Was The Sims 2 written by amateurs?
Sometimes you encounter some pretty ridiculous things in commercial software. I bought The Sims 2 for Stephanie, something to distract her from grad school, and was horrified to see that it installs over 300 MB of save data to your My Documents folder, whether you like it or not. There is no option to do otherwise. This is a problem for us because we off-site backup our My Documents folders daily.
Honestly, who hard-codes a path into an application? That's like a newbie programming move, and this is a game with a gigantic budget. While the game is cool, there are other things I'm suspect about, like ridiculously long load times and really choppy graphics when the scene isn't that complex.
I hope that RCT3 performs well when it comes out next month. The first two were brilliant but they had the benefit of being written by one guy, with a cohesive vision and serious assembly language skills. I think RCT3 could be bigger than Sims 2 if Atari markets it right.