#26 - The Sims 2 (Kudos to Player2 for guessing this)
The Sims 1 was a revelation for me. Will Wright's dream of a digital dollhouse had become a fantastic reality and I lost countless months of my life telling these people what to do with their time; building their houses and living their lives...
... until I couldn't anymore. For some reason my stupid PC at the time couldn't run any of the games beyond "Livin' it up", the first expansion, so I grew a little weary of it with time.
Enter the Sims 2. Suddenly, everything about the first game which made it great had been preserved and everything that wasn't so great had been shaken up. And it worked on my PC!
Sims aged! They could go out to the shops! They could drink elixirs to keep themselves younger! I could modify every detail in their faces! And with the expansions came loads of new possibilities for living a virtual life.
I genuinely believe that The Sims is one of the most influential game series of all time, and The Sims 2 is the moment where Maxis truly realised the potential which existed in the franchise which had been rather stunted by the original game. It's still a title I regularly go back to to this day just so I can mess around in those little people's lives.
