Megalo-maniacs and insomniacs beware: the Sims are back, and there’s every chance they will demand an unreasonable amount of your time. In the sequel to one of the most popular computer games to date, you are again cast in the role of an omnipotent god, with direct control over a colony of digital characters who struggle to make their way in a virtual world of your creation.

The original Sims was an unexpected runaway success. With no explicit goals in the classic gaming sense, it was more a pastime than a game, reflecting the vague, tangential nature of everyday life. Sims 2 extends the theme: nurturing a family relationship can be just as rewarding as becoming chief executive of a conglomerate. Designing the family members is almost a game in itself, and altering the appearance of your characters provides hours of entertainment as you change them from beauty to beast and back again. Their player-selected aspirations mirror life’s anxieties and hopes — those with lofty financial ambitions will be doubly unhappy if they find themselves on skid row. When life gets on top of you, there is always someone, somewhere, worse off than yourself. If you can’t imagine them, Sims gives you the chance to create your very own losers.

If you have the patience, guiding your characters through life, procreation and death has a therapeutic appeal, tinged with sadness when one of your creations curls up its toes. Artificial intelligence is greatly improved, giving the impression that Sims continue their lives without your constant supervision. Take your eye off them, though, and hours of hard work can be undone. For the control freak in everyone, Sims 2 is a lush, rich environment that improves on the original concept and will provide hours of exasperating amusement. Three stars

Steven Poole

Silent Hill 4: The Room
PS2, Xbox, £39.99, PC, £29.99; ages 18+

You are trapped in your flat with nothing to look at but grimy kitchen and bathroom fittings, and you have constant recurring nightmares. Then something blows a hole in your wall, and you scramble through a tunnel into a world of slimy dogs with stabbing red tongues and enormous pulsating worms — with worse to come.

The latest title in this venerable horror-game series expertly evokes a sense of dread. Early on, you witness a beautifully banal urban scene from your window. The sound design keeps horrible moanings and clankings at the threshold of perception, and you can almost smell the rot and rust in the atmospheric environments, from a deserted subway station to a prison and a hospital.

With ghosts, horribly fleshy imaginings and a panoply of other devices, including shuddering black-and-white imagery, the director Suguru Murakoshi updates the series’s aesthetic to a contemporary Japanese horror style, much influenced by the film Ring. However, where other recent games in the genre, notably Forbidden Siren, married this style to innovative gameplay, Silent Hill 4 keeps to its simplistic roots of wandering around and fighting monsters with iron pipes or guns. This familiar tedium is not redeemed by the game’s superbly gruesome ambience. Three stars

Stewart Mitchell

Outrun 2
Xbox, £39.99; all ages

You get the impression that Outrun 2 would be more at home in a coin-op than on a console. With its limited gameplay, a small number of licensed cars and repetitive soundtrack, it won’t keep you hooked for hours. Given the recent glut of ultra-realistic driving games, a simple arcade-racer such as this should be a breath of fresh air. However, there is a fine line between simple and dumbed-down, and Outrun strays into the latter. When you are not trying to beat the clock, you’re aiming to impress the girlfriend, who comes out with such handy hints as “Overtake” and “Let’s drift”. It’s all rather shallow. That’s not to say the game doesn’t look good — the vehicles are highly polished and the landscape is varied — but for £40 you expect a little more variety and absorption. One star

Daniel Emery