Codex Gamicus
Advertisement

The Sims 2 is a 2004 life simulator video game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It is the sequel to The Sims and is the second major installment in The Sims series. It was released on September 14, 2004 for Microsoft Windows, and a port for MacOS was released on June 17, 2005. Eight expansion packs and nine "stuff packs" were released between 2005 and 2008, most of them for the Windows version of the game. Versions of The Sims 2 were released on various consoles and mobile platforms, including the Xbox, Game Boy Advance, GameCube, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable. A sequel, The Sims 3, was released in June 2009.

The Sims 2 was critically acclaimed for its time, gaining a 90% score from aggregators Metacritic and GameRankings. It was a commercial success as well, selling one million copies in its first ten days – a record at the time. In April 2008, the official website for The Sims 2 announced that 100 million copies of The Sims series had been sold. By March 2012, the game had sold 13 million copies over all platforms with over six million PC copies, making it one of the best-selling PC game of all time.

Gameplay[ | ]

Development[ | ]

Music[ | ]

Reception and legacy[ | ]

Controversy[ | ]

On July 22, 2005, Florida attorney Jack Thompson alleged that EA and The Sims 2 promoted nudity through the use of a mod or a cheat code. The claim was made that pubic hair, labia, and other genital details were visible once the "blur" (the pixelation that occurs when a Sim is using the toilet or is naked in the game) was removed. EA executive Jeff Brown said in an interview with GameSpot:

This is nonsense. We've reviewed 100 percent of the content. There is no content inappropriate for a teen audience. Players never see a nude Sim. If someone with an extreme amount of expertise and time were to remove the pixels, they would see that the sims have no genitals. They appear like Ken and Barbie.

Prior to Thompson's statement, there was an enterable code which allowed to modify the size (including to zero) of pixelation accessible from the console menu. Shortly after the statement, subsequent patches and expansion packs removed the "intProp censorGridSize" code; this code had been left over from the beta testing stage of the original game and had not been intended for a public audience.

Add-ons and expansion packs[ | ]

References[ | ]

External links[ | ]

Advertisement