GameSpot: There's more of an emphasis on dating in Nightlife, but what's improved? As it is right now, it's not too hard to get sims to go from complete strangers to engaged in just a day or two of game time. Will you stretch this out a bit in Nightlife to make the courting ritual more of a challenge? Will you need to work harder to woo a potential partner?

Tim LaTourneau: It's true that experienced players can speed through the relationship game in a couple days, provided all the conditions are right. What we've done here is make some aspects of the relationship game easier if the conditions are really right--if the sims are attracted to each other, and the player is focused on making sure a date goes well. With each expansion we add a lot of new gameplay, and that new gameplay takes time out of a sim's limited life span, so we have to find new strategies that allow players to get through parts of the game more quickly so they have time for all the new stuff. To make it challenging for the hardcore players, we added a lot of rewards to the dating game, so mediocre dates won't be that hard to achieve, but "dream dates" will take some work. The fact that dates are scored, have strategic challenges, and, most importantly, have rewards make it a whole new dating game from anything we've done before.