When you install the Sims 2 Seasons expansion packs, one of the random bits of silliness that comes with it is the penguin.

Typically, your Sims have only two actions for the penguin: greet, or shoo. Although occasionally your Sim will have the option to “talk to” the Penguin. I have only had this happen once, but it was pretty funny!

PENGUINS LIKE FISH

(Duh!) If your Sims are into fishing, you can take one of their catches out of their inventory and either set it on the floor, or mount it on the wall. The penguin will eat a fish which has been left on the floor. It will attempt to eat a fish which is mounted on the wall. It’s pretty funny to watch the penguin try to reach a fish mounted on the wall - it will hop up and down, and flap its little wings.

Some people have reported that if you feed the penguin a lot of fish, it will leave pee puddles all over your house. So keep that in mind, if you want to feed him.

PENGUINS ALSO LIKE SNOWMEN

If your Sims build a snowman, the penguin may stop by to chat with it. (This is of course a rather one-sided conversation.) My penguins spend a lot of time talking about crime. Apparently this is not uncommon.

PENGUINS NEVER STAY

Alas, the penguin soon decides it’s time to leave your lot. Several people have tried trapping the penguin by building a fence around him. After a set time, the penguin simply disappears.

The first time my Sims sat down to a dinner of sparkling food, I didn’t think anything of it. They were eating a dish of blackened Cajun catfish, and I thought it was just a sparkling dish. With the Cajun spices and all. I took note, but didn’t bother to snap a picture.

The next night, they sat down to eat a dish of sparkly macaroni and cheese. This time, I sat up and took notice. Macaroni and cheese does not sparkle. I knew this for a fact, deep in my bones.

Sparkly food can be confusing to the new player, because it occurs at a great remove from its root cause: the installation of the Seasons expansion pack. With Seasons, your Sims have the opportunity to garden and go fishing. Many players don’t set up a garden or a fishing hole right away, and furthermore it takes a while for your Sims’ gardening and fishing activities to pay off in the form of fresh food in their personal inventories.

Once the food (either fish or fresh garden veggies) is in your Sims inventory, you next have to add it to the fridge. While controlling the Sim in question, click the fridge and choose “Stock.” The game will have you pick food from your Sim’s inventory to stock the fridge.

Next, the meal itself has to be prepared and eaten. A sparkling meal will also fill your Sim’s hunger meter faster (this is how the developers interpreted the greater nutrition of fresh food).

The Sims was released back in 2000 and quickly proved to be a fantastically popular game. Star designer Will Wright developed the title at Maxis and many people were sceptical about the appeal. However Wright had already proved himself with SimCity which was another innovative game with unique game-play. Luckily they took a chance on The Sims and it was published by EA and has been a license for them to print money ever since.

There were expansion packs galore and then a sequel which promised to be even bigger and better with yet another slew of expansion packs. This year will see the cycle begin again with the release of The Sims 3 which was originally due this month but has been delayed until the summer. Now I may be in the minority here but for me the original game was the best. Let me explain myself, the first Sims game was fresh and unique. The new concept was an absolute revelation in gaming and it could appeal to anyone. I was completely hooked and played the game for days on end creating bizarre families and constructing huge houses for them to live in.

One of the best things about the original Sims game was the community that grew up around it. There were several websites where amateur modders created skins and even models for the game. They added new textures and characters and the wealth of options kept the content fresh and interesting. Something I have always found with Sim games is that once you have seen and used every bit of content they start to get a bit dull so having a fresh supply was great. The creativity and freedom in the game was awesome and later iterations have curtailed that open spirit and squeezed gamers for more and more cash.

My first neighbourhood in the original Sims game had a variety of households. There was Sean Connery as Professor Jones from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who lived in a castle with his harem of young beautiful wives. Sadly Sean passed away changing a light bulb because he had no mechanical skill. Death was common and fickle in the original game. Having spent so long building his castle I just made another Sean but somehow he was never quite the same.

The house across the road was like a spaceship and it was home to Darth Vader and his two gay Stormtrooper pals. It was kitted out with all sorts of user created sci-fi objects and an Imperial interior which included Darth’s sanctuary. He looked very odd when he went swimming discarding his cloak and body suit to reveal a chubby pink body in trunks but he never removed his helmet.

My favourite house of all was the serial killer haven. This creepy horror construction had Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees all rooming together and they were kept busy with a steady supply of victims. In the original game you could torture and kill your Sims. You could let them go swimming in the pool and remove the ladder watching them get more and more tired before drowning or you could wall them up in the body of the house and watch them soil themselves and scream until they starved. The great thing was when they died they would leave behind a tombstone or urn and their ghosts would haunt the inhabitants of the house at night time. Ok a bit sick I know but they aren’t real.

The later games have introduced more complexity to the characters but the game-play has never been improved and the amount of expansion packs you are expected to fork out, for just for a minimal amount of new content, is bordering on the criminal. The freely distributed user created content community has shrunk, everyone wants to charge money for their creations and the spirit has been lost.

Now The Sims 2 is still an enjoyable game and I had fun with it for a while. The ability to develop generations and the more developed personalities for your Sims were a step in the right direction but I was also disappointed by the changes they had failed to make. The discrepancy over the time it takes for Sims to do things and the time it takes in real life is admittedly a tough one to solve but they never even tried. They can spend half a day showering, using the toilet and making their way to the front door. The path-finding is still pretty awful and they often can’t work out the best route to take. I would have sooner seen these things fixed than the addition of a random desires meter or the ability to visit an empty shop.

Relationships always bothered me too. The Sims are so shallow you can basically make anyone fall in love with anyone. If you make them talk together or engage in activities for long enough they’ll be happy to jump into bed together even if their wife or husband is sitting in the same room. It would be nice to see some attempt to change these elements.

The Sims 3 will be a success because the series has loyal fans. By the sounds of it the main additions are continuous aging and large seamless neighbourhoods. I know fans will disagree but I feel the creativity and innovation that made the original game so good has been swept aside in favour of making money and that’s a sad development.

If you have the Pets expansion pack for The Sims 2, parrots are one of the available options. Frankly, I recommend them. It’s fun to have a dog or cat, but if you’re running a busy family, it can be challenging to keep up with the mammal pets too. To get a parrot, go to the Pets menu in Buy Mode, and buy a cage. Put the cage in your Sims’ house, then click on the cage and choose “stock cage.” You have the choice of six different birds, five of which are parrots. (I believe the sixth is a falcon, but I’m not 100% sure about that.) Your Sims can teach your parrot to talk. I haven’t yet determined whether the parrot’s future conversations are based on the interests of the Sim who taught them to talk, or the Sim to whom they are speaking at the moment. Meet Cupcake. Cupcake enjoys talking about finances and the environment. Once your parrot learns to talk, you can command your Sims to talk to the parrot. This is great because it fulfils their Social and Fun needs, while boosting their Charisma stats. In fact, a parrot is almost a necessity for single Sims. The parrot’s dish can be filled for $20. Parrots seem to eat about $8 of food per day. You can check the food level at any time by right-clicking on the cage and seeing how much it will cost to refill the dish. It’s best to refill the dish once every other day or so. Don’t let it get too low, or your parrot will get hungry. Grotesquely, a hungry parrot complains with the same thought bubble as your human Sims. Which happens to feature a chicken leg. Oops. Meet Dolly. Dolly enjoys riding around on Connor’s shoulder. To get your Sim to carry the parrot around, choose the interaction “Carry X” (where “X” is your parrot’s own name). I have yet to see a parrot die of old age, but they do seem to live quite a long time. (Until you accidentally forget to feed them.) Since the parrot isn’t a full-fledged family member like a dog or cat, they don’t have a controllable panel, and you can’t see exactly how old they are. However, Cupcake was purchased when Connor was a baby, and lasted until Connor became an elder. 20 Sim days, give or take? Aside from feeding, the only other maintenance is the occasional cleaning of the cage. A green “stink cloud” will alert you to this fact. If your Sim leaves the cage door open, your parrot will periodically escape and fly around the house. This doesn’t seem to cause any harm - I have yet to see a parrot die in such an escapade, nor have droppings ever appeared on the sofa. If you have the Seasons expansion pack installed, you might be concerned when your tropical parrot flies around outside in the middle of winter. I haven’t seen a parrot freeze to death, but I suppose it is a possibility. I’ll keep you posted on that one.

In a move which surprised no one, EA has officially pushed back the Sims 3 release date to June 2

The push-back on the Sims 3 release date came in conjunction with a series of published delays in the release dates of several other EA games.  Network World called the flurry of announced delays “puzzling,” particularly since at least one of the games delayed (The Godfather II) was, by all accounts, almost completely finished.

Coincidentally, EA dropped the news on the release date delays hot on the heels of the press conference call in which reported “disappointing” results for third quarter profits, and “announced plans to chop its workforce by 11%, or 1,100 people, while closing 12 facilities.”  Many people, includingSteve Spohn of Able Gamers, are speculating that EA is deliberately pushing back its release date in the hopes that the economy - and consumers’ willingness to spend money on video games - will have improved by then.

Rumors of bugs in the game and problems in Developer Land have been rampant ever since the Creator Camp invitees began publishing their experiences.  Although many contended to that the game they played at Creator Camp was an older, less polished version of the game which was to be shipped, few believed it.  For the last few months, confidence in the release date has been dropping steadily.

The new “four months from now” release date for The Sims 3 is eerily reminiscent of its sister game Spore’s release track. Although Spore had an entirely separate development track, one can’t help but make comparisons.  Spore’s release date was “four months from now” for about three years.  It even made #2 on Wired’s Vaporware 2007 list

The official press release quotes Russel Arons, Vice President of Marketing for EA, as lauding the delay for providing them with “the perfect runway to create awareness for The Sims 3.”  Although this is clearly a case of “when life hands you lemons,” it’s still pretty funny that the VP of Marketing is concerned about awareness for the successor to one of the most popular PC games of all time.

The Sims 2 has been a consistent bestseller ever since it was released in 2004, and hit the “100 million copies sold” mark in April of 2008.  It was the #1 bestselling game in the year of its release, and its ranking only slipped to #7 for 2008, four years later.  Two of its expansion packs, Free Time and Apartment Life, also hit the list in 2008, coming in at #12 and #16, respectively.

Since word on the street is that you will NOT be able to import your Sims into The Sims 3, this release date does give Sims 2 players a chance to play their beloved Sims for a little while longer.  If you are missing any of the expansion packs, keep an eye on retailers’ sales!  For the last few months, the expansion packs have always been on sale somewhere.  Amazon has offered some of the best bargains, with stuff packs at one point priced as low as $9.99 apiece.