The high sales of boxed copies of expansion packs for The Sims 2 mark a particular transition period for the industry. The success of The Sims and its sequel was contributed to greatly by the internet, both as a facilitator for word-of-mouth and a means of providing further material to customise into them. Again, my own limited experience with The Sims back in 2001 included playing it with Final Fantasy VII characters someone had made and uploaded. But in 2005, even as games were including ever more significant online elements and Steam had been running for two years, the mainstream hadn’t quite yet arrived at online patches as standard and the world of DownLoadable Content as a more regimented and controlled thing.
As a result, putting a bunch of new stuff onto a couple of discs and selling it that way still made sense. A lot of sense, for a game with the ongoing popularity and fan appetite of The Sims 2. The fact that it was still only possible to put out updates to many in this way shows through in some of the inclusions. When the game initially makes a big thing about now being able to buy your own car, I thought it was going to need that to get to the nightlife which is the main point, but you can still get a taxi. That leaves the cars as tangential to the nightlife at best, while other features like new shapes of swimming pool clearly have nothing to do with it.
The main event is a relatively substantial one, with more significant gameplay changes than previous chart-topper The Sims: On Holiday. As well as new restaurants, clubs and bowling alleys to go to, there are a lot of new dating mechanisms. Your sims can have turn-ons and turn-offs that affect your chances of getting on with a particular prospective partner, and there’s a whole dating mini-game. It’s not exactly Tokimeki Memorial, but when you invite someone on a date you get a countdown timer and have to match enough specific wants to impress them into extending the time. Human interactions as a checkpoint racing game is quite the concept, but it does fit into the general atmosphere of The Sims well.
It also fits all too well into the matter of time as the most limiting resource in The Sims. I got my sim to invite someone on a date, did the whole working out a taxi thing, travelled into town to an art gallery… and by the time we were there it was almost the end of the date which, unsurprisingly, went down as pretty meh. I only then partially redeemed it by travelling around various spots and running into the same guy again (one of several familiar faces) and inviting him for karaoke there and then. Which he accepted rather than treating as the behaviour of a stalker. It felt extra artificial at that point, but it told an interesting story in its artificial way as well.
The timing issues, as with The Sims 2, come in on my end too. Nightlife is a sprawling update that I probably couldn’t appreciate all of the features of even if I had a great deal more time to explore it and the base game. But if some fans somewhere really wanted to expand their swimming pool range or whatever, that might just be the thing to tip them into paying for Nightlife. And some fans might even end up also buying the seven other expansion packs for The Sims 2, or the nine smaller ‘stuff’ packs, like the IKEA furniture one. If you can get a small group of people to keep spending on your game for minutiae, that’s much easier money than working on something new or attracting new fans. Which was a principle that stuck. This particular form of that approach may have had a short shelf life, but it would be replaced by even more ruthless versions.
Top of the charts for week ending 17 September 2005:
UK games: The Sims 2: Nightlife (Maxis/EA, PC) 
Japan games: 真・三國無双4 猛将伝 / Dynasty Warriors 5: Xtreme Legends (Koei, PS2) 
UK films: Pride & Prejudice 
UK singles: Pussycat Dolls ft. Busta Rhymes – Don’t Cha 
UK albums: David Gray – Life in Slow Motion