The Sims 1 & 2 Legacy Collection Review
Added 2025-02-03 18:33:01 +0000 UTCThe rumors were true! EA actually went and re-released the first two Sims games for Windows PCs to mark the 25th birthday of the series. And they even fixed them up to work on modern PCs!
Kinda! Sorta! Almost! Ehh, an attempt was made. A valiant one, I'd say, as these games have always been held together with toothpicks and duct tape and getting them to run on anything beyond an XP PC from 2005 is no easy task. But still, I cannot help but be let down by the way the games function on launch. These first two Sims games deserve better, especially for their big quarter century anniversary, and you'd think a company with a $32 billion market cap would have the resources to do so.
Regardless though I hope that you enjoy the episode! It was still fun to revisit these classics yet again, despite all the crashing and performance woes.
And now it's back to the computer retrospective I was working on before I dropped it temporarily to crank out this review, so expect that video soonish. $5+ supporters will also receive the next LGR Wrap Up episode pretty soon. Thank you for your ongoing support, it is deeply appreciated as I continue rebuilding my house! A process that's coming along nicely so far, by the way.
Comments
Ah, that makes sense. I guess I had been optimistically thinking that most of the video was complete and you just needed footage. I hadn’t even realized you record off original hardware which is really neat. It’s great that those items were safe and you’ll be able to resume work on the video eventually.
Ryan Seney
2025-02-04 19:14:59 +0000 UTCThe main thing preventing TS2 retrospective work is access to all the physical big boxes for the games and packs, plus the old hardware to run them. I always show and use all that stuff in my retrospectives. So much of that is still deep in storage while my home is being rebuilt.
LGR
2025-02-04 18:44:29 +0000 UTCForgot to ask… I know you mentioned in the video that your gaming PC needs to be rebuilt to do a review of the Life & Death EP for TS4, but does this re-release allow you to resume work on the TS2 retrospective you had been working on? Also, I’m not sure what your current setup allows you to work on but I’d absolutely watch some livestreams of you playing these re-releases once they stabilize or just old school Lets Plays / VODs of live streams.
Ryan Seney
2025-02-04 18:19:50 +0000 UTCGreat review, and agree with most of your thoughts on these. Not having to deal with the hassle of reinstalling these from disc and apply numerous community fixes is a huge deal. To me that’s worth $40 and I think EA will address the more egregious issues, they probably just didn’t test on enough configurations before shoving this out the door. The DirectX crashes in TS2 seem like something that is probably easily repeatable and my uneducated guess is they have the same root cause in their renderer. I also have a 1440p monitor and can confirm that TS1 looked great last night on it and ran very well. Gotta love the bundle throwing in some TS4 kits to try and entice people into that ecosystem. Never change EA 😂 Edit: Looks like TS2 got a patch today which addresses some of the DX crashing? I would be interested in seeing if that fixed the issues shown in the video: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3314070/view/538844469688009441?l=english
Ryan Seney
2025-02-04 18:06:50 +0000 UTCIt would be awesome if this team could also update the SimCity 4 and Spore releases so you don’t need to fiddle with the graphics rules files for any GPU released in the last decade and a half.
Ryan Seney
2025-02-04 18:00:31 +0000 UTCHeh, I know that feeling! I actually tried motherlode straight away myself and was met with an error. Only then did "rosebud" come back to me!
LGR
2025-02-04 15:31:26 +0000 UTCReally I remember so vividly using it in Sims 1. I guess I played all those games so many years of my life that memories simply blur the lines.
Ezydenias
2025-02-04 14:15:10 +0000 UTCMotherlode is the money cheat in The Sims 2 and later. In the first game it’s rosebud :)
LGR
2025-02-04 14:10:26 +0000 UTCAlso I never had the sims 2 carsh on me or bug out. Like really never, I don't know why, even on modern systems once I've got it running properly it never ever crashes, either it had something to do with the german version or simply luck. Let's hope it's luck or this new version will bug out on my constantly.
Ezydenias
2025-02-04 08:10:11 +0000 UTCI feel like by brother and me where the only people who know the motherlode cheat, didn't know about the rosebud multiplier but who cares if motherlode gives you 50k instead of 1k.
Ezydenias
2025-02-04 08:04:55 +0000 UTCI love your sims vids great vid and I hope they do a Mac versiom soon
Talie
2025-02-04 07:14:07 +0000 UTCThey're both still going to be using DirectX to some extent; if not for rendering then for input, audio, networking, and other such things, given that Vulkan is only a rendering API as far as I'm aware. That said, one of the error boxes you got on The Sims 2 in your video says "Direct3D' plain as day so yeah, that one clearly hasn't been updated as such. :P
Kris Asick
2025-02-04 00:38:56 +0000 UTCApparently The Sims 1 has been re-written somewhat and now uses Vulkan! https://gist.github.com/riperiperi/78c843b7fc3b11a92e3d5585a7815fee#new-vulkan-renderer Makes me wonder if The Sims 2 is still on DirectX then, as it's the one giving me the most hassle with those kinds of errors
LGR
2025-02-03 23:43:50 +0000 UTCThe unfortunate irony of the crashing being worse on Windows than on the Steam Deck is because Microsoft is less keen about properly supporting older versions of DirectX than any of the third-party tools for making DirectX work on other operating systems. I wouldn't be surprised if using DXWnd in combination with these "new" Sims releases might help alleviate some of that, though I wouldn't have the faintest idea which settings would be needed to help matters. :/
Kris Asick
2025-02-03 22:46:13 +0000 UTCI emulated sims 2 long before the rerelease and imo it's always Sims 3 where I run the most issues.
Giselle Torres
2025-02-03 22:12:59 +0000 UTCI do really hope the team at EA who developed these gets the funding to fix some these problems. It's propably quite hard fix some of these crashes, seeing that most likely most if not all people who worked on these games originally have since moved on. Good programming practices and good documentation if it exists only brings you so far, because there are always strange quirks with large complex pieces of software like this that might never have been documented.
Niels Poldervaart
2025-02-03 21:19:37 +0000 UTCAnother feather in the cap of the Wine/Proton projects for offering better legacy Windows software support than Microsoft themselves.
Niels Poldervaart
2025-02-03 21:14:01 +0000 UTCI am hopeful that the accessibility and visibility of these two games on actual digital storefronts will increase community support for these two versions to create the best versions. Since I'm hesitant to believe EA ever will. But considering how much hard work people put in to make these two games playable up until this point I hope the increase of players will lead to great new things for both. Although I am also just giddy on how easy it is now just to boot these games up whenever I want now.
Kenneth Nelson
2025-02-03 20:39:40 +0000 UTCOh thank you for the link! This clears up some questions and confusion, I'll add this to the final edit.
LGR
2025-02-03 19:57:33 +0000 UTCPersonally the only Sims game I ever had issues with was the Sims 3 funny enough. Especially on later builds with more DLC added, the game just constantly freezes or crashes without some community patches, and even then you still get the occassional hitch before a pop-up shows up "Removed unroutable sim" or smth <.< Sims 2 has always worked pretty well for me, even on newer hardware. Tho ofc it won't run without patches, especially on a modern GPU with 4+GB of VRAM...
Chickenbread
2025-02-03 19:56:40 +0000 UTCHere's a technical breakdown including how the renderer works: https://gist.github.com/riperiperi/78c843b7fc3b11a92e3d5585a7815fee
Adult Sword Owner
2025-02-03 19:28:50 +0000 UTCI like to think they did this because of my complaints on my own retrospective video. Makes me feel important :D
Deckard Games
2025-02-03 19:26:41 +0000 UTCI haven’t had too many of the issues other folks have had, knock on wood. Just having one that I don’t have to hack my resolution on is already a big improvement. Here’s hoping the future patches make this more stable for everyone else.
Rebecca Richards
2025-02-03 19:13:26 +0000 UTC
