This cheat mod makes The Sims 2 feel like a god game and it turns out I am a cruel, cruel god

The whole ‘trap Sims in the pool with no way to get out’ shtick is such a cliche, and it’s a real pain in the neck to actually get done. By the time anyone actually dies my Sim has had to run to the bathroom about twenty times. No, I need a good old fashioned smite button—something that can finish off any joker with a hand buzzer before he can say “sul sul.”

Luckily my prayers were answered with Aaroneous’ Sim Manipulator, a mod which grants me that smite button and so much more. The mod comes with a coterie of controller objects, from a weather machine to an NPC spawner and everything in-between. If there is a thing that can happen to a Sim, chances are you can force that interaction with a controller. Make your children’s grades straight As, force everyone to be hungry, inspire new hobbies in existing Sims, make it rain figuratively or literally, and so on.

In a Sims veteran’s hands, these tools allow unmitigated control over each character’s progression, current state, and lifestyle, binding nearly every aspect of the simulation to your whim. In my hands, the idyllic streets of Pleasantview started to look more like a game of Dungeon Keeper.

In fact, maybe I never deserved these mods. They’re meant to aid roleplaying, allow me to quickly relocate and customize Sims, alter ages and faces, switch careers and time of day, set the stage in any way I see fit. But that never even crossed my mind.

Within minutes of installing the Sim Manipulator, I spawned half the neighborhood into a single lot, and once they started doing jazzercise or whatever unprompted in my living room, I turned myself into a witch and used my weather machine to make it rain lethal indoor fire.

Later, I was trying to practice my free throw outside the neighborhood grocer, and some utter rando decided to invite himself to play with me. Since I’m a god, I fill his bladder and strike him with lightning. What’s he going to do about it? Tell someone a god filled his bladder and struck him with lightning?

Anyway, there’s more to virtual life than schadenfreude. The Sim Manipulator has an impressive suite of features, ranging from the aforementioned godlike powers to the more grounded ones like the ability to swap outfits on a dime instead of having to go change clothes manually. It basically lets you access a ton of Sims 2 cheats without having to remember them all.

While it’s fun to screw around with the more outlandish features, I’d recommend it to anyone looking to control the game’s moment-to-moment a bit more or pack a house full of werewolves and vampires without any fuss. There’s even a census feature allowing you to view a number of stats related to your neighborhood’s cast of Sims and NPCs. Once the novelty wore off, I mostly used it to teleport myself to the bathroom and back.

Somewhere in-between the extremes there’s a way to use this mod that could encourage new sorts of emergent storytelling. Maybe you want a Sim who’s enemies or best friends with everyone in the neighborhood the day they move in, or you want your elderly grandfather to evade death’s door for another week so he can watch his granddaughter graduate college. Is it cheating? Maybe, but The Sims 2 is hardly an esport, and if I wanted to be subject to reality’s every cruel whim, I’d go outside. For now, it’s back to the weather control machine.