Review: The Sims 2 (GBA) ~ Showtime!

The_Sims_2_GBA_box_artworkThe Sims Wikia entry

When I was young, I wasn’t allowed to spend too much time on the computer. So, that’s why I actually played a lot of handheld games. When I heard that the Sims got popular, I got myself the Sims 2 on my Gameboy Advance. While the early Sims adaptations weren’t the same as the original game, I did enjoy myself with this title quite a lot. But, there is a catch. Now that I’m older I can take a better look at it. Is it really as good as I remember? Or is it actually a terrible game? Well, it’s time to take a look at a Sims game from my childhood. Are you ready? I hope so! Also, feel free to leave a comment down in the comment section about the content of this article and or this game. I reply to every comment. It’s also creates a big happy feeling for me, so feel free to comment away. 

 

Story… In a Sims game?!?

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I couldn’t believe it myself at first. A sandbox game with a story. Well, to make this game fun they wrote a story and it’s quite interesting. You are in a TV-show but nobody of the citizens of the town know of it. While you complete the story, you have to try and make an entertaining TV-series.

The story might be cheesy and forced, but it’s a good move of EA. I don’t think the gameboy advance would have been a great platform to port a Sims 2 game on. The actually tried to make something creative.

Actually, to be honest, the story is quite decent. It isn’t the best that you have seen from EA, but when I’m able to recall parts of the story, some characters and such, then the story has done it’s job.

But, this is actually extremely risky. Thanks to the story, this game isn’t very well received by Sims fans. I can honestly understand why. This game just has some Sims elements but that makes it far from an actual Sims game. The fans just had other expectations than this.

Showtime

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So, in between episodes, you are able to upgrade your skills. This makes the game quite interesting. Since you need to decide which skills you are going to work on. If you don’t work on the right skills, you might not be able to advance in the next episode.

Talking about episodes, let me get one thing clear. A big flaw in this game is that, in order to see the epilogue episode, you have to connect with another Sims 2 GBA game. This has been a very bad move of EA and you can’t actually play the last episode now on a legit cartrigde. Unless you are very lucky and you find someone or you do it by yourself. That was such a disappointment.

Thankfully, the last episode you can play without linking up wraps up the story nicely. So, yeah. But the final episode is there, waiting to be played. But you can’t due to the reasons explained above.

The gameplay is actually quite nice. You run around, solve mysteries, talk to sims, decorate your home… Well, there are various things to do. This game isn’t linear at all. The experience each playthrough will be quite different. A nice secret is that you can enter the directors room while playing. Of course nobody is there, but it’s a nice touch.

An awesome thing is that there aren’t annoying bars that you need to keep up. This way you don’t need to babysit your Sims’s needs in order to have an enjoyable time with the game. There is just one bar, used for everything. Every action like eating or sleeping will raise that bar. But if you repeat those actions, it won’t raise that bar. The way to drain the bar is to have your actions being rejected in a conversation.

There are also mini-games. While I don’t have the time to talk about them in this review, I can honestly say that they are quite good. I enjoyed playing them back when I was trying to beat this game and while I was replaying this game in order to review it, I enjoyed myself messing around with the mini-games again.

Other things

GBA--Sims 2 The_Nov4 11_04_11We are nearing the end of this review. So, it’s time to talk about the other things outside of the story and gameplay. The length and difficulty of this game are just perfect for this game. While I wanted to play a bit more, I honestly think that they stopped at the right moment. If the game would have been longer, the game might had destroyed it’s own novelty.

The game gets harder and harder each episode, but it doesn’t get too difficult. Getting enough money might be a challenge but as soon as you figure out how to abuse a certain game mechanic, it’s quite easy. I won’t tell how, but there is a way to farm money.

The controls, music and design of this game are quite decent. They make great use of the gameboy advance and I think they help with the immersion. As soon as you give this game a chance, you get a nice experience.

While it’s quite clear that I haven’t talked about everything in depth, I think it’s time to move on to the conclusion. I like to leave questions unanswered so that players who are actually interested in the game might find some surprises. In my reviews I mostly talk about my experiences with the game and talking about it for too long, would be boring in my opinion. Enough rambling, time to give this review a conclusion.

Conclusion

The bad:

– The final episode is locked.

– Disappointing for Sims fans

– A way to farm money.

The good:

+ Decent plot

+ Decent visuals.

+ …

Final thoughts:

This game has problems for sure. It isn’t perfect. But with the amount of polish that this game has, it makes for an enjoyable experience. The game isn’t very memorable, but it isn’t boring.

While a Sims fan might not have a great time with this game, I think a gamer that likes to play adventure games will like this game and play it until the last episode, they can play unless they can link it to another game.

Anyways, thanks for reading my review. I think I wrote an abrupt ending but I wanted to get this article out before I got too sick. Maybe I might take another look to this game in the future. So yeah. I hope you enjoyed reading this review and until the next review! Take care. ~

Score: 70/100