The Sims 2 for the Nintendo DS was the game that your mom would buy because you "asked for The Sims 2 and that was the cheapest of the two"; typically seen as the ugly ducklings of Will Wright's franchise, the console games were sprawling across all manners of platforms: PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable...
If there was something they did greatly, however, was expanding the lore of the games and pushing forward a semi-innovative gameplay that had to adapt the limits of the console they found themselves in. It's with this scenario in mind that The Sims 2 comes up as one of the most enjoyable little gems of the franchise, followed close by The Sims 2 on the PSP and The Urbz: Sims in the City for Playstation 2.
The game sees you stranded in one of the lovely neighborhoods of Sim Valley, called Strangetown: it's a name familiar to those who have played The Sims 2 on the PC as one of the more 'supernatural' base game neighborhoods where characters such as Olive Specter, aliens and where the most famous piece of lore from the whole series stems from - The Mystery of Bella Goth.
This game doesn't go over that specific part but sees you take the reins of a character that sees their car malfunctioning in the middle of the desert, prompting a quick stop i Strangetown to check whether or not you can get it fixed. You go to the local hotel to take a nap and find out the owner is gone and, somehow, knew you'd make your way there and lumped the honor of directing such hotel and you soon find out about the Alien plot to take over Strangetown, the presence of a mafioso of the name of Fusilli and a weird cult dedicated to a cow...
All in all, the game is a charming macro/micromanagement pearl that only gets muddied by the poor performance on both Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite: the outside of the Hotel, where the town is located, most often stutters due to the limited power of the handheld and, in doing so, makes certain missions such as dealing with the weekly Alien invasion extremely hard or the fact that the game doesn't like making furniture take up their strictly necessary space but sees you unable to slam a couch against a wall (creating weird combination and leaving much of the room naked).
I would recommend going for The Sims 2 for GameBoy Advance (the plot isn't the same but the character's charm is unvaried).
Still, if you want a semi-laid back hotel management with charming NPCs who each have their own characterization, don't let the big issues stop you from trying to enjoy it. Most of the times, there's no fall off from missing an alien invasion or two and, most of all, you can always recover from events or even a long time off-line (I hadn't played The Sims 2 on the DS for 6 years before returning to it recently) without too much of a problem.
