The Sims: Hot Date

The Good
This Sims add-on adds an incredible new dimension to the game by adding the "downtown" area. Your sims can go shopping, eat out, pick up disgusting people in bars... the options are endless. Furthermore, you can DESIGN your downtown area if you want... create your own bars, restaurants, shops, whatever! The expansion also VERY much complicates the Sims' relationships, adding a plethora of new options for sim interactions -- saying "hi" can now lead to a submenu asking exactly HOW you want to say "hi"... shake hands? Wave? You can see where this gets interesting in a romantic subtext...

The Bad
The massive number of new options takes some getting used to, and expands the game's already substantial learning curve. If you knew what you were doing in Sim land, once this disk is installed, prepare to start learning all over again.

In addition, once you begin getting multiple expansions installed, unless your system has a LOT of free memory handy, you're going to start getting some substantial slowdown in the game.

The Bottom Line
If you're really into The Sims, this set is a must-have. Turns it into a whole new ball game...

The Good
For a start, speedy install and smooth performace on a 2.4 GHz Pentium(R) 4 with 8mb graphics. The restaurants are really French kiin meals and NPC's. The old prude adds charm to the game. It took minutes to build a new downtown lot-easy to edit too. Also the dateable npcs are stupendously quick talkers. Enjoyable parts were the clothes racks and new objects made it a interesting melding of interactions into new objects like podiums.

The Bad
No beds or computers to use. Otherwise quite enjoyable.

The Bottom Line
This expansion pack is worth its gold in millions of ways. But it's enjoyable-highly recommendable.