Pros: New features in relationships, Sims can finally get out of the house!
Cons: Downtime time is wack. Can't import lots. Greeting is now too complicated!
The Bottom Line: A ton of new features to extend your simming pleasure, not just more of the same. Despite a few weaknesses, this is a very worthwhile expansion pack.
dreamshark's Full Review: The Sims Expansion: Hot Date (Mac)
Wonderful and addictive as The Sims is, there is something claustrophobic about the fact that your poor little guys can never leave their own houses. Well, okay, if you want to give Susie a chance to get out of the house you can play as one of her neighbors and invite her over, but you have no control over her when she's at the neighbors' house. The very cool thing about Hot Date is that it adds new locales for your Sims to frolic in, alone or with a date or friend. There's also a whole new building mode to explore as you expand or improve your downtown, and of course there are some new building components, new furniture, and new objects. That would be enough right there to justify this expansion pack.
But wait, there's more! In keeping with the "Hot Date" theme, the whole algorithm for calculating sim relationships has been deepened. No longer is every Sim relationship expressed by a single integer from 0 to 100. Now there are two levels to every relationship (each of which can still be expressed as an integer between 0 and 100, but hey, there's TWO numbers now!). One number describes the long-term relationship, the other one is for how the Sim feels right this minute. I can't say that I've noticed a lot of difference in gameplay due to this feature, but there are probably subtleties that I haven't tumbled to yet. I was a little worried that existing Sims would not be able to function in the new world, but all my children were upgraded smoothly, and even given a temporary shot of joy juice with the upgrade (all their mood indicators maxed out green).
All Sim interactions have been made more complicated, with many more options on the "pie menu" that springs up when you click on another Sim. It's great fun exploring the new options and watching the ever-entertaining Sim body-language (Wait until you see your Sims' idea of "flirting" *hee hee*). On the other hand, in some areas the designers have just gone off the deep end. I think they need some defaults for some of the choices - just saying hello and goodbye should not have to be this complicated! On the other hand, you now have the option of calling people up just to chat, which provides a much quicker way to get your social need indicator back into the green. Before I discovered that, my Sims were running themselves ragged with constant entertaining just trying to keep a few family friends.
One unexpected bonus is a whole bunch of new neighbors, the Townies. They're a large, friendly clan; a couple of them may slip you their cards when you're downtown, and suddenly there's some new potential friends on your phone list. That certainly came as a pleasant surprise to hapless Bob Newbie, who's been on the outs with his wife ever since they got evicted from their home and had to move into a shantytown. Every time Betty yells at him, he sneaks into the kitchen and calls up Yvonne or Kelsie, who always seem HAPPY to talk to him...
Downside
This expansion pack has been a lot of fun, but there have been some disappointments. The Downtown that Maxis shipped with the game is a bit of a letdown. There really isn't much to DO there except play pinball and wander around looking at some very peculiar looking art galleries (featuring things like moose heads and urinals). I haven't tried building my own attractions yet, but I was hoping for some more entertaining new objects and actions. What good is a beach if you can't swim in the ocean?
But the biggest problem with downtown is TIME. It takes Sims such a long time (in game time) to do the simplest things, like go to the bathroom or walk across a room, that before you've had a chance to do much of anything downtown it's 4:00 a.m. and your date is getting tired and cranky. I've learned how to keep my Sims zooming around home efficiently, but when I'm exploring a new place I want time to saunter around.
The other problem with time is that your home is saved when you get in the cab to go downtown, and then whenever you come back it's the same time as when you left. This is just weird, especially if one of the family members stayed at home in a time warp while the other one was running all over downtown getting exhausted and hungry.
Hot Date is the 3rd expansion pack for The Sims, coming on the heels of Livin' Large and House Party. I don't have the 1st two expansion sets, which I think has caused some problems with my installation. Theoretically, the expansion packs are all independent of each other and can be installed in any combination, but don't count on everything working perfectly if you do that. The first problem I ran into was that after I downloaded some free stuff from the Sims website, all my toilets disappeared from downtown! This was addressed in the online FAQ and was solved by following the instructions for reinstalling Hot Date. I'm more annoyed by the fact that the game crashes to the desktop whenever I hit the "Import Lot" button in the downtown view. This is disappointing, since much of the fun of this game is importing the creations of other users. I haven't found a fix for this one.
Considering the complexity of the game, these are fairly
small problems, however. This is still a very impressive expansion pack that takes the game in new directions.
Computer Resource Limits
My computer is a 750Mhz Dell, with 128M RAM and a decent graphics card. I usually play at 1024x768 resolution, which is pushing it a little. When the scene gets complex, as it tends to do downtown, things slow down a bit. It's still in the acceptable range, but this game reminds me that my computer is no longer "high end." People with slower CPUs or less RAM may encounter some performance problems with this game.
Take your Sim Downtown, and meet up with other Sims you can ask out on dates Create fun places to take your date -- movies, clubs, parks, and more Kee...More at Amazon Marketplace
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