EA has shared a community update stating it is investigating reports of «various issues» in the Legacy Collection re-releases of The Sims 1 and 2.
Over on Steam, the games are both sitting at a «Mixed» score from user reviews, with complaints of crashes, bugs, and a general lack of quality or improvements. «We recognize some fans are currently experiencing issues with The Sims: Legacy Collection and The Sims 2: Legacy Collection,» an EA employee wrote in a post to The Sims Game Info Hub on the EA forums. «We are currently investigating these issues and hope to have more information on fixes soon.» It's a fairly boilerplate, cards close to the chest sort of response, and does not quite measure up to how much these Sims re-releases seem to be fundamentally borked.
Combing through the Steam reviews of both Legacy Collections, the issues I've seen repeatedly mentioned include: I've seen some positive reviewers contest the UI complaint on The Sims 2, but overall, these re-releases appear to be fundamentally compromised.
What's more, even once you get past the overt failures, EA is charging $20 and $30 for The Sims 1 and 2 respectively when they are, in the best-case scenario, bare bones ports of the original games to Steam—Nightdive's The Thing: Remastered charges $30 for a version of the game with numerous light touch quality of life, graphical, and gameplay upgrades.
MSRP for Beamdog's Baldur's Gate Enhanced Editions, which similarly add a ton to their respective games, is $20 a pop. The situation reminds me of the disastrous initial release of the Metal Gear Master Collection, where similarly basic ports of classic games were compromised by a multitude of technical issues.