ranzware
Now that The Sims 2 is kinda-sorta playable again on modern machines, you might expect it to be perfect right out of the digital box; its rich simulation of the modern day-to-day (circa 2004, anyway) is among the best you can find. But let’s just lay it out there: these sims are a bunch of sexless dweebs.
I didn’t deck my sims out in clothes from the H&M Fashion Stuff pack so they could laze around on their home lot, needing me to poke and prod them to do anything but pee every five minutes and put their dirty plates on the floor. I want sims whose hearts are ablaze with the fires of romance, getting lost in crushes and jealous daydreams as eagerly as they get lost in their own swimming pools. As always, mods come to the rescue. Perhaps, in the case of Twojeffs’ Autonomous Casual Romance mod, a little too excitedly.
The mod, which encourages sims to develop and pursue romantic relationships of their own accord, works subtly at first. The Sims 2 packs in a ton of romantic interactions by default, but you’re typically selecting them from a menu to cultivate a relationship manually once your sim develops a want or aspiration in that vein. With ACR, sims randomly get the hots for other sims and act on those desires independently and frequently, running the full monty from woo to woohoo. ACR’s default settings are arguably a bit ridiculous, with everyone in the neighborhood acting like they’d just loaded up on aphrodisiacs.
My quest began humbly. I made the most appealing sim the game allows—an unemployed bachelor with a Musketeer’s goatee and a tracksuit he never takes off named Darren Gorp —and sent him to the club. Darren saw it all firsthand. Everyone was hitting it off; dancing, flirting, running off for The Sims’ signature PG-friendly mating rituals. Despite the tone shift from how I normally play The Sims (working overtime to afford a nicer couch and another dog) it brought a rare sort of liveliness to everyone in the neighborhood.
Except Gorp, of course, who when left to his own devices failed to overcome his low attraction scores, struck out majorly, and went home alone. I think his aspirations to become a career criminal and “mean” personality trait were turn-offs. That night, he passed out on the sofa while a robber stole his TV.
ACR does require an “adjuster object” be placed on any lot where you want all this autonomous love stuff to happen—it’s all tweakable and the adjuster is inconspicuous enough, appearing as a stack of books. You can also disguise it as any number of trees or bushes. I just pretend it’s a spiritual anchor to late-career John Waters.
You’re free to fine-tune your sims’ coolness with infidelity, booty calls, casual relationships, their gender preference, whether they can get pregnant, whether they leave the socks on when they woohoo, and so on. You can even foster crushes and determine who they’d envy others having a relationship with. That’s just on the sim level; you can make sweeping global changes like deciding your whole neighborhood is jealous of everyone else’s lovers or making everyone gay overnight. Maybe you’re sick of it all, and want a completely non-horny game where sims are asexual and reproduce through divine intervention. That’s on the table!
In my mind, the strength of this mod has little to do with the romantic aspect and everything to do with the increased autonomy. Regardless of how you tune your adjuster, you’ll find your sims’ behavior more dynamic than ever, letting them make more of their own choices and getting to observe the consequences. It might seem slight if you aren’t into the romantic aspect of the sims, but it enriches the simulation in ways I didn’t expect.
Love becomes as messy and complicated as you want it to be. Maybe you want your sim neighborhood to reflect the real world, with sims flirting, hooking up, and finding their own relationships independent of your explicit guidance. Or maybe you loved Baldur’s Gate 3 before Larian nerfed the Sex% speedrun, and you want to relive the glory days. Either way, ACR is as much a tool for raunchy silliness as it is a lightning rod for engaging drama, making it a perfect fit for The Sims.
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Kurt Indovina
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