Much like previous expansions, The Sims 2 Open For Business doesn’t completely transform The Sims 2. For example, in The Sims 2 University expansion, you didn’t have to send your teen Sims to college, but if you did there was a lot of new content to explore. In Open For Business, you can explore running both small and large businesses, but those Sims who lack an entrepreneurial bent will still keep going to their jobs every day. In this case all of your Sims can reap some of the benefits of these new businesses by shopping in the stores and hanging out in the nightclubs. Really, though, the draw of Open For Business is that it’s about business.

Open For Business introduces the Business Tracker control panel, which is a separate control panel in the upper right corner of the screen where you can control all aspects of your business. This control panel only appears for Sims who have started a business and displays business information like your business rank, financials, and employee performance. I’m very glad they designed a separate panel for business rather than trying to incorporate it into the regular control panel. It enhances the game-within-a-game feeling and you don’t have to deal with it when playing Sims who aren’t running businesses.

In order to run a business, you have to have something that other Sims want to buy. Sim businesses fall into the two classic categories, goods and services. A retail goods business might sell general items that are purchased at wholesale and sold for a profit, or items that your Sims create themselves. Service based businesses revolve around the ticket machine. You can set up an amusement park, health club, or any other kind of gathering space and sell tickets for Sims to spend time there. The longer they stay the more money they spend. Of course, you want to have plenty of entertainment around if you want them to stick around, and also to keep them out of trouble. Certain Sims have a knack for getting into fights when they get bored, and that doesn’t necessarily improve your business credentials.

As I mentioned above, if your Sims are crafty enough they can create items to sell. Sims can create things like toys, robots, and flower arrangements by buying the appropriate workbench in Buy mode and slaving away at it. The first items your Sims can make are simple and inexpensive, like toy robots and Sir Bricks-A-Lot (a toy brick with a face on it). As they create items, they can earn bronze, silver, and gold Talent Badges. Talent Badges mean your Sim can create more items and create them faster.

Talent Badges aren’t only awarded when your Sims make stuff. They can earn Talent Badges in all aspects of business like restocking, running the cash register, and sales. If you Sim has spent time developing skills like Mechanical and Charisma, they may also gain Talent Badges more quickly, but the relationship between skills and talents is not obvious in the game. Also, there’s no progress meter like there is for skill points, so you have to work away and hope to eventually gain a badge. I think that it would have made more sense to expand the regular skills than to have two separate areas where Sims can improve.

So, your Sim has a great new start up idea? Let’s talk about location. You can choose between a home-based business and buying real estate in the business district. In some cases it’s easier to start a home business, especially when your Sim is short on funds, but there are some important considerations. First of all, you need space. As your business grows, more and more customers will show up and they don’t do so well crowded in a small room. In addition, you need to be able to segregate the business from the rest of the Sim’s living space. Yes, in real life you can run a home business from the kitchen table, but if you try to do that in Open For Business, you’ll soon have freeloaders watching your TV, eating your food and using your bathroom. At least you can lock doors so that your customers stay in designated areas.

If you try running a business in one of the downtown districts (including the new one that comes with the expansion, Bluewater Village), you will get more space and fewer Sims on your couch, but you have to factor in travel time. Also, it’s not as easy to close for a few hours when your Sim is tired or hungry. It seems to me that the natural progression is to start out in a home-based setting and then move downtown if the business takes off.

You’ve done a lot of work so far, but I’m sure you know that just opening your doors and putting out some stock isn’t enough. As any salesman would say, it’s all about the pitch. No matter the type of business, your customers always have to decide whether or not they want to spend their Simoleons at your shop. This is when your salesmanship comes into play. You get the opportunity to convince the customers to buy, which can increase their satisfaction if you’re good enough. As you earn Talent Badges in sales, you become more and more persuasive and gain access to different sales techniques.

When you start a business, you’ll probably work your Sim into the ground manning the store, running the cash register, and making items. It gets tedious and your Sim might want his or her life back after awhile. Fortunately, you can hire help if the business is successful enough to support it. Employees gain Talent Badges, too, so over time they can become very good at their jobs just like you. You’ll probably still want to keep an eye on those employees, at least for awhile, but if you make enough money you can even hire a manager to crack the whip for you.

As is traditional with Sims expansions, there are over 100 new items included in Open For Business. Many of these items are business-centric, like cash registers, ticket machines, and shelving units for store inventory. There’s even a lemonade stand that your kid Sims can run. However, some of them will enhance the non-business side of the game too, like elevators. I haven’t yet put an elevator into one of my buildings, but I’m sure that my Sims will have fun with it once I do.

Robots are perhaps the most intriguing new items in Open For Business. You start out by purchasing a robot workbench where you can make toy robots. As you earn Talent Badges, you can make more useful robots that will clean your house or water your plants. You might make some duds along the way, but that’s part of the learning process. Once you’ve reached the gold level, you have some pretty fantastic bots available. The pinnacle in robot engineering is Servo, a humanoid robot that can do most things real Sims can do (except for that one important thing that robotic technology hasn’t quite mastered - making a baby). Robots certainly add a fun new element to game play, and I like that you have to earn the right to build them rather than having them freely available in Buy mode. Plus, they add to the goofy sense of humor that pervades the Sims universe. For example, imagine the fun that can be had in building a robot that can become skilled in building more robots, who can themselves build even more robots. It will be interesting to see how robots fare in future expansion packs, since they don’t age like regular Sims and could very well be permanent additions to your neighborhood’s cast of characters. Just make sure they don’t break on you…broken robots can be unpredictable.

My biggest complaint about Open For Business would be that some of the business stuff is not intuitive at all. For example, to start a business you need to use the phone, which seems odd. You could argue that making the game complex is just a way to mirror the complexities in owning a small business, and I can certainly see the logic in that. I appreciate the complexity, because it means that you won’t automatically succeed at business. There are plenty of decisions to be made that can make or break your Sim’s chances at presiding over a retail empire. Business isn’t easy, or else we’d all be tycoons, right? But there’s challenging, and then there’s annoying. If I put 6 items on the shelf, why do I have to restock every time I sell one rather than when the whole lot sells out? Still, this is a minor complaint in my book.

As far as basic game play issues go, there aren’t many. I found that object placement was a little bit fiddly with the new shelving units and it took some creative mouse work to get things where I wanted them to be. This was dependent on the item, too – robots in particular are a bit hard to manage. Also, if I own a business, then I am self-employed, not unemployed. The employment panel’s unemployed label makes me look like a slacker when I’m running my Sims ragged trying to crank out daisy arrangements.

The Sims 2 Open For Business adds a new dimension of game play to The Sims 2. It doesn’t dominate the game, but it opens up plenty of new opportunities. There is a learning curve to the new functions, and this can get annoying when you just want to sell stuff. Once you master the business side, though, you’ll be raking in the dough and having fun doing it. However, if you’re not interested in the work involved in running a Sim business, then you will probably want to skip this expansion. If you dig business and want the most flexibility, you may want to run Open For Business in conjunction with the Nightlife expansion in order to take advantage of the items and social activities that Nightlife provides. Oh, and robots are just cool!