The Sims 2: Apartment Life

So far I have found this game unplayable. None of my families will load anymore. I have heard of several others experiencing the same problem and I can't really believe EA Games would bring out a game that can be so unworkable.

So far (knock on wood) this extension pack is behaving with my computer. The game itself is fun, but I do not like the limitations you have with the apartments. Unless I am wrong there is no way to make your own apartment building you are stuck with the ones Maxis has made. I also do not like the fact that once you meet your neighbors they just walk on in your apartment and it is impossible to make them leave. Again it is fun, but the limitations of building and decorating are driving me insane

The Sims 2 Apartment Life expansion pack has so much to offer in terms of gameplay. However, the number of bugs prevent gameplay from even being possible. I did not have many problems with the other expansions except this one. As of yesterday, I am no longer playing the Sims 2 until a suitable patch is released. The bugs I found are as follows:

1. Cell Phones disappearing: Every cell phone any of my Sims had or recently purchased disappeared from their inventory. I even sent another Sim downtown to buy new cell phones for the entire family after all of them first disappeared. After I put a phone in everyone's inventory, within the next hour (real time) they were all gone.

2. Crashes: I have had 2-3 crashes since I installed the pack on August 29th. Yes, I have custom content, but no major hacks. In fact the only "hack" I have allows me to put items on dressers. In one instance, I clicked on a house and it went to the loading screen. About 5 minutes later it was still on the loading screen and would not move at all. When I minimized the window to go to the task manager to end the process, I saw that a window popped saying the application crashed. I have a suspicion it is all related to bug #3.

3. NPCs galore: With apartment life came all new NPCs. This is a good and bad thing. Usually I prefer my sims to marry townies and I like that the names of NPCs are so various now. However, I think a townie passes my house/apartment/dorm every 15 game minutes. Apparently the over frequent number of NPCs causes a type of file to enlarge which can cause the game to crash. Groups.cache maybe?

4. No interactions with the gypsy matchmaker on community lots: One of my sims was a vampire and I wanted to cure him. For some reason whenever I would call the matchmaker, she would only show up at my lot and drop off a genie lamp and then leave. No interactions were ever available with her. So I opted to send him to a community lot to buy the potion from her there. Well, when she finally showed up the only option available was "dismiss". What the??? After a little bit of searching I did find that I needed to redownload the freetime patch which fixed the matchmaker so when I called her she did not bring me a lamp and she offered her services. Thankfully I got the potion from her that way.

5. No potion interactions: If you make/buy a potion and then set it down on a surface there are no interactions available with it. When you click on it, it does in fact say "no actions available". You can put it back into your sim's inventory. This may not seem like an issue at first but if you wanted to influence someone to drink a potion, I do not know if the interaction would even work. =/

Other bug rumors: butlers stealing babies, pictures/sims/objects just turning black, after moving a sim to an apartment their cooking skill automatically drops to 1 even if it was maxed, schoolbus not showing up to apartments to pick up school kids, unable to pay apartment rent at a mailbox. It's all over the bbs, check it out ahead of purchse.

Gameplay:

1. There are a lot of new objects in the game, both build and buy mode. There are a few new themes as well.
2. If you do not like to use the motherlode cheat, the apartment feature is a vast improvement. Usually first generation sims have 20,000 simoleons to start with. Once you build or buy a house for 2-3 people, that money is pretty much all gone. Apartment living is much cheaper. Once your sim(s) move into an apartment their first week's rent is deducted and you can use the rest of the money to furnish the apartment and still have a good amount left over for maybe a better bed or a TV. Rent is due on Mondays and you pay it at the mailbox. If you have a single sim that you would like to have a nicer apartment you can choose one a little more expensive and then search for a roommate npc. I did get a roommate for one of my sims seeing as how one of the apartments I downloaded had rent at a whopping 5,600/week. What I did not like about the roommate gameplay was that I could not control them at all and they pretty much were never home. They were always out "running errands" and would return home with full motive bars. Also with an apartment, your neighbors do drop by - a lot. Not too much of a bad thing if you are just starting out and need friends for promotions. However it does get annoying at times.
3. Different types of townies now available. Depending on the circle they are in, they can provide some type of benefit to your sim. So far I received a discount on furniture purchases and a rent reduction on an apartment that cost my sim 1,600 simoleons a week. I never did get to see how good the discount was being that my game crashed and all. I did meet both the bad witch and the good witch and was able to turn a few of my sims into witches. All that is needed to become a witch is a high daily relationship score and a lifetime relationship score somewhere 20-25. The spells for neutral and good witchcraft are very useful (i.e. make puddles disappear, burn leaves during the fall, clean your sim, put sim in a good mood and conjure a spectral cat). The black magic is good for a trouble maker. The only thing I do not like is that once your bad witch reaches a certain level of "badness", then their skin turns green. Another downside is that each spell requires reagents in order to cast. Your sim can make them with a cauldron, but making the reagents drains their motives hard. One would think a witch would like making reagents to cast spells with but the fun motive drops exponentially while making them. Also associated with the witches are secret lots, however I have not found any yet.
4 - New service NPC - The Butler: If you have a Servo, shut them down and leave them to rust, you want to get your sims a butler. He does EVERYTHING and I do mean EVERYTHING. You do not even have to direct him what to do, he just assesses what needs to be done and goes to it. I got a butler for one of my sims' homes and the #1 thing I love that he does is greet the guests that come up and ring the bell. Not that this was a huge task for my sims to do, but I liked being able to have my sims already engaged in an activity (i.e. cooking for the guests or warming the hottub) when guests arrived. He even repairs broken items in the home, makes meals and watches the kiddies. Unlike Servo he does NOT eat your food and try to engage in conversation like he is a member of the household. This guy knows his place and his role. Once you hire the butler, if you have any other service sims on your payroll (i.e. nanny, maid) he will ask you if you want him to dismiss them all since he is more than up to the task. <3 the Butler. He is the best thing ever. The only thing I have not tested with him is gardening, but my guess is that he does that too.

This is a great expansion pack and I know it will hold me until the Sims 3 is released in February, however there are a number of issues to be addressed with it so if you want to get it, get it but just know you will have a lot of problems until there is a patch. Happy Simming. :)

This game is wonderful it adds awesome hair styles (for girls) and it gives you the choice of the color of the hair tie. There are also alot of different clothes added with this expansion. The apartments are fun to play, and makes the game more realistic. It gets sort of annoying though because the neighbors are loud alot of the time and I always feel bad telling them to stop but it really influences my sims.
Anyway you are probably wondering why my review is titled BEWARE!! well its because the disc only works on DVD-ROM drives, not like the rest of the expansions which are CD-ROM. So we had to return ours and we had to buy the direct download from EAstore.com.
Hope this helps :-)

Let me first say that I have every single expansion pack for The Sims 2 and have not had any issues with SecuRom. I do have a brand new computer so am not sure if that makes a difference. I was really looking forward to this expansion pack because it is rumored to be the last since the team needs to work on The Sims 3. I thought it would be much more fun but it is not really that interesting to me. The best part is the magic where a witch or warlock can obtain powers. It was very easy to get my witch up to complete powers, unlike in The Sims where it took a very long time for my people to be fully magic. I have actually found myself missing The Sims lately and it is mainly because Studio Town was so cool and having your sims be superstars, etc. was fun and the magic was much more detailed than it is in The Sims 2. If The Sims could age, I'd go back to it in a heartbeat. It almost seems like the creation team was in a hurry to release this so they could focus on The Sims 3. I'm not really excited about The Sims 3 because they play in the background when you aren't playing and that doesn't always go with the story line you had in mind.