The Sims 2 has the most unhinged drama in the entire series that finally seduced me away from my beloved Build Mode

I’m not a Live Mode player. Or at least I haven’t been for the past decade of playing The Sims, so I’d assumed that the itch had left me in my teen years and being a Build Mode girl was a personality trait I aged into. That is until The Sims 3 and, as of this week, the re-release of The Sims 2, completely changed how I like to play.

Over the past year I’ve gotten back into playing The Sims 3. I have a lot of love for its more realism-driven Build Mode and bygone tools like Create-A-Stye, but to my surprise I found a lot to love in Live Mode too, at times struggling to put it down and return to my usual MO of quietly building little houses.

The Sims 4’s approach to Live Mode is massively different from the series’ past, a phenomenon that I got to ask about when interviewing Sims series boss Lyndsay Pearson last month. Where The Sims 4 is terrified of stepping on your toes—with popups asking everything from whether you want to confirm that a Sim officially “likes” a hobby they’re trying, to random neighbors calling to ask your opinion on who they should make friends with, let alone allowing your sims to die—The Sims 3 is happy to throw potholes in your path and make you navigate around them.

I’ve recently had fun digging into becoming a car thief in The Sims 3, enamored by how random events like burglary or romantic attraction make The Sims feel so much more lively than The Sims 4 and its constant permission-asking to make anything interesting happen.

The Sims 2, however, is completely unhinged. Here’s a loose retelling of events from just my first night playing:

• Day 1: I load up the Goth family to find Cassandra Goth hopelessly crushing on neighborhood playboy Don Lothario. Cassandra foolishly proposes marriage to Don, spiraling into despair as her little brother Alexander bashes on the piano nearby.
• Day 2: Mortimer Goth and Dina Caliente mutually have crushes on each other already—Dina because she wants to marry rich and Mortimer as he laments the disappearance of his wife Bella. Unplanned by me, Mortimer sweeps Dina off her feet into a kiss as a greeting the first time she visits the house. So he’s not that torn up.

• Day 2 (cont.): While Mortimer and Dina canoodle upstairs, I react to a thunderstorm setting a tree on fire by (foolishly) sending Cassandra out to extinguish it. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen but Cassandra gets struck by lightning in her underwear and lives just long enough to walk back inside and die in the kitchen.
• Day 3: Alexander is the only one to notice Cassandra’s death. Mortimer is too wrapped up in Dina’s arms to bother feeding his son, who subsists on potato chips. Alexander comes home from school to find out that Dina is moving in with them already. When I try to promote household harmony by having Alexander ask Dina for homework help, he accidentally walks in while she’s cuddling with Mortimer in bed and hates his new not-stepmom instead.
• Day 4: Dina and Mortimer get engaged and I notice that Alexander has three different wants in his list for buying a pet, so Mortimer takes him to the pet shop to adopt a large terrier who they name Worthington. That night, Cassandra’s horrifying underwear-clad electrocuted ghost haunts Alexander causing him to wet his pajamas.

• Day 5: Mortimer plans a birthday party for Alexander but basically nobody comes. Despite that, Alexander is happy (because of Worthington) and successful (after doing his homework unassisted), though when he ages up into a teenager and picks his turn-ons he is (as prodded by me) suspiciously into characteristics that Dina has.
• Day 6: Dina fulfills her wish to start a job in the law career—which seems to defeat the purpose of her desire to marry rich but Dina contains multitudes. Worthington gets a job (because pets can have jobs) as a movie set extra but decides on his first day that he’s feeling too lazy to go to work.

After all that, I look at Mortimer’s lifespan timer counting up days until death and wonder if perhaps Dina should put off this marriage and wait to marry the new Goth family heir. Maybe he’ll get over the trauma of catching her in bed with his dad by the time he ages up again.

I had to drag myself away from The Sims 2 that night, past my real-life bedtime, and realized that I’d not touched my beloved Build Mode at all.

I played The Sims 1 and 2 as a kid, but I’ve slept a few times since then and my CD-ROMs are likely gathering dust in a box in my childhood bedroom. I’d forgotten so much of its inherent silliness that I either took for granted or never quite noticed back when it launched.

Now that I’ve spent time in all four mainline Sims games within the same week I can confidently say that The Sims 2 is the one that nails the chaos and humor of Live Mode best.

Ghosts are an incessant menace floating around the Goth household, even before Cassandra’s demise. My sims’ basic needs are a constant battle to keep filled, unlike the much more forgiving Sims 4. It has whole cutscenes to mark big life events like first woohoos between partners and marriage proposals. And heck, dogs can have jobs. I love that.

Something about The Sims 2’s interface puts all the drama immediately at my fingertips in a way that The Sims 4 has never managed to. Existing townie relationships draw my eye as a place to begin stirring the pot and the way that The Sims 2’s simulation chooses to constantly ramp up the dramatic tension without any input from me keeps the madness going.

Build mode has my heart in The Sims 3 and 4. And the re-release of the original The Sims has reminded me just how novel a concept it felt like at the time. But as a newly-minted Live Mode drama-seeking freak, The Sims 2 is an absolute winner.