If you havent heard of The sims 2 by now, where have you been?! The Sims 2 is a fantastically addictive life simulator game where you guide your virtual characters (sims) through their everyday life. Although it can be argued that The Sims 2 and it's expansion packs are now out of date due to the release of The Sims 3, I still find it fun to play The Sims 2!

WHAT'S IT ABOUT?
After years of permanent sunny weather throughout the previous Sims games, "The Sims 2 Seasons" finally provides your sims the chance to experience all 4 seasons and the weather conditions that come with them. There are new activities and effects on your sims specific to each season.

WEATHER
Each season is clearly labelled and customizable for each neighborhood from the neighbourhood screen. This is a useful feature because it means you can avoid your least favourite seasons. For example, if you want a desert landscape, it's easy to set all seasons to summer. Setting all four seasons to winter is just as easy to create a snowy landscape. The weather adds a real sense of realism to your game and brings fun new activities to try including building snowmen, making snow angels, going ice skating and playing in leaf piles in Autumn. Other nice features include the cute penguin who waddles onto your lot during heavy snowfall and the shock you get when you first see lightning strike (hopefully it wont strike your sim!)

There are downsides to the weather. One of the stupidest features is that sims can spontaneously combust if it gets to hot in the summer. This is an unrealistic and utterly useless feature. I downloaded a mod from a Sims 2 download website which disables this stupid feature. Another irritation is the way that your sims run to the window in order to react to the weather. It's cute at first, less so when they do it about 20 times a day, cancelling out activities you've gave them just so they can gaze out of the window. Also, social workers can take sim children who are displaying extreme temperatures in their personal themometres. Again this is just pointless and a constant worry throughtout the summer season.
Snow in winter will kill your plants which is annoying but realistic I supose.

GARDENING AND FISHING
Another welcome new feature is the ablilty to garden harvestable vegetables and fruit. Sims can harvest a ranges of fruits and vegetables, with more seeds become avaliable to them the better they get at gardening. Sims will earn badges, which opens up new seeds and ability to talk to plants and the nicer the garden, the more chance you will get of joining the neighbourhood gardening club!

These harvestable fruits and vegetables from gardens can be used to create healthier foods for your sims from the fridge or in the juicer. Each type of juice made in the juicer has a special effect so its fun to experiment with different recipes. Alternativley, you can sell them to earn your sim a bit of spare cash. I like challenging my sims to "live off the land".

Your Sims can fish from a garden pond or a pond at a community lot. This produce can be sold, used as a fun wall decoration or used to make healthy meals. Again, it's a nice way of earning money on the side.

PLANT SIMS
We've had werewolves and vampires in previous expansions. With the Sims 2 Seasons comes the addition of Plant Sims. These Sims can be made by spraying trees many times. They need only water, love, and sunlight to live, just like a real plant!. This makes them easier to care for. They are green in apperance and spawn cute plant babies with daisy hats.

OVERALL OPINION
The Sims 2 Seasons is one of the best Sims 2 expansion packs by far. Loaded with things to discover and explore, new activities and objects. It will also add a sense of realism to your game. If you ignore the stupid features like the combustion and the sims obsession with changing weather, there isn't much to complain about here.