The Sims has always been a little broken, and the Legacy Collections are preserving the experience of '00s PC gaming warts and all

The Sims 2
(Image credit: EA)

Full disclosure: the article you're about to read is not the one I intended to write. I'd hoped to make some direct comparisons between the Legacy Collection versions of The Sims 1 and 2 and fan-patched versions of both games, in order to see how EA's upgrades compared with all the fanmade alterations that have come over the years. The reality is that both the official and fanmade patches offer effectively identical experiences. There are minor pros and cons to each - more on those in a minute - but I find myself unable to definitively call one better than the other.

After a half-dozen hours getting a Sims 2 Legacy Challenge - a popular community ruleset that has you building a multigenerational legacy from humble beginnings - off the ground, I've been impressed with how well the Legacy Collection is working. I've had a couple of odd crashes and interface quirks, but they're few and far between. I only started playing after EA had deployed a few patches to the game, and I was hopeful that these updates had indeed knocked out all the major issues that were being reported in the first days after the game's release. Then I spoke with my colleague Anja, who's still having all the consistent crashing issues she reported in her initial impressions. We're both on high-end PCs. I don't know why our experiences are so different.

But while I'm not here to try and spin these kinds of technical issues as a good thing, there is something appropriate about The Sims feeling like it's being held together by duct tape and good wishes, because that's exactly how I remember the experience of playing these games back in the mid '00s. While the past decade or so has gotten us all used to stable PC games that work consistently across a wide range of hardware configurations, that wasn't the reality for the vast majority of PC games in this era, and The Sims in particular is vast mess of complicated gameplay systems and endless expansion packs building on top of each other to create a uniquely broken experience. I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible to truly "fix" these games.

The real Legacy Challenge

The Sims Legacy Collection

(Image credit: EA/Maxis)

You might have rose-colored memories of your time with the old Sims games, but I'm here to tell you that it was not all sunshine and roses playing these games on the contemporary PCs of the '00s. These were big, complicated games that could bring all but the highest-end machines to their knees, and the casual audience that The Sims attracted suddenly had to become PC gaming experts to keep their games in working order. Each new expansion was like adding another level to a house of cards. By the time I got to Hot Date - just the third expansion pack for The Sims 1 - my load times were ballooning into the minutes range, and I held my breath every time I took a Sim out of the house for fear that this trip would be the one that would cause the inevitable crash.

Both The Sims and its sequel have always been a little broken, and that converts into a lot broken once both games have gotten years worth of progressively more complicated expansion packs. That's just as true with the Legacy Collection and the fan patches today as it was with the original games running on Windows 98 and XP decades ago.

Honestly, it's a little less onerous in the Sims 1 Legacy Collection, which features reasonable load times and solid performance, but I do still have to keep a few of those old breaths held back, especially when I take Sims on vacation, which is probably the most reliable crash trigger I've seen in either Legacy version. That's an issue that, notably, does not occur in the fan-patched version of the game I've tried, but those fan patches have their own problems.

The Sims 2

(Image credit: EA/Maxis)

Chiefly there's the problem that, outside of the Legacy Collections, it's effectively impossible to play The Sims 1 or 2 on a modern PC without engaging in some form of piracy. Even if you own the original game discs - and have a disc drive hooked up to your modern PC - pretty much every mod guide you're going to come across will tell you to first of all replace your .exe files with a cracked version, as that's the only way to evade the crashes caused by the original DRM imposed on these games. There are exemptions to the DMCA that could potentially give the OK to this kind of crack, but I ain't a lawyer and neither are any of the modders creating these patches, so you'll have to navigate that legal and ethical minefield yourself if you want to go for the unofficial upgrades.

Beyond those Sims 1 vacation issues, I've found the fan patches and official Legacy Collections to offer roughly equivalent experiences across both games. I think the Legacy version of Sims 1 is slightly more visually appealing, but the fan-patched Sims 2 probably looks slightly better in the end. Fully stress testing both versions of each game is going to take a long, long time given the volume of content in each, and the results of that testing will quickly become irrelevant when another patch comes down the pipe.

Perhaps I'm being too forgiving of the Legacy Collections, but that's easy to do when I'm not experiencing the same issues that other players are. For me, these are now the easiest and most convenient ways to access two of the most significant video games ever created, which is all I'd hoped for from this release. I fear the instability and inconsistency that others have found, hopeful though I am that more and more of it is going to be fixed, might just be the price of Maxis' ambitious legacy.


If you're looking for more games like The Sims, you know where to click.

CATEGORIES
PRODUCTS
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

Read more
The Sims 2
After 11 years, The Sims 2 returns with a re-release on the EA App and Steam – and it's still as wonderfully janky as it was in 2004
The Sims 2
The Sims 2's long-awaited comeback meets a mixed response on Steam thanks to a barebones port suffering prolific crashes
The Sims 4
After 3 years away from The Sims 4, it's finally the game I've been waiting to play
The Sims 2
As The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 on PC continue to be met with mixed reviews citing everything from crashes to performance issues, EA says info on fixes is coming "soon"
The Sims 4 screenshot showing a young woman with shoulder-length wavy brown hair and an academic green coat, her expression surprised
The Sims is back after 25 years, and it's teaching Sims 4 players a lesson in retro life sim difficulty: "Damn this game is hard"
The Sims 2 screenshot of two sims fighting and onlookers cheering or booing for them
The rise, fall, and rise again of The Sims: 10 moments that shaped EA's 25-year life sim legacy
Latest in The Sims
A Sim draws a tattoo in The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies
The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies cheats for small business success
A shop in The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies
How to start a small business in The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies
A Sim celebrates his tattoo shop in The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies
How to complete The Sims 4 Esteemed Entrepreneur aspiration in Businesses and Hobbies
Paralives
The Sims 4's colorful competitor Paralives is bringing one of my favorite features from The Sims 3 back – the ability to customize literally everything
inZOI Character Studio trailer showing a young woman with ginger-y long hair and a white baseball cap smiling, her hand against her chin
The Sims 4's hyper-realistic competitor inZOI will only "sort of" have sex – but I'm sure a Wicked Whims-style mod will take care of the rest
The Sims 4 screenshot showing a young woman with shoulder-length wavy brown hair and an academic green coat, her expression surprised
New Sims 4 update adds burglars, customizable tattoos – and a "horrific bug" that makes children pregnant: "This is an actual nightmare"
Latest in Features
Matt Mercer, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and art from the opening of Exandria Unlimited: Divergence
"He's right to think it's cool, because it is": D&D legends Matt Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan on Divergence, sharing worlds, and what they want next from Exandria Unlimited
Monster Hunter Wilds beta and trailer screenshots
The Dark Souls games might be my all-time favorites, but Monster Hunter Wilds beats them in one crucial way: fashion
The Elder Scrolls' Oblivion's most annoying fan holds a torch
Oblivion remake leaks suggest Skyrim's cooler sibling is making a comeback, but I'm worried a modern makeover could bulldoze over the weirdness that makes it great
Ayo Edebiri in Opus
The Bear star's new A24 cult thriller proves Ayo Edebiri needs to be the final girl in a horror movie
Xbox Series X
I love consoles more than anything but Microsoft has me less excited than ever about the Xbox Series X successor
Nintendo 64 console with SummerCart64 inserted on desk with Panasonic CRT TV and Zelda: Nightmare ROM hack on screen.
I've fallen down a Zelda ROM hack rabbit hole, and this nifty N64 flash cart is to blame