Maxis Announces The Sims 2 Holiday Edition For PC

[ManagerJosh]

The Sims 2 Holiday Edition contains the original game plus 40 new holiday-themed items. For fans who already own The Sims 2, The Sims 2 Holiday Party Pack offers only the bonus content and not the full game. The Community will also receive 12 of the Holiday items as downloads from thesims2.com during our Holiday Giveaway!

The Sims 2 Holiday Edition (http://thesims2.ea.com/about/holiday_index.php)
The Sims 2 Holiday Party Pack (http://thesims2.ea.com/about/holidaypp_index.php)

[Lynet]

Fantastic!! :D Now all I want for Christmas is snow in both Baltimores (Maryland and Simmyland.)

[Kristalrose]

:D I can't wait. I looked at them last night, and they are really cute! :)

[Sylla]

On the official site, ppl where saying that it is going to cost around $30Au, at the moment NL costs that much here (at Target) so there is no way I'm gonna pay that much for a few extras....

[zydeco]

Sylla's right, they are selling the new version of the base game with the holiday package for less than we paid for the original game. Those of us that purchased the game when it was released will have to pay ep price for the holiday pack and 12 of the 40 items will be available for free on the official site. Do you think that if we waited until after the holidays the holiday package will drop drastically in price?

[surprised_by_witches]

Good thinking. I don't think I'll get that pack if it's that much. I was thinking the extras pack would be cheaper ...

If I'm lucky my daughter won't find out about it. She loves holidays.

[ijRoberts]

I'm pretty sure the booster pack will only be sold for a limited time. Because we're getting it over the internet, they can stop selling it whenever they want (most likely as soon as the holiday season is over).

If you're even thinking you want to get it, do it while it's available, or you'll have to rely on pirated objects which isn't good for the community.

[Lynet]

:o I went to the EA games site and preordered the party pack. $14.99, and no shipping cost because of a coupon. If there are 40 items that's about 37.5 cents per item. Couldn't help myself.

[zydeco]

Is it ready to ship? If you get it soon then you can tell all of us if it's worth it.

If there are 40 items that's about 37.5 cents per item.
As I understand it, 12 of those items will be/are available for download on the official site. The Christmas tree, mennora, etc. So it's really about 41 or 42 cents per item. :D

I am curious about the New Year's party and Santa Claus though. I don't really decorate my sims' world for holidays but if the animations open up new things for modders and meshers, I might be willing to buy it.

[Mirelly]

Um, $14.99/28 is 53c, Zy. :rolleyes:

For that sort of money I would expect at least one or two actual objects with interactions. The Christmas tree and all the other objects already available on the exchange are decorative only. In my view this pack is being marketed strictly for players who want the whole Krimble deal but by confining it to online retailing they are avoiding uncomfortable issues arising from certain deranged extremist religious/political correctness merchants

[surprised_by_witches]

Yes, got to avoid those.

I talked to my hubby and he said we could get it if it wasn't outrageously expensive. It's mostly for the kid. She loves Christmas! (And we're not even Christian LOL ... she's a Santa-ist. :D That's Santa-ist, NOT Satanist.)

I think I can swing $15.

[Lynet]

:rolleyes: OK, it's .53535 (etc.) cents for each of the 28 items. After thinking about it this morning I realized that I spend a lot more than that at Christmas time on wreaths and colored lightbulbs and greens, not to mention the tree. Yeesh, $14.99 is a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned. Do I have to decorate around my house? Yes, because the family came here for Christmas dinner last year and the year before and they're all big on decorating their houses. My daughter will be coming this Christmas, and she has the Sims2 game, too, so naturally my sims have to decorate their houses for her visit. :p (It's a slow day at work and, yes, I'm goofin' off a little.)

[zydeco]

Um, $14.99/28 is 53c, Zy. :rolleyes: *oops* That'll cure me of doing division in the dark on scratch paper without my glasses. :o (Have you all figured out that I read the forums while drinking my first cup of coffee? I vaguely remember promising I wouldn't post while undercaffeinated. I should stick to that.)

Well...I love santa! He still comes to my house because I say so. Easter Bunny still comes, too. My dog guards the stockings waiting for them to fill. He snoops through the packages. He's ecstatic over baskets and tissue paper. He loves hunting for liver treat filled eggs while my grown kids fight over finding theirs. The easter bunny hides the baskets now. It requires clues or a map to locate them. My 21 year old drove all night to get home so she could search for hers. Holidays require a little magic to make them fun otherwise they simply become a chore.

[ManagerJosh]

:o I went to the EA games site and preordered the party pack. $14.99, and no shipping cost because of a coupon. If there are 40 items that's about 37.5 cents per item. Couldn't help myself.
Which coupon code did you use? :)

[Lynet]

Which coupon code did you use? :)The EA.com store gave me a coupon number toward the shipping costs when I looked at the product. It's a preorder coupon (SIMS2HLDYFS) and applies to standard shipping to the US and Canada.

You say "which". Was there another one? Not that it matters now. :rolleyes:

[Mirelly]

Following the links above I don't even get a chance to pre-order anyway ... I guess EA is still wondering how much the UK market will bear, money-wise before setting a price. It would be £8.50 at the current exchange rate (which undervalues the dollar by some few percent). However in strict market terms a price like £9.99 is preferable cos it looks neat in retail marketspeak. However 10 quid is far too much, a more attractive price would be £7.99 because it has that magic quality of leaving enough change out of a 10 spot to matter (enough to buy 2 items off a McD's 99p menu for example) and thus compares with $14.99 which leaves a similar amount of change out of a 20 dollar bill. I will wait to see what transpires ... :)

[Chris]

It looks like we won't have to order the Party Pack in the UK, looks like it will be available in stores. Also, it seems like the Holiday Edition won't be available over here.

In the UK it will be known as the Christmas Party Pack. More info: http://thesims2.uk.ea.com/content.php?i=36

[Mirelly]

LOL duh ... I wish I'd thought of checking the ea.uk site ... :p :o

What would you consider a 'best' price, Chris?

[KatAnubis]

:o I went to the EA games site and preordered the party pack. $14.99, and no shipping cost because of a coupon. If there are 40 items that's about 37.5 cents per item. Couldn't help myself.
In North America, they are only going to be selling it through EA. However, they may be selling it through retailers elsewhere in the world.

I've been amazed at how late they are getting the word out about this. It reminds me of an ad I saw for some other game company where it said that they were selling it on the "mystery" method. I'm wondering if this is some new advertising theory that works by making people wonder about something but give them no actual information until right before it is actually out for sale. (I was shocked when I saw how soon they had it available but we hadn't even been told anything about it.)

[ManagerJosh]

AFAIC tell, the booster pack is gonna be at EA. The Sims 2 Christmas edition is gonna be at stores and even at Amazon.

[Kristalrose]

You know, do we really need to pay 1/2 the price of an EP for a booster pack that we'll use 1, maybe 2 months out of the year? I thought this thing was gonna cost about $10, seeing as how it will all be availiable for download hacked and recolored two days after it's released.

[Mirelly]

I'm with you, Kristal. Considering that almost a third of the items are already available for free download and also that wall and costumes can be made to any desired pattern we are left with a 15 buck santa and a fire hazard (stockings on the mantel) ... as if sims needed any more opportunities for a conflagration.

When the booster pack issue was first raised a few weeks ago I envisaged a couple of dozen brand new objects at least a third of which would have some sort of meaningful or useful interaction. Menorrahs and Horns of Plenty don't quite cut the mustard if that's (almost) all that's on offer.

I won't be going to any effort to buy this one. If I chance to see a copy and I like the price (under 8 quid) and I have the cash spare that'll be another matter .... (I only take cash into supermarkets these days - it forces me to concentrate on thriftiness ... and also drives the store batty when they can't identify my demographic detail ;) )

[zydeco]

I'm sure this was an experimental pack...and an easy one to whip together. They should have gone all out for it though. I can see many ways they could have packaged it. They could have created everything to build a magical world. It could have been Currier and Ives perfect or even the whole gingerbread town that exmen created on his pay site. Or they could have made it so that it was inclusive of holidays around the world. I know on Neopets, with 40 million registered players from every country in the world, they, too, left out most of the world's cultures. They finally added oranges, red envelopes and firecrackers for Chinese New Year. While many cultures are fascinated by the U.S. version of Halloween, they forget that perhaps many English cultures are just as fascinated by other countries celebrations. I would love to have Sweden's St. Lucia crown of lights or items unique to Asian holidays. Even Santa is different around the world. I remember someone from the Netherlands studying in Canada going to extreme lengths to order unique candy and items to give to friends. I enjoyed hearing about Black Peter and Sinterklaas. It would have been a lovely and educational thing to have spotlighted other customs. Throwing in a menorah isn't quite enough. :rolleyes:

[Mirelly]

Yeah what about diwali and eid as well. (I live in a totally multi-cultural area and this year Diwali, Eid, Halloween and Guy Fawkes all occur within a couple of weeks.)

Hey! No sweat, I'm gonna celebrate them all! :p

[WereBear]

I think it would be cool if, instead of human holidays, they created "simish" holidays like Simorial Day, Simsgiving, or Simmish New Year. There could be all kinds of non-human-denominational decorations, interactive holiday items, and simish holiday parties/celebrations with associated actions/wants (like mourning headstones, cooking turkey or singing simmish carols around the bonfire.)

As Krystal and Mirelly pointed out, it would be worth $15 bucks for new types of *interactions* rather than just getting decorations that will be available two days later for free as re-colors. And by creating non-religious simmish holidays they would avoid the pitfall of omitting any particular human religions and offending anybody.

[Shintoga]

That would be cool, but how would you actually celebrate a 'regular' holiday in the Sim world, since they have no seasons/months? Just a thought.:confused:

[WereBear]

That would be cool, but how would you actually celebrate a 'regular' holiday in the Sim world, since they have no seasons/months? Just a thought.:confused:

Well, I'm no programmer or anything, but I bet they could use the pc clock/calander. Set it up so that on certain days of the (real world) year your sims have "Holiday Party" as an option on their phone. Or (for those of us that wish it could be xmas every day) It could be triggered by purchasing an interactive holiday object (like roman candles or a bonfire for Sim New Years) much in the same way that buying a bar or buffet table turns on the bartender and caterer options in the "service" menu.

[Lynet]

Since we have Washington and Lincoln's birthday here in the states in order to celebrate historical figures who contributed a lot to our country's way of life, the Sims should have a Will Wright day in Sim World. They should get a day off work for it, always a Monday. And, of course, it naturally follows that my sim neighborhood should celebrate Lynet's birthday with a day off work. ;)

[Shintoga]

Oh, that is so cool! But what I meant was, I would like it so that the holidays could be celebrated more than once in a Sim's lifetime, assuming the player isn't using the aging_off cheat. It would be cool if we had seasons, so players could make their Sims celebrate real life holidays at the appropriate time of "year", but I guess with the right items you could do it anyway, any time you wanted. I love the idea of Will Wright day!:D

[surprised_by_witches]

I too am kind of surprised they went with real holidays. I think Simmish holidays would be much more appropriate.

But I think it's aimed at kids, like mine, who adore Halloween and Christmas. I don't know if it includes Hannukah but I think it should, if they're going "real world" on us. I also think birthday presents would be cool ...

I'm wondering how it will work, also (the timing of holidays, that is). How did it work in Sims 1?

[WereBear]

I'm wondering how it will work, also (the timing of holidays, that is). How did it work in Sims 1?

If I remember correctly, in sims 1 it was object triggered. You had to buy a fireplace, xmas tree, and plate of xmas cookies and place them all together for Santa to come at midnight. The only problem was that the fireplace kept catching the xmas tree (and eventually Santa) on fire! :o

[HelloKit]

If I remember correctly, in sims 1 it was object triggered. You had to buy a fireplace, xmas tree, and plate of xmas cookies and place them all together for Santa to come at midnight. The only problem was that the fireplace kept catching the xmas tree (and eventually Santa) on fire! :o
Yep, that's how it worked. Although I never caught anything on fire because I never lit the fireplace... it was too much of a hassle to interrupt a sim's routine to light the fireplace, especially since it didn't stay lit for very long. Actually I still can't usually be bothered to light them even in TS2.

When I played TS1, I made it so every 3 sim days was a month, and actually kept track of what month it was. So in "October" I did Halloween, Thanksgiving in November, Christmas in December... I pretty much had some kind of celebration or decoration scheme for every "sim month". Unfortunately a scheme like that is a little harder to keep track of with the introduction of days of the week in TS2 (in TS1 since the bills came every 3 days I used that as a marker for the new month). So, I just do holidays at the same time they happen in the real world, and they are like once-in-a-lifetime occasions for them. I don't get a whole lot of time to play, so most of my sims live at least a year... lol. I still have some Maxis-made Pleasantview sims alive, although they are dying off... just lost Angela Pleasant, Lilith is not far behind, neither is Dustin Broke (actually, he was ready to die the same day Angela did, but apparently the game can't handle two sims in the same house dying at the same time, so it added a couple more days to Dustin's life). The youngest "technically" Maxis-made sim I have is Brandi Broke's third-born, and even he is an elder.