Having access to all the expansions is nice, but a bit overwhelming at first. Right off the bat the Makin' Magic expansion means a guy shows up at your doorstep as soon as you move in to drop off some magic stuff before you've even managed to buy a sofa. Some of the expansions were just obviously made for players who had been playing the game for a long time already, so starting a file with everything is a bit conflicting. The Superstar expansion has its whole basis on getting an agent and building your sims fame. But you can't do this while also having a regular job. It seems pretty obvious this was made for people who had maybe burned out on the normal jobs that were the only option prior to Superstar. For a brand new player with both options out the gate, I feel the Superstar one is just overly complex and feels like something you do when you have your sims life sorted.

One thing I don't really like about this is the whole travelling mechanic. When you go to any area (downtown, old town, the superstar areas, the magic areas etc), the game creates a save of your house exactly as it was - including the time so you don't have to miss work. My problem is that the sims needs don't really adjust for a setting that isn't tailor made for them. Bladder is fine since all places tend to have toilets. But hygiene? Very few places have showers. Energy? Even fewer places have beds. Freaking comfort? You'd be surprised at how little sitting on a public bench does to help this. Even hunger is hard to keep up, since the food you can buy while out and about is good for maybe 2 minutes worth of game time before it drops back to where it was. This means you're pretty much on a very strict time limit whenever you leave the house.

The main problem with that is the above mentioned save state thing. If you went out with all your needs met, chances are you've just slept, eaten, watched TV or did whatever else you do for fun, and because the time was saved, it means its close to work time. Except your sim is now exhausted, needs to eat, needs to shower and who knows what else. To be fair you can miss a day of work in the game with no real consequence except lack of money, but do it too many times and it becomes an issue.

It also just generally runs in to many of the issues that were there from the base game. Money is too hard to obtain in notable amounts without cheats (to be fair the Superstar path may solve that issue, I never went too deep in to it). The sims needs drop way too fast, making it a big juggling act that just turns into repetitive tasks every single day. The friendship mechanic still sucks to try and keep and maintain multiple close friends at once which is needed for job promotions - but at least now you can just "talk" over the phone so doing that daily is much easier...though it runs the risk of a negative interaction through no fault of your own.

One thing I think came from one of the specific expansions, since I didn't notice it in the base game, is the fact you can get flies that just appear out of nowhere. Usually they're tied to filth and disappear when the filth is gone, but these flies just fly around as they want even when the house is spotless. You can't interact with them at all, so the only way to get rid of them, according to the research I did online, was to turn on a cheat. That's pretty wild.

So ultimately my feelings on Sims 1 is that despite being great nostalgia, it has a lot of issues in regards to giving the player enough time to do stuff outside just balancing all the needs and social stats.

Having all the expansion content is of course great, even if a lot of it feels like it clashes against each other since they all have different themes and purposes. It's hard to just have a "try to live like a normal person" file when the first thing it does is hand you a bunch of magic stuff.

As weird as it is to say, this is probably best played with cheats so you don't have to worry about work. Then you can just use all your free time to experience all the different stuff the game offers. Because I found when trying to build a career I wasn't able to focus on anything else. It's clear that some of these things were made for players who had been playing the base game and expansions in order, and thus had maxed out stats and enough money to do whatever they wanted.