I tought this would be interesting:
What's your favorite sims game? Why?
If it is The Sims 1, i'd like to ask you some more things:
What makes it so special? Your sims doesn't age, there's no story progression, You can't go anywhere on the base game and no matter how much time you play, you'll still have the same Sims, unless any of them died of some accident.
I hope I can answer some of your question regarding TS1 but before I do let me just say that even though TS1 is my favorite Sims game, I loved every single Sims game that followed after the original! TS2 was great, there was much more you could do, the graphics were in 3D, you could build your own city's, fantastic and as you already said the open World in TS3 was just so much better than getting those stupid loading screen just because you moved from one lot to another... The whole world aged, not just the Sims you actively played, TS3 was amazing! Now the TS4... Oh boy that's more of a "it's complicated" kind of relationship I have with it. There are some good things, like the emotions and the new CAS, but no open world, neighborhoods that are tiny compared to all other Sims games (remember the TS1 neighborhood before Unleashed? That tiny thing got another Life in TS4 it seems...) and the unfinished state that game was released in... Sigh!
Don't get me wrong, when I have a bit of free time I do play TS4 and yes I have fun with it, it's just not what I hoped it would be at all and EAxis made some really stupid decisions with it.
Anyway... To finally address your questions...
I love TS1 mainly because it's a game I grew up with. I first played TS1 at the age of 6 and boy was it fun! But nostalgic reasons aside there are some key reasons, I think, that make TS1 so special. First and foremost It didn't need things like story progression, an open world or an emotion system to be a great game. It's easy for people that grew up with or started the Sims games with TS2 or even TS, to judge TS1 for the lack of features.
Yes, TS1 didn't have a lot of the things "modern" Sims games have at their core or that EAxis is advertising,
but It didn't need them!
Don't get me wrong here, it wouldn't be a bad thing if TS1 had an open world! Heck that would be pretty amazing actually!
But the thing is that TS1, in my mind, was perfect. Just like you stated in another thread that you think TS3 is perfect, we or I think that TS1 is perfect.
By the time of it's release TS1 was something no one has ever seen before, TS1 introduced a whole new genre to the market, Life Simulation. There was nothing like the Sims before TS1 and that made it not only interesting but unique.
Okay, so it's obvious TS1 hasn't got a lot of the features TS2, TS3 and TS4 have and as I said, it didn't really need those but there is another why I think a lot of people come back to play TS1 after so many years, that is linked to this 'lack of features'.
Let me tell you a little story about the Goth family in my TS1 version... (I put the story in brackets just in case anyone wants to skip that part!)
[STORY]
So one day Mortimer met another woman and suddenly fall in love with her (it's not like I made him... He just did that on his own... of course!), so he left Bella and Cassandra and decided that he wanted to start a new Life with a new woman. Everything was fine at first but the relationship between the two didn't go so well, manly because the woman was a psychopath and killed other Sims for fun... we all know what that is like right?... anyway he decided he can't accept her... well... lifestyle I guess(?!) and left her. Now Bella was so hurt after Mortimer left her that she decided she needed to live somewhere quiet and peaceful, so she bought a house in Magictown and shortly after met a great man at a disco downtown and got happily married again. Mortimer decided to live alone and to focus on his career so he bought a nice house, worked his butt of, became a mad scientist, made a fortune and lives in a big mansions with his butler, two maids, his birds and his own mini golf course. But every other day, he invites his daughter Cassandra to visit him and they play together.
[/STORY]
So...
Why the hell am I telling you a story about my Sims' life?
Because I remember this story. TS1 didn't have the features that showed you the memories of your Sims or that showed you the family tree. If you wanted stories for your Sims you had to use your own imagination and create them yourself! Yes, you could take a snapshot of certain events from your Sims' life and write a story underneath that snapshot, but I never did it that way, which means the only thing that remembered those stories was my mind. Sometimes when I hear something about a break up, be it on the news, in a magazine, or from a friend, I remember certain stories of my Sims and along with nostalgia kicking in, I suddenly feel the need to install TS1 again and just play! After more than 12 years now I still come back to the game and thing about "Maybe Mortimer and Bella should get back together?!" "Maybe now that Mortimer has achieved success and made a fortune, he feels lonely?" "Maybe a wife isn't for him, but a loving and caring husband?"
Those memories along with those question about how they may go on or end like is what keeps me coming back to TS1 and something that I very much miss about TS2 (or TS3 or TS4). Yes you always need to create such stories in a Sims game yourself (The Sims Life-, Pet- and Castaways Stories aside), you don't have to remember those things since TS2 anymore, you can basically see them in the game, be it on the memories panel, the family tree, or since TS3 even on the relationships themselves. The new games remember your stories, so you don't have to. Which isn't a bad thing, not at all! But I just don't get the same connection with the new Sims games because of those little things like that.
Now to recap and (finally) end this post:
There are a lot of reasons why TS1 is someone's favorite Sims game, something that is true for every other The Sims title that followed!
I personally like TS1 the most because of nostalgia, the game being perfect in my mind even with the lack of feature from modern Sims games.
And the stories I made and remembered, the memories I have from and about the game itself, keep me playing it 15 years after it's release.
There are a lot of other good reasons, and would love to hear some of them from other, but those are mainly my reason or why I think Sims 1 still has so much fans and players despite TS2, 3 and 4 being out already.
One last thing... I'm extremely sorry of the long post and I hope Rhys and the moderators aren't to angry about it! (Sorry!)