He pines for his wife, Bella, who mysteriously disappeared several years ago. The Caliente sisters have the hots for Mortimer, but they may be more interested in his money than in his personality. More than one Pleasantview resident has noticed that they arrived in town right before Bella vanished.

Meanwhile, Mortimer’s daughter, Cassandra, is engaged to Don Lothario, but she’s not sure if he wants her or the chance to inherit her father’s money. He seems to be distracted more often since Nina and Dina Caliente moved into town, and there’s a nasty rumor going around that Bella was last seen scrambling up the deck of his condo.

Who’s the Dip Taking a Dip? Install a pool and share it with your neighbors. Or tell them to take a hike.

If only Cassandra knew how much Darren Dreamer loves her. The unemployed artist also struggles with his relationship with his son, Dirk, who is failing in school and sees his father as little more than a nuisance.

Even the seemingly happy couple has something to hide: Daniel and Mary-Sue Pleasant appear to live in a storybook marriage, but Daniel is secretly in love with their maid, Kaylynn Langerak, who is also fooling around with Lothario on the side.

“The Sims 2 is a strategy game, a creativity tool and, most importantly, a storytelling experience. Allowing the players the ability to tell better stories was our key goal.”

- Tim LeTourneau, lead producer

Just recently, Daniel’s sister, Jennifer, and her family moved back to town. Her husband, John Burb, and their daughter, Lucy, are eager to make new friends. Their presence could create more tension in Pleasantview, but the Burb family might also be the cure for what ails the town.

A Storytelling Experience

Whether that set-up reminded you of a soap opera or the Robert Altman movie Short Cuts, The Sims 2 lead producer Tim LeTourneau wants you to know that “the core of The Sims 2 design [was] giving the Sims a lifetime to live, and giving the player a wealth of new stories to tell.”

A Match Made in Pleasantview. One of many new graphical effects in the game.

After the groundbreaking success of the original Sims game and its series of expansion packs, LeTourneau, franchise creator Will Wright and the rest of the development team realized what is special about The Sims and the people who play it. According to LeTourneau, “The Sims 2 is a strategy game, a creativity tool and, most importantly, a storytelling experience. Allowing the players the ability to tell better stories was our key goal.”

With that in mind, they set out to implement new features that will help you become a master storyteller. The Sims are your cast, the neighborhoods Pleasantview, Strangetown and Veronaville your stage. (You can also make your own Sims and build your own neighborhoods.) Simply provide direction and the stories will practically write themselves.

Digital DNA

The most revolutionary change in The Sims 2 comes in the form of digital DNA, which enables your characters to pass down traits to the next generation. LeTourneau acknowledges that the development team used Punnett Squares to dictate how new Sims inherit traits, such as hair and eye color, from their parents, since “it’s the model most people are familiar with, and it’s also a very straightforward logic method to implement that gives more than enough variety for the game. It’s actually better for us to develop a simpler system that gives predictable or understandable results than to mimic reality so closely as to deliver the same ‘noise’ that the world around us often provides.”

“Some of our funniest stories in life, and thus in the Sims, revolve around failures. If your Sim just vanished after death, the story would be over. But to see your Sim again as a ghost lets the story about that Sim continue, even in a limited way.”

- Tim LeTourneau

He continues: “For things like skin color, though, we took a different tack. We decided to establish a spectrum of skin tones from light to dark, and allow a child to inherit any skin tone that lies within the range defined by the two skin tone genes given by the parents.”

There’s no limit to the number of generations that you can create in The Sims 2, although LeTourneau notes that “the family tree only tracks predecessors and siblings, so the data management is relatively easy.”

Wish I Was a Real Boy. Even a birthday celebration can be an opportunity for Sim teens to bug Sim parents.

Lifetimes of Wants and Fears

Now that the Sims can reproduce, one of the major limitations in the original game — their inability to change over time — is gone. You can watch a Sim progress from toddler to child to teen to adult to elder and see him experience a lifetime of joy and sadness as well as successes and failures. As in the first iteration of the game, Sim personalities are not always compatible, although you can always try to nudge their relationships in certain directions and see what happens.

LeTourneau points out that, in addition to a more robust 3D engine that brings the characters to life in new ways, his development team “worked to make the Sims smarter with regard to their basic motives. For example, Sims who really have to go to the bathroom will now put that into their queue urgently, instead of just going on the floor. And as they walk around, they’ll check out their surroundings, such as paintings and other Sims, in ways that make them seem much smarter and alive.” You can also turn their free will on or off, depending how much you want to micro-manage their lives.