The Sims 2 expanded upon The Sims in many official, and unoffical ways. First off, no longer were you tied to a fake-3D 45 degree isometric top-down perspective. Now you could scroll, even WALK in your own houses and buildings that you create. You could finally drive a car somewhere, with several vehicle options available to pick from ranging from bicycles or your own two feet, to people rendering up things like monster trucks and movie cars. There was so much unofficial awesome DLC for the game that it was incredible. The Sims themslves offered more expansion than previous too, looking a lot more like photorealistic people and being a lot more user-editable via more conventional methods than others.

But another awesome thing is the engine allowed for some hackable ways to get what you want, whether that was building a basement, building an evil-genius pad into a mountainside, or a big abandoned factory complete with all the various pipes, holes in the wall, and other stuff. The Sims 2 really had the best creativity in my humble opinion. This was probably the most open-ended of the series. So much so I did my early music videos on YouTube in this as an art medium.

But I also spent a lot of time playing the game. One of the best things about The Sims 2, was it was still the era of a lot of *free* user created content, including an NES, Atari 2600, various Electric Guitars, Arcade Games, vehicles, and various fixtures for the house including telephone lines, telephone boxes, fuse boxes, power switches, wall outlets, rain gutters....the amount of DETAIL you could achieve in The Sims 2 was beyond incredible. But with that incredible-ness, came with a pretty hefty price.....ladies and gentlemen, may I now introduce you to the E.A. hell of DRM - SecuROM

One reason I'm not super nostalgic about 2000's gaming and later (aside from not participating in it very much to begin with), is because of all the really draconian anti-piracy measures being put into place at the time. Whether it was WIndows XP locking you out asking for reactivation over the phone because you upgraded your video card, SoftWrap keeping me from registering my copies of POstal or Postal 2 (or having access to my downloads), or this - SecuROM reminding me what a PAIN IN THE ASS it was to run this on a optical-disc-less system. So yeah, you can see why I'm a big "original hardware, physical media" guy - I don't like corporations f***ing up my programs with poor customer support and incorrect accusations of piracy when I just want to run a game with a dead optical drive.

So the night before this far more brief and substantial rewrite, I decided to take a crack at using The Sims 2 on my modern Linux box. Oh christ, the amount of insanity I had to go to to try and even get CLOSE to getting this installed, let alone working. Had to download wine, winetricks, lutris, bottles, tried a Windows XP SP3 Virtual machine, which got me far enough, but I had to make the virtual drive 10GB bigger in size, and had to enable 3D support. Then had to try and install it from an ISO file - hahahahaha - good luck with that one. Then had to find a really old website I used to visit to get a noCD crack because well...I shoulda used Alcohol 101% instead of ripping it using Linux, but NoCD was the plan anyway off the bat...and well, the download had CRC errors...so eff that noise.