Sims 2 - University Expansion Pack

simu

This is the first expansion pack for the Sims 2. (And the cheeky feckers had an ad for thier next expansion (night-life) inside the box!). Your teen Sims can be sent to university where they become young adults and live in dorms/houses/fraternities and sororities as they try to keep their college grades up and enjoy the college social life.

There are three types of uni you can set up in each neighbourhood and each campus has different community lots for socialising etc.

When your Sims graduate, you can move them back to the neighbourhood and new and better career options are open to them thanks to the skills and friends they've acquired at uni.

Another new feature, and one that has been mapped onto all stages of the Sim lifecycle is influence. You gain influence the more social success you have and you can use this to get other Sims to do funny things (you can make a person kiss someone else, for example).

I only got this yesterday but it seems to integrate well with the original game and there's a whole load of new behavioural traits and interaction opportunites to discover.

Has anyone else played it?

Tusky

Its happening all over again...nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

simu

There's nothing wrong with expansion packs if they provide good value for moeny and this one does!

People might be interested to hear what Will Wright (creator of the Sims) has to say about his experiences with expansion packs - these allowed the devlopers of the original Sims to experiment with new ideas before creating the sequel and ensured that the sequel would be a success, he claims.

Excerpt:

Fargo: Expansion packs! What made you decide to do the first expansion pack?

Wright: I have to admit that, when we did the first expansion pack, I was probably the one person in the entire company arguing against it. Saying, "Why are we wasting time doing expansion packs!?" But in fact it turned out to be a great model for us. It kept interest in the game because a lot of people who would buy The Sims were very casual gamers, unlike a hardcore gamer who buys Halo or whatever and they get home and play intensely for a few weeks and then they go away and buy the next cool game. Our fans would play The Sims kind of on and off a few times a night for months -- years -- and collect a lot of content. To them it was a hobby, an ongoing hobby. They didn't really play any other game. So the expansion packs kind of give them something periodic to look forward to where we can actually change the rules of the game. We can add micro-games or meta-games within the engine giving them brand new activities that they couldn't do before. And also you give them template objects that they could customize.

But also we were able to learn a lot in the expansions. We were able to experiment with a lot of game concepts at fairly low cost and get a sense of which ones the fans liked, which ones they didn't like, which ones were big hits. Like pets -- pets turned out to be a big hit. Being able to leave the house and go downtown was a big hit. We learned a lot from the expansion packs that we were then able to fold into The Sims 2.

Fargo: You could use them as test cases.

Wright: Had we just released The Sims one and tried to guess what to put in The Sims 2, we would have guessed wrong. After having seven expansion packs we had a really good calibration on what things the fans liked and didn't like and it really helped The Sims 2 nail that market. So we think of the expansion packs more now as a mechanism through which the fans can teach us more about the game.

Full interview here Very interesting for Sims fans and people who are interested in game design in general. Wright is interested in creating games with emergent properties rather than the more linear, traditional game - that's the way to go imo!

DEmeant0r

I bought(Yes I know, I couldn't believe it myself when I took the box up to the counter) it from Gamestop for 30 eurons minus 5% for student discount a couple days ago. haven't really had time to play it, but from what I've played so far, it seems like a good expansion pack.

Ciaran500

Theres a 5% student discount in Gamestop. :eek:

Fr Dougal

Not sure if this is the right place to post but I gotthe university expansion pack yesterday. Tried to install it but at 99% it asked forSIMS2 Disc 4 to be loaded so it could synch up. I did this but then it gave an error and uninstalled.
(I can read the SIMS2 disc 4 okay with explorer...)

Then tried to run the original SIMS2 but keep getting a tiny error window with no message. So not only can I not run the expansion pack but cannot run SIMS2 either.

Running XP Professional and I have plenty of space and enough RAM.

Rang EA support and guy advised me that I would have to uninstall SIMS2 and re-install from scratch. However, I cannot uninstall. Tried using the XP "Add or remove programs" and also the EA Games uninstall feature but neither worked. Pretty stuck now.

Any ideas?