The Sims 2 Apartment Life Preorder Available

Apartment Life for The Sims 2 is on its way! You can preorder Apartment Life at Amazon for a whopping $49.99. Ouch! The Sims 2 website sells the digital download for $39.95 $29.95 (But, if you don't have XP installed, you can't use the download).

Here are some details from Amazon & The Sims 2 sites:

• Move into the perfect apartment: a spacious loft, a cozy place for a young couple, or a multi-bedroom flat-share with friends


• Mingle with Sims from all-new social groups: stylish socialites, artsy bohemians, sports jocks, gadget-collecting techies, or edgy gearheads


• Take advantage of apartment life: form social networks to make new friends, advance their careers, or look for love


• Build your Sim’s new reputation meter: with a good reputation, your Sim can find the right friends to help them achieve their goals


• Control multiple households: will you make your Sims live in happy harmony or comical conflict

You can check out some screenshots for Apartment Life in my flickr photostream. I really like the expansion packs for The Sims 2, way more than The Sims expansions. But with Medicine Man's bills and this pack being released on August 26th, I don't see how I'll be able to get it. Spore will be out September 7th and that will cost $50. Fifty here and fifty there adds up. I'd like to be slick and say I'm going to get it and report on it for you, but the reality is that this is just a site about my hobbies and things I find interesting, not a pro review site. I'm just not a big consumer and my household has a very low budget. Writing takes a long time to create and sell, and the money just isn't there.

If there's a major change for me between now and then I might get it. Each of the expansions added a new level of play to my game which I enjoy. But I don't remember any of them being $50. I actually started my expansion collection with The Sims 2 Pets and then got the others mostly because they were kind of cheap. I filled out my The Sims collection of expansions by buying them only last year when they were ten bucks for a couple. And The Sims 3 will be coming out next year.

Plus there's a few things I find odd about this expansion. Do we really need to be dividing people up into more groups? Bohemian (Whatever that is. Artist? I don't know too many "bohemians" in this day and age.), jocks--are there any jocks outside of high school? Isn't it hard enough to get out of bed if you're not a pro football player or pro basketball player? I don't know of any people my age really doing sports. Watching sports, sure. But watching sports doesn't make you a jock. Adults have to get jobs and they don't have time to play sports. Exercise is important and we all do it, but organized sports take time most people don't have. Does anyone really call people gearheads any more? That means they work on cars, right? They have to be working on older cars I guess because new cars won't let just anyone mess with them, they have to talk to computers or something to regulate themselves or whatever. Don't all people do little bits of these things? Why do we have to label people anyway?

Social networking was introduced with Nightlife. I don't know why they're rehashing it again. Your sim makes new contacts through other sims, and sometimes they get phonecalls from them. Done. If you want a deeper system, they put that in when they put in the secondary aspirations in FreeTime, and also in Open For Business as your businesses advance and you gain abilities. The reputation meter sounds interesting, but it's just one more meter to keep track of in a game full of meters. There's already meters for needs, for aspirations, for businesses, and for hobbies. Pets and kids have meters. I think even the garden vegetables have meters. And as for the last bullet point, can't you merge two households in the game already and control them both on the same lot?

I was kind of critical of this expansion in the first place because it has things that players have already made or just don't need, like spiral staircases and ceilings. But none of those bullet points or screenshots have convinced me that it's worth dropping $50 on. The economy's pretty tight right now. I say save your money for bread instead!

Update: After I wrote this post, I delved into The Sims 2 BBS to see what others had to say about Apartment Life. MaxoidDrea has a stickied post explaining that EA Games invited 7 of the most popular fansite webmasters to visit them in California and review this expansion. Here's a very nice review posted by The Sims Resource. There's a number of surprises in this expansion, including heating and cooling (if you have Seasons installed) and witches as the player creature. Still not enough to convince me to get it instead of Spore. The holidays aren't that far past September, though, and it's not like tons of great sim games come out on a regular basis, so I'll probably get it then, especially if it's cheaper.

Update Deux: A video of the witches!

Update Three: MaxoidDrea's thread was deleted due to "the flame war going on" in it, aka complaints about SecuROM. Maxoid_Hydra created a new one.

Update Four: Looks like the price on the digital download dropped by $10 in less than 24 hours?! Maybe the Amazon hard copy price will drop, too. One can only hope!

Update Five: Amazon now lists Apartment Life for $29.99. Hooray!