Topic: Have you purchased a game you know to be bad just to complete a collection?

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The handheld Sims games. I haven't collected all of them, and I eventually traded-in The Sims 2: Pets [DS] (which I regret only for the fact that the cover art was so pretty) to put toward Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, as a store had a "trade any 2 DS games" promotion, so I went ahead and traded in my two biggest duds.

The Sims: Bustin' Out (2003) [GBA]
I love this game. The music, the beautiful visuals… and as an overall experience, it is so engaging and charming and I still go back to it every once in a while. The ONLY thing holding it back is its linearity and the fact that it has a Fire Emblem-style ending in which the conclusion is a definite one, and the only way to continue playing the game is to avoid triggering the final cutscene and just pretend that it isn't there (which is a device that I do not like to see in mostly open-ended games).

The Urbz: Sims in the City (2004/2005) [GBA/DS]
A direct sequel to The Sims: Bustin' Out, but with a more stylised aesthetic (which I dislike), but it's less linear and addresses some of the flaws of the previous game. As an overall experience, I still prefer Bustin' Out, though I've completed Urbz many, many times when I first bought my DS and couldn't afford any more games for it until The Sims 2 was released later that year. A worthy sequel that showed a lot of promise.

The Sims 2 (2005) [GBA]
Uses the same engine/aesthetic as the last two games, but the already limited options for socialising are even more limited in this game, and everything that was good about the last two games is completely lost here. The only resemblance between this and the last two games are purely superficial. This had so much potential, and I was so, so excited to have TWO new Sims games by year's end, but this turned out to be such an enormous dud (and yet the worst was yet to come).

The Sims 2 (2005) [DS]
A direct sequel to The Urbz, but with a much smaller game world and significantly shorter campaign (using the same NPCs as its sister title on GBA, but with a totally new 3D engine and storyline). While not quite at the level of the first two games, I still enjoyed this immensely, and it was great to have a hotel management sim (however limited that it is) to take on the go. I would also consider this to be an "open world" game, though the world is a very small one (a desert town). There's plenty of things to do, and the game occasionally generates side-missions for you to complete. The graphics were also quite nice, if not impressive. I would have been happy to see the franchise continue in this direction, but alas… alas…

The Sims 2: Pets (2006) [DS]
This game is a complete POS with atrocious production values (dreadfully low-polygon models, all of whom look almost exactly alike; poor animation; downright creepy/ugly looking cats/dogs; grammatical/punctuation errors in most instances of on-screen dialogue), and to add insult to injury, it's a buggy mess that frequently locks up. While you can customise the interior of your house, the furniture is appallingly undetailed, owing to the fact that some items are literally just cubes with blocks as textures designed to vaguely resemble furniture or appliances. Just an inexcusably poor quality game and a stain on the Sims franchise. The GBA version appeared to be better (adopting similar visuals to previous GBA Sims games), but I couldn't find it at a reasonable price, so I gave it a miss. I'm still tempted after all of these years to give the GBA version a try, but I don't particularly care enough as I know that it will not live up to the first two games. I didn't even bother with The Sims 2: Apartment Pets (2008) as it looked like a rehash of The Sims 2: Pets on DS (cough the worst game in the series). Its only redeeming factor is the licensed soundtrack (which it shares with the PC expansion and the console versions).

The Sims 2: Castaway (2007) [DS]
Production values are not quite as bad as Pets (though they appear to use the same engine), with a nice ambient soundtrack, but this is still far from reaching the heights of The Sims 2 [DS] and the GBA games that preceded it. Animations are quite poor, however, the graphics look better here if only for the fact that everything is viewed from a distance. Hardly any NPCs to interact with here (with stupid, unimaginative names like "Doctor Feelgood" and "Chef Butcher"). Okay for a few hours, but the game leads absolutely nowhere, so I eventually gave up on it.

The Sims 3 (2010) [DS]
A decent attempt to replicate The Sims 3 [PC] on a dated handheld device, but that is also the game's key detriment. It's sluggish as hell and I would much rather have seen a game that was better suited to the limitations of the hardware. The game also doesn't lend itself well to short gameplay sessions, as you need to wait for your Sim for the entire duration that they are at work, for instance (and the sped-up in-game clock isn't fast enough to alleviate the tediousness).

The Sims 3 (2011) [3DS]
While superficially impressive, the poor controls really weigh this one down. Too limiting/shallow to hold one's attention for more than an hour or two. EA would have been better off porting the original Sims game on PC to 3DS instead of trying to push the system's graphical capabilities at the expense of enjoyable gameplay.

The Sims 3: Pets (2011) [3DS]
The controls are improved slightly, but it still suffers from the same problems that plagued The Sims 3 [3DS]. There's a little more to do here, but it is still an unenjoyable and limited experience.

It's quite pathetic that EA are yet to best a GBA game from 2003 as far as the handheld iterations of The Sims are concerned. The Sims is a great concept tarred by EA's greed and disregard for quality. Sadly, I strongly doubt that The Sims (or other classic EA franchises, such as SimCity) will ever reach the heights of their heyday again (let alone exceed them). =(