The Sims 2: Apartment Life

The Sims 2 Apartment Life expansion pack has so much to offer in terms of gameplay. However, the number of bugs prevent gameplay from even being possible. I did not have many problems with the other expansions except this one. As of yesterday, I am no longer playing the Sims 2 until a suitable patch is released. The bugs I found are as follows:

1. Cell Phones disappearing: Every cell phone any of my Sims had or recently purchased disappeared from their inventory. I even sent another Sim downtown to buy new cell phones for the entire family after all of them first disappeared. After I put a phone in everyone's inventory, within the next hour (real time) they were all gone.

2. Crashes: I have had 2-3 crashes since I installed the pack on August 29th. Yes, I have custom content, but no major hacks. In fact the only "hack" I have allows me to put items on dressers. In one instance, I clicked on a house and it went to the loading screen. About 5 minutes later it was still on the loading screen and would not move at all. When I minimized the window to go to the task manager to end the process, I saw that a window popped saying the application crashed. I have a suspicion it is all related to bug #3.

3. NPCs galore: With apartment life came all new NPCs. This is a good and bad thing. Usually I prefer my sims to marry townies and I like that the names of NPCs are so various now. However, I think a townie passes my house/apartment/dorm every 15 game minutes. Apparently the over frequent number of NPCs causes a type of file to enlarge which can cause the game to crash. Groups.cache maybe?

4. No interactions with the gypsy matchmaker on community lots: One of my sims was a vampire and I wanted to cure him. For some reason whenever I would call the matchmaker, she would only show up at my lot and drop off a genie lamp and then leave. No interactions were ever available with her. So I opted to send him to a community lot to buy the potion from her there. Well, when she finally showed up the only option available was "dismiss". What the??? After a little bit of searching I did find that I needed to redownload the freetime patch which fixed the matchmaker so when I called her she did not bring me a lamp and she offered her services. Thankfully I got the potion from her that way.

5. No potion interactions: If you make/buy a potion and then set it down on a surface there are no interactions available with it. When you click on it, it does in fact say "no actions available". You can put it back into your sim's inventory. This may not seem like an issue at first but if you wanted to influence someone to drink a potion, I do not know if the interaction would even work. =/

Other bug rumors: butlers stealing babies, pictures/sims/objects just turning black, after moving a sim to an apartment their cooking skill automatically drops to 1 even if it was maxed, schoolbus not showing up to apartments to pick up school kids, unable to pay apartment rent at a mailbox. It's all over the bbs, check it out ahead of purchse.

Gameplay:

1. There are a lot of new objects in the game, both build and buy mode. There are a few new themes as well.
2. If you do not like to use the motherlode cheat, the apartment feature is a vast improvement. Usually first generation sims have 20,000 simoleons to start with. Once you build or buy a house for 2-3 people, that money is pretty much all gone. Apartment living is much cheaper. Once your sim(s) move into an apartment their first week's rent is deducted and you can use the rest of the money to furnish the apartment and still have a good amount left over for maybe a better bed or a TV. Rent is due on Mondays and you pay it at the mailbox. If you have a single sim that you would like to have a nicer apartment you can choose one a little more expensive and then search for a roommate npc. I did get a roommate for one of my sims seeing as how one of the apartments I downloaded had rent at a whopping 5,600/week. What I did not like about the roommate gameplay was that I could not control them at all and they pretty much were never home. They were always out "running errands" and would return home with full motive bars. Also with an apartment, your neighbors do drop by - a lot. Not too much of a bad thing if you are just starting out and need friends for promotions. However it does get annoying at times.
3. Different types of townies now available. Depending on the circle they are in, they can provide some type of benefit to your sim. So far I received a discount on furniture purchases and a rent reduction on an apartment that cost my sim 1,600 simoleons a week. I never did get to see how good the discount was being that my game crashed and all. I did meet both the bad witch and the good witch and was able to turn a few of my sims into witches. All that is needed to become a witch is a high daily relationship score and a lifetime relationship score somewhere 20-25. The spells for neutral and good witchcraft are very useful (i.e. make puddles disappear, burn leaves during the fall, clean your sim, put sim in a good mood and conjure a spectral cat). The black magic is good for a trouble maker. The only thing I do not like is that once your bad witch reaches a certain level of "badness", then their skin turns green. Another downside is that each spell requires reagents in order to cast. Your sim can make them with a cauldron, but making the reagents drains their motives hard. One would think a witch would like making reagents to cast spells with but the fun motive drops exponentially while making them. Also associated with the witches are secret lots, however I have not found any yet.
4 - New service NPC - The Butler: If you have a Servo, shut them down and leave them to rust, you want to get your sims a butler. He does EVERYTHING and I do mean EVERYTHING. You do not even have to direct him what to do, he just assesses what needs to be done and goes to it. I got a butler for one of my sims' homes and the #1 thing I love that he does is greet the guests that come up and ring the bell. Not that this was a huge task for my sims to do, but I liked being able to have my sims already engaged in an activity (i.e. cooking for the guests or warming the hottub) when guests arrived. He even repairs broken items in the home, makes meals and watches the kiddies. Unlike Servo he does NOT eat your food and try to engage in conversation like he is a member of the household. This guy knows his place and his role. Once you hire the butler, if you have any other service sims on your payroll (i.e. nanny, maid) he will ask you if you want him to dismiss them all since he is more than up to the task. <3 the Butler. He is the best thing ever. The only thing I have not tested with him is gardening, but my guess is that he does that too.

This is a great expansion pack and I know it will hold me until the Sims 3 is released in February, however there are a number of issues to be addressed with it so if you want to get it, get it but just know you will have a lot of problems until there is a patch. Happy Simming. :)

I purchased two copies of this expansion pack because both my son and my wife are Sims 2 addicts. Both of them loved the extras BUT then the problems began!

As a 'PC expert' I was called in when my son's copy would not load. It seems that he had re-installed the game at least four times because he had installed corrupted custom content on his new Sony Vio laptop. He then found he could not get Apartment Life to work at all.

I tried and every time I insert the disk it ejects and the message 'Insert a disk' appears. I tried my wife's copy and got the same result so it wasn't a bad disk. I investigated the problem on Internet and found EA have protected the game using SecuRom - the same software which caused the Spore DRM controversy. According to what I found SecuRom does not like:
(a) Nero software (Yes my son had Nero 8 on his machine and yes it has stopped working properly)
(b) It can cause problems if there are repeated installs - Now up to at least 5 that I know of.

SecuRom is NOT easy to remove. The removal tools provided by EA and SecuRom do not do a complete removal. EA games is not very helpful either, offering a variety of non-relevant solutions such as telling me that the game would not work on his laptop because of it's video card. (It already had been working).

All in all it took me several hours to fix the problem, my time being worth a great deal more than the games cost. I still have an Apartment Life disk which messes up computers and prevents other legitimate software working. There is a way round it, but that involves un-official copies of the game which I can't condone.

My recommendation is that if you are an average user who just plays the standard game then go ahead and buy it but if you want to build your own Sims and use custom content - give this expansion pack a miss - it isn't worth the hassle.

Apartment Life in my opinion is better then FreeTime. It has added new hairstyles, clothes, items, and the fact that your sims don't have to spend a ton money on a house is great! Your sims can move into an apartment, and still have most of their allotted $20,000 to use on furniture or whatever you like.There is definitely a more urban vibe in this game that was definitely needed in the Sims!

The only things I'm not too fond of is the lack of being able to simply build apartments. You can do this! BUT you must use a cheat code to turn your apartment building into an ACTUAL apartment. Otherwise it will simply be a big house for purchase. Another thing is the driveway. I'm not sure if you can have cars with apartment buildings int his game. Which is too bad since I have a nice collection of custom cars :D

Overall its a great addition to the game!

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