The Sims 2 Maxis Buy Now Buy Now on Console Standard Edition An incredible sequel to the best-selling PC game of all-time! You'll get to direct an entire Sims' lifetime, and try to get them to reach their life goals.

Photo courtesy There are tons of new additions that set 'The Sims 2' apart from the original game. Let's take a look at the most significant upgrades. Graphics Makeover The original Sims world has a functional 3-D type look, but, by today's standards, is fairly limited graphically. Maxis built the sequel around a top-shelf 3-D game engine, which allowed them to make more detailed environments, more detailed sims and more detailed motion. Among other things, sims wear textured clothes, that flow around the body, they have complex skeletons with separate articulated fingers, rather than hand 'paddles,' they exhibit a range of facial expressions, they blink, and they have shadows and reflections. The world is fully 3-D which means the camera can move around to show the action from many different angles, just as in most action games. The Maxis team put in tens of thousands of animator hours to give the sims a wide range of movement.

Improved Sim Builder Taking advantage of the advanced graphics capabilities, the Maxis team built one of the best character creation systems to date. Players can create their own sims in detail -- not just by picking from available clothes and facial types, but by actually manipulating every aspect of a sim's face to sculpt an original character. By mixing and matching features from pre-loaded sims and then making your own tweaks, you could recreate your own family's faces, or even celebrity faces. Or pick two different faces and mix them together, using a slider control. Aging In the original game, your sims might die eventually (in a cooking catastrophe, for example), but they never got older.

Create a school kid, and it will stay in school forever. In 'The Sims 2,' your Sims age through six stages: infants, toddlers, children, teenagers, adults and elderly adults. And just as in real life, things that happen to a sim at one age, affect who they are at another age.

This progression is built around the 'Life Score' system. Basically, what your sim does and how it feels are largely determined by how it fares in 'Life's Big Moments' -- a first kiss, getting married, having a child, etc. Sims with a lot of experience with important events (both good and bad), will have more 'depth' than sims who haven't experienced as much. Photo courtesy Memories play a much bigger role in the sequel than the original. If a Sim lives with a nurturing, happy family when it is a child, it's more likely to be a happy adult Sim, while a Sim with bad parents has a greater chance of being a relatively unhappy adult. If a sim hurts itself on the patio as a kid, it may have a strong aversion to the patio as an adult.