Back in the mid-2000s, I really enjoyed playing Sims 2, before any expansions had come out. I stopped playing at some point, however, due to real life and just generally being involved in other distractions. Now, thanks to EA's giveaway, I finally own the game once again, but coming back from Sims 3 is hard.

Yet, people seem to be very fond of Sims 2, at least so it seems in the ongoing Sims 4 debate, so I'm very much willing to give the game a try. My first attempt at getting back was immediately thwarted by the horrible maximum resolution (that gives me motion sickness) and faces located solidly on the deep end of uncanny valley. I have by now fixed the resolution and am browsing through skin mods, but still somewhat struggle to actually get into the game.

My typical play style in Sims 3 is essentially "create multiple families, play one, but enjoy hearing about the others' exploits" - in short, I've become very dependent on story progression. I remember playing two households back in the day, trying to keep the timeline synchronized between both but somewhat failing to do so on occasion. I guess switching off age progression and aging up Sims manually would be an option, but I somehow feel that that might undermine a core gameplay mechanic. Then again, I'm playing The Sims for the emerging story, not for the gameplay challenge (hah).

So, yeah, my key questions to the motivated Sims 2 players among you are:

1. Can you recommend any skins or modifications that improve visual fidelity?
2. In general, what mods do you think I should definitely get to start out (I'll probably end up with billions of job mods anyway since those were something I really missed in Sims 3)?
3. How do you deal with rotating between families and keeping the timeline in order?

I'm looking forward to your input!

1. There is a thread in this forum where people list what defaults they use. Take a look there, and you'll get lots of suggestions of skintones.

2. There have been quite a few "what mods should I use" threads since the UC, so if you look at the past 3-4 pages, you'll find several. Read those

3. A lot of people here play in rotations. How long each rotation is varies, but the most people seem to do somewhere between 1 day and 1 week. It all depends on how you want it. I know Peni likes her one day rotations because it gives households time to react to what happens in other households, and makes it more integrated. Others don't like playing families for such a short time, and prefer a long rotation. But I'd say rotating households at a scheduled interval is the easiest way to mimic story progression.

If you want townies to progress along with your Sims, there are mods that let you force them to age up, and also to graduate/drop out/be expelled from university. I take note of which townies are featured enough in my Sims lives that seeing them three generations later would be weird, and bring those along with my sims, age-wise.

1. Do you want maxis Match like this: http://wcif-sims.livejournal.com/85312.html Or more realistic like this: http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=181555
There is of course well done and poorly done in both categories, but what has been coming out in the last 3 years is for the most part far superior to older cc from before 1009. You can get beautifully done, up to date cc in both areas.

2. Oh my, well... That totally depends on what you want to do. The mod fixes are essential such as no corrupt death, nounlink on delete, creature fixes (if you want vampires) The Bat Box and No Sim Loaded. (burns useless tokens and prevents the Super Hug which is buried code used by modders that can surface given the right circumstances) I would also recommend the sim blender. This thread might help: http://modthesims.info/t/475918 I like to play self supporting hoods, so that every sim has a part to play in keeping things running. I have mods to run a school, a prison and everything in between. I say get the fixes and see what annoys you (most likely modded out) see what you would like to add and then ask on WCIF. I would start small and get a feel for things first. You might also like to get yourself a cheat file so cheats are made into shortcuts and things like furniture cane easily be out on an angle.

3. My rotations normally last for a season, but I swap households sometimes depending on whats happening. Each house has an important role to play and I don't add them in unless they do. For keeping things synchronized I use the day setter so I can switch to any day of the week, the season adjuster so i can do the same. very handy when moving sims. Any family that gets a bit boring I will roll a random event for or think about adding something else in for them to do. For example my fire station is a residential lot and I was getting a bit bored there probably as the fire fighter career I use requires a lot of skilling, so I had them open it as a home business as well. I will also start having the top man there do lectures. Lot's of things can be achieved with mods.

Hey, I'm getting back into TS2 again too!
Well, I can't answer your last two questions but I can answer the first one- This dreamwidth page has a list with links and thumbnails to default replacements as far as CAS goes. They're even sorted into "Maxis match" and "Semi/Realistic" categories. If you do use this resource, though, please know that you can only have one default of everything at a time, however you can mix different defaults with each other (For example, you can take the brown eyes from one pack and the green eyes from another, and so on). The dreamwidth page itself is SFW (safe for work) but I can't always be sure about its links to other sites.

Then of course you can get the custom things for your Sims that don't affect defaults. I also really like Tumblr user Muupi's list of (their favorite) resources. I've been going through her (her?) resource blog and it seems to be very SFW.

Trapping Crushes on Tumblre is one of the best places to find links to new content. http://trappingcrushes.tumblr.com/

:o
I have another Simblr to follow.

Once you get in there, you never come out.

Keep an eye on anything Trapping posts. Anything. Also on MTS as Lina. (She is bulging my download folder).

Rotational play is superior to story progression because you can keep track of what's happening in the whole neighborhood and make sense of it all as it's happening. You can get to know your sims at a level not possible in any other game; in numbers not practical in any other medium.

If you don't like controlling everything that happens, make use of community lots (loading screens needn't be a big deal if you control your CC habit, use small community lots, and save before leaving home; part of the loading screen time is just saving the lot you're leaving), the "invite households" feature, and parties. You won't be able to control most of the sims on the lot, but you'll be able to track most of what they get up to (especially if you go in for small lots). For even less control, use mods like ACR (which I won't touch; too big, too complicated, and doesn't suit my preferences for romantic rules), which allows sims to engage in the highest-level romantic interactions without your intervention and without being in love; or "real sickness," which increases the danger of death by disease exponentially. (Do not use Real Sickness with short rotations unless your hood is overpopulated and you're looking to cull! My one-day, gathering-heavy rotations make clearing out reservoirs of infection extremely difficult.)

Don't like the way the clock jumps around when you visit community lots? There's a mod for that. Don't like certain autonomous behaviors that you think take up too much time? There's a mod for that. Don't like the nannies that came with the game? There's a mod for that! Don't like the way school works? There's a mod for that! Anything that annoys you, annoys somebody else, too, and after such a length of time, somebody somewhere has done something like that.

If you want to play some houses more than others, or don't like tying yourself down to a strict rotation with the same duration for each house each rotation, you can turn aging off in one house while you play extra days; or use cheats or mods to age up a household that hasn't engaged you in synch with the ones that have. A Freetime feature allows you to age up to three townies that a playable knows at each birthday, and if you need to age more of them than that, you can make them playable, age them up with a cheat, and turn them back into townies - don't even need a mod for that, just ordinary game mechanics and the testing cheats, though there are mods that you might find easier and more intuitive. Once its time for them to die, there's a number of ways to do that, too. I have an elder home where I've dumped a bunch of ex-townies. Mostly I free-range them, but they're also running a business and dating each other. Townies I haven't engaged with, I ignore; but I also have a mod that allows me to grab them and change the way they look, if I feel that I've seen them around for too long and it's time for them to turn into somebody else.

My one-day rotational style is necessary to me because I play a very fine-grained, intense, patient game. I only use the fast-forward button when everyone on the lot is asleep - and with large households, this may never happen. Playing more than one day in a row like this in the same family would exhaust me; but only playing one day at a time (even when I play aging-off days, I break them up; my Warehouse Boys, played normally at the end of the Downtown portion of my rotation, generally get an aging-off day after the end of the rotation in my main hood, which follows downtown, before I return to campus for my college sub-rotation) never gives me time to get bored of them, and usually leaves me with something to look forward to in it. It's the same principle as finishing up a writing session knowing what your next sentence will be: you get to hit the ground running. Other people, however, feel they can't get enough done in one day. A week, three days, a season satisfies them. I like to play through houses in order, clicking to move from one to the next; other people like to play in the order of their whims and keep track of which ones they've already been to so they make sure everyone gets played the same amount. You'll probably need to experiment to find what's comfortable for you.

This is a complex, detailed, endlessly malleable game. Start small and experiment a lot. You can always reset your game, restore from a backup, or start a new neighborhood to try something different.

The primary rule is: If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. Try something else. Because there is always something else to try!

Skin tones - depends whether you want to make your own neighbourhoods, or play the in-game hoods. If you want to make your own then I recommend a proper geneticised and towniefied set with a lot of shades, which means that the skins are given a value so that the game can recognise this is darker than that and you'll get a nice effect when two sims have a baby that their skin tones have "blended". If you do this, just download one set at a time unless you want to go through and redo all of the numbers so they make sense on a scale.

If that sounds too complicated or you want to play pre-made sims, I really recommend the "Correlated skins" found here on mod the sims by Phaenoh. This means you get up to four different shades of each skin, linked to sim hair colour, which means more variety than the standard four shades, and more realism too - red hair often looks odd on a dark skin tone, for instance. There are a few skintone sets which have been converted to this method. I'm working on one too but it's not done yet. I use this system in my megahood because I was sick of looking at the same four skins and it gives variety.

IMO, you definitely need to get some default replacement eyes. I love Enayla's eyes but there are lots of nice ones to choose from. Eyes make a huge difference.

For rotations, I use the lot sync timer from More Awesome Than You and just play whichever household I feel like playing, and don't have a set time limit, but use the sync timer to make sure no household falls too far behind the rest. You can't pull this mod out without risking corrupting the hood because it uses unused token space, so be careful. There is an option on the object to safely remove it from a neighbourhood before deleting or moving the download. Townies of course don't age, but if you have freetime or higher you can select a townie you have a high relationship with to age up on your birthday.

I use the Sim Blender (twojeffs at Simbology) and the Clothing Tool (More Awesome Than You) to grab townies who look weird or templatey and change their clothing and glases/make up/beards etc.

I would not add mods to begin with. Perhaps the few I've mentioned here, if you think they sound useful, and maybe the FFS Debugger (affectionately known as the batbox) which is also from More Awesome Than You, just because that can get you out of glitched situations which are otherwise impossible to get out of except for using task manager to quit the game (in some cases). See how your play style is before you download anything major, and then anything you find annoying or don't like the way it works, get searching for a mod to sort that. If you want some sites to browse for general gameplay improvements, once you've got used to it, these are the names I would suggest:

Twojeffs
AncientHighway
Cyjon
BoilingOil
Numenor
MogHughson
Chris Hatch (many adult mods but a lot of non adult stuff too)
Inge Jones @ Simlogical
Pescado
Crammyboy
SimWardrobe
SimSlice (use with caution, but some unique stuff here)

I hope I haven't forgotten anyone important :'( But these are the names which come to mind when I think of game modifications, especially those I've looked down lists of their things and thought "That's a great idea! I need to have that!"