Hunter Howe, one of the designers for the Sims 2 Seasons, is starring in a new walkthrough video for the upcoming expansion pack. During 7:30 minutes he talks through the four seasons of the year, starting with spring. The first thing you'll see is rain. It'll rain more in spring and in winter it'll snow more, so it depends on the season how often certain weather appears. Next he shows how to give a gift, one of the small new family activities. Catching butterflies is another of those spring activities, just like fishing. Gardening is one of the biggest things in the pack, and Howe shows orchard trees as well as a greenhouse. The latter are slightly more intensive to tend, but more rewarding. Planting some eggplants is explained. It depends on the season when you can harvest the food. Sims with a good gardening talent may be able to talk to and communicate with plants, making them grow better. Next up is summer, which is all about having fun. The pool upgrades are shown: the curves, shading and reflections, new pool games like Marco Polo, the slide and painting the walls and floors of the pool. Hunter also explains how seasons help in certain things: summer makes building relationships easier, during fall it's better to do skill building. In fall the leafs have fallen off the trees, and it's time to do some harvesting. Sims will have warmer clothes to make sure they don't get cold during this season. The lighting in the pack is enhanced so each season gets its own look. Back to harvesting, the orchard trees will generally have food in fall by themselves, but tending them generates better fruit. Good food can have positive side-effects, like curing colds. Finally Hunter goes to winter, showing the new cursor which uncovers anything under the snow. There are some new activities using the snow, like building a snowman, creating a snow angel or throwing snowballs. The last one is a group activity to which an entire community lot can join in. Hunter also explains that if you like you can create a neighborhood that is in winter all year round. At the end of the movie Hunter shows the wishing well, a new reward object, which can have very surprising side-effects if you wish too often. He doesn't go into any details though.

To see the video head on over to the Seasons videos page. If you prefer to download a very high quality version of the video, then the official German site has a newspost linking to a 317Mb large edition of the same video.