The other major difficulty of The Sims 2 is that it often manages to be too realistic a simulation. Between eating, sleeping, bathing, working, and cleaning, there's little time left over to investigate the goodies packed into each location. Sure, you can manually queue up a list of activities and then fast forward through them, but then any immersion factor evaporates. You can likewise choose to hop from Sim to Sim at the most opportune moments, but this too dilutes any sense that you're helping an individual build his or her own virtual life.
 
Whether you'll enjoy The Sims 2 boils down to how much you enjoy oodles of raw content in the form of toys, furniture, food, and skills. If you don't mind that none of it ever quite congeals into a coherent whole, you'll have a blast.