The newest Sims 4 expansion, High School Years, has released, and whilst buggy right now, continues the trend of supporting each new Sims title into a feature powerhouse. However, if you'd like to give EA time to fix up some of the more impactful bugs introduced by the expansion, here's five mods for past games by Maxis, the once creators and caretakers of the Sims franchise!
Top 500 Rated Creature Database
By grandw0lf
Spore's a game about creating the best creatures you can, utilising the reasonably powerful toolset available to players to express your mad scientist tendencies. Some people go a step further than making a walking phallus or min-maxing the most powerful creations and, instead, try to imitate pop-culture, or make a truly unique critter. If you wanted to populate your world with some of the most highly-rated community creations, then this pack is what you're looking for.
SimMars
By SimMars
SimMars is a mod for SimCity 4 taking the game to Mars. It will bring new buildings, transportation systems, user-interface and music and will replace the Maxis SimCity 4 content as far as possible, giving you the feeling to play a colony on Mars. SimCity's ability to, well, simulate the goings on of a metropolis is a formula that has held up well for literally decades now, and applied to other scenarios, it produces just as compelling stuff for citybuilders.
Project FreeSims
By francot514
Project Sims Ville is intended to be an open source engine recreation of The Sims 1, still requiring the base game, but allowing users have an expanded engine with better gameplay experience and new features. Open-source recreation engines are often utilised by communities to exceed the boundaries of the base game - GZDoom is one of the most prominent examples of this in action - and such projects, as long as they work within the legal confines of requiring the original game, are a boon to modders and the game's publishers in enhancing the UGC potential.
Network Addon Mod
By NAM Team
The Network Addon Mod, or NAM, is a modification for SimCity 4 Deluxe (or SimCity 4 with the Rush Hour Expansion pack), which adds a myriad of new transport network items, ranging from ground light rail, to fractional-angle roads, to roundabouts, and much more. It also includes bugfixes to Maxis items and a highly optimized set of traffic simulator plugins, improving pathfinding accuracy and performance.
Saturn Tileset
By Fox_666
SEGA Saturn tileset for Simcity 2000. It also includes properly ripped 1900 and 2050 versions, unlike the Special Edition. SimCity's variety is a core part of why the game has held up so well for classic citybuilder fans, giving it plenty of room to grow and creators lots of room to build their own unique cityscapes. Sometimes the simplest additions are all you need - extra tilesets to expand your creative horizons and open up new possibilities for arrangement.
Not-So-Immersive Sims
Sims 4 is the latest entry in the monolithic life simulation series. Released way back in 2014, the game has seen regular content drops since launch aimed at bolstering the content of the game, the most recent of which is the High School Years expansion. Placing players into a position of shipping their Sims off to school to bully or get bullied, learn new skills, and expand their social circle, it's another chapter in a Sims life now able to be explored by players, joining other expansions that focus on pets and infants for similar elaboration. Not all is rosy as of now, however, as the expansion's bugs have been numerous and humorous.
High School Years is the newest expansion for Sims 4, letting players send
their Sims off to school to get educated and grow their social circle
Getting Schooled
It's not uncommon for major expansions to launch with glitches and we imagine they'll be fixed soon enough, though early birds are currently experiencing their Sims aging at an exponentially faster rate and expressing attraction to, er, family members. The Sims team is aware of these issues and working to resolve them, so if you're waiting on that, hopefully the mods we've brought to you today will give you plenty to do.
Maxis sucks.