Customer Rating:
Summary: Sims 2 goes out with a bang
Comment: The "unofficial" word is that Apartment Life will be the final expansion pack for the Sims 2 line. I don't really know if that's true, but if so Apartment Life closes the series on an up note.

Along with Seasons and Nightlife, Apartment Life is one of my favorite expansions. I really like the apartment feature, it's been long overdue. It's so much easier now to start off a sim newly graduated from University by having them live in an apartment. It's so much easier to get them suitable living quarters.

I am so glad we finally have spiral stairs and playground equipment. They were both very much needed 4+ expansions ago.

The social townies can be kind of annoying in a way, but the reputation feature is nice. One thing I don't like is how the new social greetings will mess up the greetings from locals at the Bon Voyage vacation neighborhoods. It's very rare now for my locals to do their normal greetings, instead they do the new social ones and my vacationing sims have a harder time of meeting the "learn local greeting" want without cheating on my part. But it's a minor frustration.

Witches are pretty interesting. I like the neutral spells but some of the evil and good witch spells are kind of blah. Plus, I'm really not into the skin overlays with the evil and good witches. I don't like the green or sparkly skin so I use a mod to stop it. But overall I do like the witches and am glad we have them. They're the only paranormal creature in the Sims 2 line I've had more than a passing interest in.

Apartment Life is a great EP and given the choice I'd gladly buy it again. I think it will keep my creativity & gameplay with Sims 2 going for a very long time.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great EP
Comment: This is a fun game. You can only play 1 family at a time but you can work on relationships a lot faster. Not sure if this is gonna be the last ep until sims 3 comes out, if their is, I'll buy it too.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Love the expansion pack. but it's not worth the DRM hassle!
Comment: I purchased two copies of this expansion pack because both my son and my wife are Sims 2 addicts. Both of them loved the extras BUT then the problems began!

As a 'PC expert' I was called in when my son's copy would not load. It seems that he had re-installed the game at least four times because he had installed corrupted custom content on his new Sony Vio laptop. He then found he could not get Apartment Life to work at all.

I tried and every time I insert the disk it ejects and the message 'Insert a disk' appears. I tried my wife's copy and got the same result so it wasn't a bad disk. I investigated the problem on Internet and found EA have protected the game using SecuRom - the same software which caused the Spore DRM controversy. According to what I found SecuRom does not like:
(a) Nero software (Yes my son had Nero 8 on his machine and yes it has stopped working properly)
(b) It can cause problems if there are repeated installs - Now up to at least 5 that I know of.

SecuRom is NOT easy to remove. The removal tools provided by EA and SecuRom do not do a complete removal. EA games is not very helpful either, offering a variety of non-relevant solutions such as telling me that the game would not work on his laptop because of it's video card. (It already had been working).

All in all it took me several hours to fix the problem, my time being worth a great deal more than the games cost. I still have an Apartment Life disk which messes up computers and prevents other legitimate software working. There is a way round it, but that involves un-official copies of the game which I can't condone.

My recommendation is that if you are an average user who just plays the standard game then go ahead and buy it but if you want to build your own Sims and use custom content - give this expansion pack a miss - it isn't worth the hassle.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fun.. Fun Fun..
Comment: How to describe the new add-on to the endless Sims 2 series in one sentence? Rental housing at its best.

Despite being the eighth expansion pack for The Sims 2, Apartment Life has really interesting features. You will love the beautiful architecture and you will be surprised at how much fun, magic can bring into the normal lives of the ordinary sims. This is more entertaining than Free Time and the apartment roommate element spices it up a touch. That's the farewell gift from the team - next expansion is inevitably expected somewhere in 2009, but for "The Sims 3."

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Love this game, hate SecuROM
Comment: I love The Sims 2, but I refuse to buy anything containing SecuROM. EA, stop pretending that this BS actually helps prevent piracy (we've seen the piracy figures for Spore) and remove your malware from your games, then I'll buy from you again.

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