The Sims Hot Date

Pros • Improved options. • Take your Sims Downtown. • More to do, see and interact with.	Cons • Even with downtown, Sims still feel trapped. • Pushing the limits of an expansion. • Similar Quirks, still has many bugs.
Bottom Line A game-altering add-on truly worthy of the "Expansion" label. Much, much more than Livin' Large or House Party, although it also nicely compliments those. Hot Date does more than just give your Sims a chance to get out and about, away from their neighbourhoods. That in itself is a real-treat for die-hard Sims fans sick of the same old lots, but it also adds new conversation abilities, better menus overall and new ways to interact. A big improvement to the game, significantly more than the other two expansion packs which merely added more items and characters.

Let's say you're like me. You played The Sims, you liked it, a lot. But you had your fill and both of the previous expansions didn't thrill you much because they just added more of the same.

No? Maybe you're like my wife, because she never got enough of The Sims and just loved the extra items and goodies that came along with Livin' Large and House Party. She loves having her Sims abducted by aliens and all running frantic around a flaming barbeque.

Either way, Hot Date might surprise you. At first I snickered at the idea, I thought perhaps the folks at Maxis had taken the measures of good taste a little too far and officially moved into the tacky zone. Actually, that's been quite true of the Sims franchise from the beginning, so why stop now.

The truth is that this is the real expansion. Those other two were just add-ons, only Hot Date expands The Sims into something approximating a new experience.

First of all, you can take your Sims downtown. That's right, visit a restaurant, take a stroll through the town square and even relax while controlling an RC boat in a pond. Well, as much as a typical Sim does relax that is, because I've never seen anyone in real-life get so excited about puttering little boats around.

More than that, Hot Date adds a slightly altered system of Sims communication, together with new expressions and topics, plus finer control over what your Sims should say. Plus there are some other clever new things. For instance, your Sims can no longer pull magical gifts out of thin air, they have to have them in stock, so to speak, meaning that you have to do some gift-shopping before the option can be used. Speaking of purchases, the menus for purchasing items have been snazzed up as well.

Altogether, some new life has been breathed into the Sims with this expansion. Word is, that when Simville was cancelled (yes, you can still have a good cry over that), some of the ideas were adapted into this expansion. That would really explain the freshness of approach that Hot Date lends to the Sims.

All is not rosy however. This isn't an entirely new game, it still suffers from being bogged down by the already plenty-bogged Sims engine. Some of the same limitations that you may have taken for granted still exist. It's still very strange to deal with more than one Sim at a time, for instance Sims can only travel in multiples to "downtown" by having one Sim invite another.

There is of course the game-state problem, which has been around in The Sims since the beginning. Basically I mean problems regarding time issues and who goes where at what times, etc. not matching up with the Sims' basic lives. With the original game, this amounted to things such as neighbours visiting when they should have been at work, etc. With Hot Date, it's even more obvious that something is quirky about space and time in the Sims' Universe when a Sim spends an entire afternoon downtown but returns home at the same minute that they had left. Ahhh, if only you could take such a vacation from time in real-life!

As well, there are problems with the combined tutorials for the original game and the expansion. When I took the Newbies downtown in the tutorial, I ended up controlling a different character altogether.

Bugs and limitations such as these are bound to show up in a game so complex and that, quite honestly, was horribly ridden with bugs in the first place. Has anyone else ever had people raining on their property, visitors stuck pacing on the sidewalk or spontaneously bursting into flames? I'm sure if you've spent some time with this series you've seen at least one major bug and it doesn't get any better with Hot Date, in fact I think the added complexity has created an additional number of bugs.

That having been said, it's a strong testament to gameplay when I can say that the bugs are often more quaint than annoying. It's hard to spoil such a good game. This expansion has just made it even better.

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