The Sims Complete

In case mac owners don't know, if you own Mac OS X and are running Tiger or higher you will have a problem in the "Create a Sim" screen. What will happen is that when you switch through outfits, the last outfit won't leave the screen and all them will overlap over each other making it hard to see them, the same will happen when the sims change clothes in the game and when you want to buy a pet at the pet stores.

It is not the worse thing in the world and will not crash your game, but is very annoying and should be known before anyone spends their money. I'm using Panther. Anything before Tiger is fine. JUST BE WARNED!

<on to my review>

After buying just a few of the expansion packs, I FINALLY decided to get the Complete Collection only after buying an external hard drive. I don't know about anyone else, but there was no way almost 4 gigs would fit on my G4 imac. Although, even on the harddrive the game does slow, but is still playable. I am often surprised that I can stay Downtown, Studio Town, etc. so long. That is a real treat.

Bad side? There is too much to do. I have yet to do anything in Magic town nor Vacation, and the idea of being able to renovate all this and add my own touch is overwhelming. You can literally start over any sim town from the ground up and make it to your liking. Very consuming to say the least, downloads notwithstanding which not only enchance your game (and may clog it up) makes it more realistic when you're not using the same pieces of furniture in each house.

The only gripe I may have is relationships. With the Complete Collection, I'm not sure, but I think the the Hot Date relationship 'meter' takes over and relationships are much harder to form and take much longer. I had a couple who constantly had red hearts but whenever I had one propose the other would get totally turned off and her attraction would bump down several points, I never understood i--even when they were 'in the mood' as I was instructed. All needs were maxed and they were happy and still didn't want to get together. Go figure. If you really want to form families, relationships and Star Careers you will have to work for it. But the good thing about the Sims is you don't really have too.

You can play any way you want. If you're just into design you can create as many houses as you want and move on. and if you have people living in your houses and don't care for them hooking up, then they'll just be roomies. No problem.

I had plenty of problems previously with my other expansions, and crashing was one of them. I don't know why, but objects that I had before, then put them back in my game a second or third time (after needing to reinstall) made the game crash. Frequently, the sofas and paintings just would not pull into the game and when they did it crashed when I tried to save. Now, everything pulls into the game and saves with no problem.

I think that having all the expansion packs made the game more stable--for me and possibly for macs in general, I don't know, but I know that all the packs seemed to help with the crashing.

Overall, there is little cons to owning this. One thing I will say is that Non-Unleashed fans will tire quickly of stray pets wondering around the lots and into the house.

Still, worth the money to have all 7 packs on one disc, just make sure you have the hard drive space-- and spare for downloads-- and you'll be fine.

My girlfriend was very excited to see this game come out, she was always a fan of the original Sims game but all of her old disks were scratched and replacing them all would have cost a small fortune, this game was the perfect solution so I bought it for her!

The only problem is that she has a MacBook, The Mac version of the game seems to have some display issues on Mac laptops, She read around and didn't find any real solutions to the problem-- The game only shows up on a square that covers about 2/3 of the screen, even in fullscreen mode you can still see the apple desktop in the back. Even the "window" mode isn't resizable and the controls to toggle between the views don't work. This also gets complicated/annoying if you don't have your dock hidden.

Anyway, she emailed Aspyr about the issue and they were very nice about it but said there wasn't much they could do to fix it, they did give her a helpful hint though; if you hold down the "command" key while you click on the game you can actually get into the view settings and change the screen size (they suggested 800x600 resolution) and choose window or full screen.

Other than that little problem the game works fine and everything is just how we remembered it! Addicting and tons of fun!!

I have all the expansion packs, and went out and bought this so I didn't have to worry about all those other packs. Contains everything just like if you went out and bought all 7 packs. I recommend this to people that are new to the sims, AND to people that already have all the packs. Faster install then installing each pack seperate. Keep it all organized. Nice game! 5 star