The Sims 2

From the neighborhood view, the player selects one lot to play, as in The Sims. While there are both residential and community lots, Sims can only live in residential lots. Sims can travel to community lots in order to purchase things like clothing and magazines, and to interact with NPCs and townies. The player can choose between playing a pre-made inhabited lot, moving a household into an unoccupied pre-built lot, or constructing a building on an empty lot.

One novelty from The Sims is foundations. The player switches among the Live mode (default) to control Sims, the Buy mode to add, move, or delete furniture, and the Build mode to rebuild the house and make structural changes. Although the Buy and Build modes cannot be accessed when on a community lot, the lots can be built on by using the neighborhood view. It is also possible to import neighborhood terrains from SimCity 4.

Preliminary development on The Sims 2 began in late 2000 following the release of The Sims. EA Games announced on May 5, 2003, that the Maxis studio had begun development on The Sims 2. A teaser trailer was provided on The Sims: Makin' Magic CD, released October 2003, which was later uploaded to websites all over the Internet. The game was first shown at E3 in Los Angeles, California, on May 13, 2003.

The development team decided that the core qualities that drew people to The Sims were that it was easily relatable to most people, gave players the freedom to be creative, had an irreverent sense of humor, and featured open-ended gameplay, and set out to build upon these aspects in the sequel. The move to 3D graphics was considered essential in getting players of the first game to upgrade. The development team considered adding thirst and stress needs but reconsidered after feedback from players showed that they were growing tired of maintaining their Sims' basic needs. Instead, the team focused on using the existing needs to differentiate the different life stages; for example, teenage Sims have a higher need for social interaction.

The Sims 2 received widespread critical acclaim, gaining a 90% score from aggregators Metacritic and GameRankings. On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, The Sims 2 average score of 90, based on 61 reviews, indicates "universal acclaim". The game also received the Editor's Choice Award from IGN and GameSpy upon final review of the finished product. The Sims 2 had a successful E3.

From 71 online reviews, the average score was 90 out of 100. Seven of those sources awarded the game a 100-out-of-100 score. X-Play gave the game a 4/5. Computer Gaming World awarded the game as their 2004 "Strategy Game of the Year (General)", beating out RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, The Political Machine, and Silent Storm.