Relationships are important in the game as well. You'll need to make friends and, occasionally, enemies. Friends are necessary to get a promotion, but also to unlock new clothes and fashion. Unfortunately it takes a lot of effort to unlock fashion, as the relationship score (interest) will need to be at 100 for you to get the items. Any less will not do. To me it doesn't have much of a priority to do unlock the fashion, and I left most of it for until after the story. One annoyance is that it's your own Sim who has to make the friends. With 76 items of fashion to unlock in total, don't be surprised you'll be spending a lot of time unlocking it all. Then again, mastering all skills, completing all careers, and helping all Sims - some of the other requirements to complete 100% of the game - also take a lot of time. One advantage: your Sim will end up with a lot of friends.

The social game has been made a little more difficult than the Urbz. No longer does the menu show you which action you should take, using the colour codes. It's just good old guessing time, and a bit of luck is necessary to get a relationship going. Socialising is best done in Direct control mode, as it gives you immediate feedback of how well the relationship is going. It also lets you look at the funny animations from close up. There are many (new) social interactions, ranging from the usual talking and joking to playing with hand-puppets or impressing using a vacuum cleaner. Repeating one interaction several times during a conversation won't often work out well. Variation can help you further faster. This makes it a little more challenging, and sometimes a bit frustrating as things just won't go right. Taking some rest and getting your mood up a bit can in this case help.

In two-player mode, socialising can be fairly annoying for one of the Sims - that is, when both players are controlling one of the Sims that are socialising. The one who didn't start the socialising will be stuck without being able to do anything. Rather than the game alternating the interactions - first player 1 chooses something, then player 2, and so on - the initiator is the only one able to choose the interaction. The reaction is also decided by the game - but that may be better too, as otherwise it would be very easy to make a few friends.

Not really new in the game are the skills and careers. These are similar in every Sims game that has been out so far. Whether your Sim wants to get a job in the Science, Art, Fashion, Criminal or any other of the 10 career tracks, you'll need to work hard to get a promotion. You don't just need to go to work in a good mood, but it's also vital to train your skills and get some friends. The story requires you to get several promotions and so this is a thing you'll be spending quite a bit of time in. Training the skills is easy when you don't have a point of the skill yet, but it gets harder towards the end. The 10th (and last) point will take quite a while, and you will probably need to schedule the training over a few days to get it.

If you don't pay a lot of attention to training certain skills, they might still build up. That's because skills are also trained while you're doing a related action. Cooking improves your culinary skills, and so even though you don't really need it for your career you will still automatically build it up gradually. The same goes for cleaning. Nevertheless you'll need to train those skills too if you want to fill them up completely, otherwise you'll be playing for ages. One special case between the skills is the culinary one - again - as you unlock new recipes for the food system as you train it.

Every career has 10 levels. As you start in level 1, you can get 9 promotions per career. Since you need to complete all tracks to completely finish the game 100%, Maxis hasn't made it very hard to skip back to a career you left earlier. If you reapply for a job in a career you've done before, you will lose only the last two promotions. So if you were at level 5 in the career, you can get back in at level 3. As you should already have the skills, and hopefully the friends as well, getting back to your old job shouldn't be the hardest thing. A useful feature that gives a bit more flexibility. Also, each career focuses on 3 different skills that you'll need to train. Naturally these will overlap somewhat between the different careers, and thus working your way up in one career will probably help you get promotions faster in another career. So once you completed one career, quite likely the one you start with anyway, completing others shouldn't be as hard.

Something new on the consoles is the new food game, which goes well together with the new creative aspiration. Rather than walking up to a fridge and picking a meal to cook, you have to combine up to four ingredients and then prepare the meal by making a salad, roast, or whatever you like. Besides that there are 24 recipes ready to be unlocked. By making those recipes you at least know what you're making. If you just combine some stuff, you might want to be ready to be prepared. It'll go well most of the times, but some types of food have special effects. Food can give you a romantic effect, or get your Sim in a good mood (quite like the PC platinum mood of your Sim), but if you don't prepare it very well expect food with a green damp that's not very good to eat. Another negative side-effect of food may be that it's so full of water, it'll make your Sim need to use facilities right after eating it.

Sims will need to eat, and so you'll need to make them food regularly. Unfortunately the food game isn't much of a novelty after a while, and it stands in the way of just getting some food. You can get some generic ingredients and prepare a default meal, but this doesn't give you real control over what your Sim eats. It's also not possible to save your own recipes you find along the way, which could be especially useful when you want to get food with a certain effect at a time. And don't expect to be just able to pick a recipe and cook it. You have to get ingredients, look at the recipe, check out what you need, then manually pick the ingredients from the list, and do the rest. It would've been a lot better if you could throw the necessary ingredients for a recipe right at your plate, without having to do it all manually. Even in classic control you can't just pick a recipe to cook, and your Sim will do the rest (including making the meal itself). So, if you just want your Sim to eat a bit, go into classic control, make your Sim get the generic ingredients, and he'll do the rest.

Which ingredients are available depends on how expensive the fridge you bought was (an expensive one has more ingredients, including llamas at some point), and which ones you harvested. There are a few objects (an aquarium, "frood" tree and a garden hutch) from which you can get some ingredients if you pay enough attention to them. Unfortunately there aren't many of these throughout the various story locations, so you'll need to buy the objects for it, or move to a lot that has them. Then again you don't really need the ingredients very badly and it's easy to do without these special ingredients.

Besides life there's also death in this version of the console. On earlier console titles Sims wouldn't really die, but they do in the Sims 2. Not of old age - Sims simply don't age due to the technological limitations - but you can starve them to death or so. However, if your Sim dies, it's not game over. Not at all in fact. You'll be able to control the ghost of your Sim. Now this sounds great, but it isn't as incredible as you might think. You can go through walls and such, and don't have to take care of needs, but as a ghost there isn't much you can do. You can socialise with other Sims and spook, posess, wail or puke on them, but that's about it as well. You can't interact with objects and posess them or so (just to scare the wits out of other Sims). As if it isn't bad enough, ghosts that are controlled by free will won't do much except annoying other Sims on the lot - giving them a bad mood. Controlling a ghost is nice for a while, but after that you'll want to get back to life and play the regular game so you can actually make some progress. Fortunately this is very easy. When you die you have to wait a while before the Grim Reaper appears on the lot. He'll stay around until all ghosts are brought back to life then. Ghosts can play a fiddle challenge against him, or just pay cold hard cash to get back to life.

Like the rest of the game, build and buy mode are fairly intuitive. Unfortunately they feel quite limited, especially when you've played the Sims 2 on PC. Where you have so-called 'swatches' on the PC game, different textures for one objects, all objects on the console are available in one colour only. The fire limit, of which I'm not sure if it exists on the XBox and GameCube too, can get fairly annoying. Because the amount of memory of the PlayStation 2 is limited, a place can't be filled with objects. The fire-risk bar reflects how far you are. Place too many objects - including walls, doors, etc. - and your place will spontaneously catch fire. When in story mode, this can already happen because you're buying objects necessary for the story, and thus you have to sell or remove items to prevent them from burning down. Obviously consoles with more memory should solve this problem for a large part, but not for this game. Let's hope such limits will be of the past with the next generation of consoles (PlayStation 3, XBox 360 and Nintendo Revolution) - and of course games for those platforms.

I've never really liked buy mode on the consoles, mostly because it isn't that great. You can do the basic things - place walls, fences, doors, windows, etc. - but there aren't any roofs in this game. Maybe that's a good thing, as in the Urbz it stopped you from changing the outer walls. You can only build on one floor too, so don't expect foundations, stairs, or anything like that. Other than that, using a controller to build just doesn't work that well. The controls are too sensitive to make placing a wall easy. They can still be in angles of 45 degrees only, and it's easy to slide a bit off the straight line you're trying to get. It's a bit too tricky to be easy and comfortable. I didn't use build mode all that much in the end...

During the game you can monitor your progress closely. There are 9 things to complete to get 100% of the game. These include unlocking fashion, recipes, objects and locations, getting promotions and completing all careers, earning skill points and train skills to the maximum, and finally helping out other Sims by completing their golden wants. As you can see, some goals go hand-in-hand, like getting a skill point also gets you closer to maximising a skill. One thing to keep in mind is that all the goals are oriented at your own Sim. Because you are forced to do quite a bit of work for other Sims as well, your focus is probably more on completing the story than training all these skills and getting promotions and such. Once you completed all goals, you can start focusing on the rest a bit more, and get in a sort of free-play mode like there was in the Urbz. You can just go ahead and do whatever you like.