Sims 2 was the best game for me because it had interesting stories built into the game both for each family and for the whole neighborhood. It came with 3 neighborhoods and each game in one of them could be expanded by an unlimited number of subhoods so we never ran out of space for adding new houses and families to our games. We controlled all the families and there were no culling or other attempts from the game to create events that we didn't want. To me this game only lacked in depth and a little more challenging gameplay because otherwise it was close to perfect.
Compared to Sims 2 all the other games just lack something:
1. Sims 1 had no aging, ugly graphics and too tiresome gameplay.
2. Sims 3 had an open world but for a terrible price. Suddenly we could only play one family, the neighborhood was way too small and couldn't be expanded by adding subhoods anymore. Besides that all the other families was only used to create an illusion of life in the neighborhood (which often had empty nightclubs anyway) and the story progression could destroy everything in those other families at random. World Adventures was a good EP though. But after this I soon stopped playing the game.
3. Sims 4 was an attempt to repair some of the problems in Sims 3. But there no built-in stories and family play is dumped down by simplified babies, omitted toddlers and simplified (too high) teens. The neighborhoods are small so most of the sims are homeless and it has relationships and emotions which are created in no time at all. So it has no depth, is very superficial and is only for people (probably young teens) who only wants to have a liittle fun after using most of their time to create sims and to build houses. It's gameplay is much too superficial for me. So I don't play it anymore.
