On PC I must’ve spent thousands of hours playing The Sims, the first and second ones. They had fantastic soundtracks and were very chill experiences where you couldn’t really lose and didn’t rely on reflexes or strategy. Above all else I’ve always enjoyed being able to build cool houses. I would barely even play with the Sims themselves, I was mostly just creating families to not leave my houses empty. I had entire neighbourhoods made from scratch, all with wildly different houses with wildly different people living in them. I lost all my data a couple of times but I always kept the CD around with the key code written on it so I’d just reinstall and start rebuilding from scratch (that disc is probably still in my bedroom somewhere). Just selecting an empty lot and spending an entire afternoon building a cool house on it, then making a family to live there and putting all the furniture in place. Rinse and repeat, life was good.

I’d later go on to play other games that allowed me to build stuff trying to scratch that same creative itch. Mostly other Maxis games such as SimCity 3000 and Spore (never got into Sims 3 as it didn’t run well on my PC) but also Minecraft, which was all the rage and would go on to consume countless hours of my life. A few years later I also tried Sims 4, which did run well (on a newer computer tbf), but also felt so limited with the small fixed-view non-customizable neighbourhoods. It’s baffling to me that 4 couldn’t have the same features 2 had a decade earlier. Oh well, at least the building tools are much better than 2’s, so there was that.

Tl;dr: I like The Sims. The first couple ones, not the last couple ones.