This YMMV page is for the second game in the series.
- For the series as a whole, click here.
- For the first game, click here.
- For the third game, click here.
- For the fourth game, click here.
- Adorkable: The brothers in the Curious family have weird interests, but are still likable. Their popularity with the fanbase resulted in their ancestors being playable in The Sims 3 Ambitions.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: The premade characters are often subject to this, with any one character's personality running the full gamut of the personality scale.
- Angela Pleasant: Friendly neighborhood girl, or annoying spoiled Alpha Bitch brat who torments her twin sister?
- Lilith Pleasant: Misunderstood soul or nothing more than an angsty, rebellious, hateful teen? Was she neglected unfairly throughout childhood leading to her current personality, or has she always simply been a downright unpleasant, rotten child from the start?
- Is Bella Goth a gold digger who simply married Mortimer for the money? A fair share of Simmers believe this (it doesn't help she's Romance aspiration in The Sims 2...), while Bella fans heavily disagree. The former camp sometimes even goes as far as to say Bella wasn't abducted by aliens at all, rather she left the Goth family and moved to Strangetown herself. Bella's true nature definitely creates a bit of a rift between players and how they perceive the pre-made sims.
- Meadow Thayer is a teenage townie NPC from Pleasantview (and any custom neighborhoods made by the player). Due to her good looks, better-than-average clothing sense, and fairly high amount of 'Nice' personality points, she is a frequent target for fulfilling a controllable teenage sim's "First Kiss" want, and other romantic wants by teenage sims. This leads to an in-joke amongst Sims forum communities that she's the town hussy, as she's so eager towards any teenage boy's advances. It's paradoxical however, since Meadow's aspiration is Family, not Romance, and many other players treat her as such, usually sending her to college then marrying her into a family afterwards. Thus the division is strong amongst players when it comes to her.
- General Buzz Grunt is often seen as an abusive, hateful and irredeemable man by a significant part of the fanbase because of his low amount of 'Nice' personality points, because of his bad relationship with Ripp and because of the pressure he puts on Tank. However, the PSP game seems to indicate he's just a grumpy and strict guy who undeniably has shortcomings, but can be genuinely friendly to people he likes, and some fans choose to view him as such. The nature of his feud with Pollination Tech #9 Smith is also divisive. While retired, he was a Pollination Technician, thus one of the aliens who was in contact with humanity the most while knowing what his rulers wanted from humans ; it's easy to see why people like him can be both a threat to the government of Sim Nation and people of interest in the military's investigations about aliens. It's entirely possible that Buzz simply mistrusts his neighbor because of his past and his deal isn't simply Fantastic Racism.
- Any Sim who has ended up with the Grilled Cheese aspiration: folks who have shed the burden of ambition and learned to enjoy the simple things in life (even if it is only grilled cheese sandwiches), or mindless, emotionless zombies whose desire for grilled cheese is all-consuming?
- Cult Classic: Like all Sims games, it was always popular, but even today with the jump to The Sims 3 and even The Sims 4 it still retains a very devoted fan base, chiefly on Tumblr and Mod The Sims 2
, that still churns out mods and custom content. - Draco in Leather Pants: Downplayed. While Don Lothario and Dina Caliente are clearly based on stereotypical Soap Opera villains, there's several players that prefer to portray them in a more positive light in their machinimas or gameplays.
- Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Many players enjoy improving Lilith Pleasant's life, often at the expense of Angela's (Which isn't too difficult or unlikely as Lilith is set up for a more pleasant life as an adult since she's the love interest of Dirk Dreamer while Angela is dating the lawless lowlife Dustin Broke... Seems obvious which family household would be more prosperous, with happier children).
- Goopy Gilscarbo is one of the default Townies (NPCs) in Pleasantview and custom neighborhoods. The name Goopy, his memorable facial features and his hilarious fashion sense (or lack thereof) definitely have caused him to stand out. 'The Goopster', as players sometimes call him, is such an (in)famous darkhorse among fans of The Sims that a Sims 3 dish was named after him, the Goopy Carbonara.
- The Pleasantview Goths and Strangetown Curious family are pretty popular.
- Kaylynn Langerak was an NPC with a minor story role in The Sims 2, but it made her popular enough to merit a promotion to playable character with her own extended family in The Sims 3. Despite definitely being a darkhorse, she was pushed a little, since she wasn't exactly a subtle figure in Sims 2's Pleasantview, being tangled up with both the Lothario and Pleasant households through love affairs. As far as NPCs go, Kaylynn is the most remarkable, story-driven one.
- The Landgraab Family originally appeared as the main antagonists of The Sims console port, but has become popular enough to appear in every game afterward.
- Nervous Subject definitely deserves a mention, probably being the most memorable pre-made sim in The Sims 2 (other than the Goth family, obviously). His impossible-to-ignore black mohawk, his bony facial structure (hmm, where did he get that from?) and insane backstory makes him stand out. He's also got a Jerkass Woobie appeal which convinced many players to help him out and give him a better life. Or make it worse.
- The Newsons tend to receive more attention from sim players than every other sim bin pre-made household due to their unique and rather heart-wrenching situation; a group of orphans led by two teens after their adoptive parents died.
- Even Better Sequel:
- While the first game was revolutionary for its time, in hindsight many fans are more willing to acknowledge its flaws and limitations. This game reduced the first's notoriously Nintendo Hard difficulty, added better (though still far from perfect) free will interactions, dramatically improved the graphics, audio, and gameplay, and added "true" life simulation gameplay elements such as aging, weekdays (including holidays), many kinds of food for the time of day, and in a later expansion, seasons, all while keeping everything fans liked about the first game. As such, fan opinion tends to be split over whether this or The Sims 3 is the best game in the series, and many Simmers treat it as a Sacred Cow.
- For the Stories spinoff, Castaway Stories, by virtue of adding new content and new worldspace instead of the previous Stories games reusing assets from the core game, albeit toned down for low-end players to be able to enjoy the game.
- Franchise Original Sin:
- This game popularized the practice The Sims has been known for of removing features and mechanics from the previous Sims game and then selling them back to the players as another expansion - partly due to the fact that including all of the features added to the first game with its expansions would have resulted in the game being way too big (the base game released on four discs and could take a while to load on mid-tier computers at the time). Players largely forgave the game for it because it also started the trend of adding some unique mechanics for it, with its first expansion pack (University) being something far different than what was in The Sims and Nightlife being seen as adding way more to the game than Hot Date. Unfortunately, later expansions seemed to add less and less.
- Stuff Packs. While "Livin' Large" for the first game was arguably the first (if only because it was the first expansion pack period), these "micro-expansions" added extra "stuff" to the game that was, for the most part, just clothing and furniture built around a particular theme. They were largely ignorable (unless purchased as part of a collection), but later games (especially The Sims 4) would include actual mechanics as part of their "stuff packs".
- Fridge Brilliance: Brandi Broke's age (22 days from Elderhood) would imply her teenage son Dustin is the result of a Teen Pregnancy, but the biography clearly shows her getting married before having him. The only remaining options are cheating... or Elixer of Life. Since Brandi is a Family sim, she would have filled a lot of high-scoring wants in dating Skip, getting married, conceiving, and giving birth, easily enough to buy some Elixer with the points.
- Game-Breaker: Vampires are easily the most powerful life state in the whole game. They do not age in any fashion whatsoever, and, as long as it's night, their needs do not drop unless performing an activity that would make it drain. Even then, low needs are just an inconvenience for them, they won't even starve to death. The only weakness is sunlight, which can kill them, but as long as they sleep in a coffin, this is not an issue. The sunlight might interfere with jobs, but one could simply have another household member do that for them.
- Achieving a Gold Flower Arrangement badge in the Open for Business expansion lets you craft Snapdragon Bouquets. They're relatively cheap and quick to craft, and they periodically boost all of a Sims motives in the rooms. Craft a few per room and your Sim will no longer have to bother with needs except fulfilling wishes once in a while to keep the aspiration meter in the green.
- From the same expansion comes the Servos. They can be crafted with a Gold Robotics badge, and unlike the Snapdragon Bouquet example above they're more expensive and take more effort to make, but when you initialize them you get an immortal, fully sapient Robot Buddy who only has 4 needs (Fun, Social, Environment and Power). Oh, and they start with maxed-out Cooking, Mechanical and Cleaning skills, plus whatever skills and badges its builder had. Servo automatically performs chores around the house (cleaning, repairing, gardening, etc...), can work jobs, can take care of the kids, basically everything a Sim can do. Just keep him or her away from the water.
- Genius Bonus: The majors and each year's descriptions is chock full of this. For example, one of the Physics' class titles is "The Strange Charm of Quarks". And one of Political Science's first classes has "Feudalism: Serf's Up!". The other descriptions have similar and sometimes punny names.
- Good Bad Bugs: The PS2 version of Pets has a funny yet disgusting glitch that makes the Sim eat expired food. To do so simply make sure that there's only one Sim in this house, then have a job, wait until the Sim has two ingame hours to the car come in, then prepare a food, but do not eat it. Wait of the car and right when the Sim enters the car, pause (not the game) the simulation, enable Classic mode and click on the food dropped in the floor and select "Eat" and do not exit Classic Mode. The Sim is programmed to eat the food after finishing the job and said food will expire before the Sim comes back to his/her house and what do you get? Your Sim is eating his/her rotten food which makes the Sim gag and vomit.
- Hollywood Pudgy: Female "fat" Sims, with only a slightly wider waist than the rail-thin "normal" Sim ladies, somewhat larger boobs, and Hartman Hips (or at least they're Hartman Hips compared to regular female Sims). Male fat Sims are kind of similar; they have potbellies, less muscle definition, and slightly larger thighs, but that's all. And both sexes are lumpier of build than the regular Sims.
- Iconic Sequel Song: The neighbourhood theme introduced in University would go on to become the main theme of the series.
- Jerkass Woobie:
- Nervous Subject. He might be a mean, antisocial slob with no sense of humor, but he was neglected as a child and used by his 'adoptive parents', the Beakers, who are also very mean, for experiments. He's a Family Sim, and is a far more capable babysitter than the nannies the game provides (though that may say more about the nannies than Nervous Subject himself).
- Tybalt Capp, who lost both of his parents and his grandmother in a short period of time, as well as being a Popularity Sim with no friends outside his family.
- General Buzz Grunt. He's not the nicest dad, but his wife abandoned him and the kids and disappeared, leaving him to raise 3 young boys by himself. It's implied that since he's a career officer and he was raised as a Military Brat himself, the only way he knows how to raise his kids is like a Drill Sergeant Nasty.
- Most Wonderful Sound: When a sim gets boosted up to platinum in their aspiration meter, you'll get a satisfying little 'woowoowoowoo' that's the audio equivalent of pure ecstasy. It really gives you the feeling that you're making your sim happy.
- The nice sound cue you get when you fulfill a sim's want.
- If your Sim gets a promotion at their job you get a lovely jingle announcing it.
- Of course if you're bent on tormenting your sim instead, the cue for fulfilling one of your sim's fears surely counts. It's a rather cartoonish sound that's a bit comparable in nature to the stock 'wahwahwah' sad trombone sound effect (which, funnily enough, was a sound effect present in the original Sims 1).
- Polished Port: The Mac version was also given a complete overhaul recently by being ported to the modern Mac OS X native Intel x64 architecture, given support for newer graphics cards, and even added 4K resolution support. However, it only include approximately 3/4 of the expansion packs and stuff packs (it lacks the two major expansion packs Freetime and Apartment Life).
- The Scrappy:
- Like the first game, Sims with low nice points will autonomously use mean interaction on any Sim they come across, making their lives harder. They will also attempt to kick garbage cans and steal newspapers and gnomes for no reason. Albany Capp is a good example of this.
- The Ottomas and Crittur premade families, which, if played, causes game-breaking bug that extend to corrupt the neighborhood they was in to the point that the fix is to either remove the neighborhood or to reinstall the game. Thankfully the Ottomas has been patched since around 2006 although Crittur didn't. And you can't simply delete them as it caused corruption. Instead use this.
- Marsha Bruenig, the child NPC who occasionally comes home from school alongside one of your child sims. Expect to get phone calls from her every subsequent day, and it will never, ever stop. Even once your child sim has moved on and aged into teenager, adult, elder,... little Marsha will still call you, asking if you're still friends. Unless you use mods to get rid of this behavior.
- The Free Time expansion pack does allow an option to age up child and teen Non Player Characters, allowing them to grow up when your sims do. Aging Marsha will at least get rid of the odd 'never-aging child who obsessively stalks my household' problem. At least then she'll then be simply more of a clingy friend rather than a creepy forever-child Neverland nightmare. If you want to go a step further than that though, once she's a teen, send her to college on a lot without a phone. Now she can't call anybody anymore.
- The cow mascots in universities are downright jerks who cause a lot of mischief. The worst though is that they will randomly hit on your sim; now (assuming you play with game-shipped jealousy mechanics instead of a mod like ACR) if another sim who's in love with your sim happens to be in the same room when it happens, the sim will take it to heart and perceive it as your sim "cheating" on them, even when your sim rejects the flirt! These cows have undoubtedly lead to a lot of heartbreaks, in the dumbest way possible.
- Not only the cow mascots (which intended as the "evil" mascot) but heck, the mascots, the cheerleaders, and the coach (who influences your Sim to work out), all qualify because their apparent lack of recognition of personal space in the college area. They'll happily go in to not only your dorm, but your personal college home (if you manage to gain one or play a Sim already living in one) to not only do their business but also mess up with your things. Thankfully updates allow you to lock your doors, limiting access to only your Sim or your household.
- Scrappy Mechanic: Has its own page.
- Self-Imposed Challenge: Players have come up with numerous challenges to make gameplay more interesting. There's the Legacy Challenge, the Asylum Challenge, the Prosperity Challenge, the Apocalypse Challenge, and the Ethiopian Challenge. And these aren't all.
- Spiritual Successor: 2 is obviously the sequel to the first one, but some of the Expansion Packs can be argued to be based on or versions of the ones from 1:
- Nightlife is the successor of both House Party and Hot Date, since its theme is socializing with either friends or a partner in an urban setting. Just as Hot Date, it introduces a dating minigame and a Downtown sub-neighbourhood, although it can be seen as an actualization or a better version of Hot Date.
- Pets is a better version of Unleashed, with more complex customization and psychology of pets. Both introduce cats, dogs and small pets to the game.
- Bon Voyage is a subversion of this, since the main concept is the same of Vacation ("take your sims to a different destination on vacation!") but the execution is radically different: the EP from 1 centers around a resort and building family relationships, Bon Voyage on acquiring memories and secrets from exotic locations.
- Tough Act to Follow: The in-game neighborhoods suffers from this according to some players. While the base game neighborhoods Pleasantview, Strangetown and Veronaville are pretty iconic and have memorables storylines and characters, the main neighborhoods from the expansion packs get progressively more uninteresting character-wise as they go on.
- Unintentional Period Piece: This is very much a time capsule of the 2000s with its various hairstyles, fashions (ie Baggy pants, long shorts), and pieces of bulky and outdated technology.
- Vindicated by History:
- When the game launched in 2004, it was seen as a downgrade from The Sims simply because The Sims had seven expansion packs worth of content that weren't available in The Sims 2, some of which were later sold back as future expansions. Over the 2000s and after The Sims 3 and the infamously troubled The Sims 4 launched with even less content compared to The Sims 2 at launch (Some of which weren't even replicated with all of their expansion packs!), people started to forgive The Sims 2 for its perceived lack of content at launch. As many people grew older, they also realised just how much trouble that releasing with all the content of about seven expansion packs would have been to develop and load.
- For a lot of the game's history it was Common Knowledge that the game was buggy and fragile and would become corrupt and broken at the slightest "wrong" manipulation. Some very popular (but debunked) claims was that deleting Sims or gravestones, or moving occupied lots into the lot bin (which technically doesn't cause corruption in and of itself but generates a lot of "junk" data that can "overpopulate" a neighborhood and shouldn't be done) would eventually corrupt the neighborhood. However as the understanding of how the game works grew, modders began explaining how the game actually handles things like deleted Sims and how the process is much more elegant and robust that previously thought, specifically to avoid the dreaded corruption issues! While corruption (both of the neighborhood files and the fundamental game files) is still a thing and can happen, the problem was largely blown out of proportion.
- The Woobie:
- Lilith Pleasant and Ripp Grunt, the famous unfavorites.
- The Newsons from Apartment Life. They're a family of adopted children whose parents have died, and the two teens have to juggle school, caring for the younger ones and providing a steady income. Unless you move them in with an adult Sim of course.
- Vidcund Curious might also have been the unfavorite to his brothers. Compared to Pascal and Lazlo, Vidcund was never helped with his homework by his parents, and his girlfriend dumped him for Loki Beaker, which according to his memories is implied to be because of a bladder accident.
- Brandi Broke, having recently lost her husband and with soon to be three mouths to feed at the start of the game, is made of this trope. So much so that many players take pity on her and give her a Second Love.
- Woolseyism:
- The English title for the 5th (Seasons) expansions pack was straight to the point, the French title was more poetic and (loosely) translated to As the seasons come and go.
- The most significant title change for an expansion pack in the Swedish translation is for Seasons - Året Runt (Year Round). Additionally, "Woohoo" is called "Myspys" which roughly translates to "cuddle-wuddle" (an expression often used in an intimate context).
