The Sims 2. I’ve played a fair amount of all four Sims games including their mobile editions, and Sims 2 remains my favorite after a near (yeeesh) 20 years.
The modding community is still relatively robust, especially for a game that’s so old and out of the four, I feel like I can enjoy even the basic gameplay as a storyteller in Sims 2 more than in 3 or 4. In Sims 3, the focus was less on playing multiple families, so it had to be modded right out of the gate to get back to its foundation and I never liked the way the sims looked. Sims 4 “feels” a lot more like Sims 2, which a lot of people hated, but its expansion and content packs are a complete joke. It costs like $2K to have everything, and they’re still releasing packs. I know it’s just the state of gaming these days, but it just sucks the fun out of a lot of the game.
Half the fun these days, though, is just getting the game up and running on modern PCs. I installed a new hard drive a few months ago and it took the better part of a weekend to get the game fully installed and running. I do have Ultimate Collection, but the less time I have to spend in that stupid EA app, the better.
I'm currently working through my mod folder since I'm coming across an issue where my sims can't get married. It's painful but I've been unable to quit this game since 2006