Sims 2 Castaway Remake

[Bartie Spalitto]

Ive always loved house-building, life-simulating game The Sims. I was on the bandwagon from day one, ever since meeting the tutorial family, Bob and Betty Newbie, and finding out that they could make a baby by kissing back-and-forth for hours. Just like real life, of course.

Life most people, I would spend hours and hours building massive, hideous rectangles and filling them with storylines ripped right from a soap opera, except with more pool ladder-related deaths than usual.

But the mainstream PC games, The Sims 1-4, are relatively normal, all things told. Sometimes you'll get alien pregnancies and vampire invasions, and a few of the expansion packs explicitly add supernatural goings-on, but it's also perfectly possible to live a quiet life in a cottage on the outskirts of town and avoid all the kooky stuff, instead having a totally normal existence where your children have uncomplicated origins and everyone dies of old age. BOOORING.

The Urbz: Sims In The City is the console game that came out after Bustin' Out, and depending on whether you play the handheld or console version, involves either befriending The Black Eyed Peas, or meeting vampires and travelling through time.

The Sims 2 on DS got even weirder, with cow cults, robots, aliens, and weird things happening in the desert. I highly recommend you read Kotaku Australia's Leah Williams on the subject of how fantastic the game is. I very much appreciate knowing that there's another writer out there with an obsession for a particular niche game. Leah, if you're reading this, let's be pals. (Mine is Fantasy Life, by the way.)

The premise of The Sims: Bustin' Out, however, is that your character is visiting their Uncle Hayseed's house for the summer, and you'll have to make money doing various job minigames in order to move out and buy your own house and decent furniture, rather than living in his barn. Haven't we all purchased a mansion while visiting family in the summer? What a normal thing to do.

Along the way, you'll meet a cast of weirdos, who will give you quests, and some can potentially move in with you if they like you enough. This includes characters like Mel Odious, a hippy with inner demons; Lottie Cash, who loves shopping; and Olde Salty, a crazy fisherman. Who wouldn't want to live with a guy you met just two weeks ago? Also very normal.

My experience of Bustin' Out was, perhaps, what made it such a memorable game for me: I played it almost entirely after my bedtime, sitting at my desk and listening to Pink's latest album. The sensory trifecta of the game, the darkness lit by a single kinda crappy desk lamp, and the dulcet tones of Pink are now all linked together in my mind; I can't listen to 'Trouble' without vividly remembering the lawnmowing minigame where you can "accidentally" run over your uncle's chickens. There's something about playing a creepy game at night, especially that specific creepiness of mid-2000s kids' games; it amps the bizarritude up by at least 200%. Fact.

Sometimes, when I write my Memory Paks, I realise that my memories are best preserved as perfect snapshots in time. I can't replicate the feeling of playing Pokmon Snap at an afterschool daycare with way too many sticky children and carpets that smelled like cat pee; even if I could, it wouldn't be the same. Actually, that might be a good thing.

Formerly of Official Nintendo Magazine, GameSpot, and Xbox UK, you can now find Kate's writing all over the internet. Her latest projects include writing for Moonstone Island, a deckbuilding creature-collecting game, and [REDACTED], which is very [REDACTED]. Sometimes she writes things here, and sometimes they are about cows and crabs.

I loved the story mode of this game, after playing this game and dabbling with the Sims 2 on PC I was surprised that there was no story mode, the series lost a large part of the appeal for me because of that, I like having an established goal where you feel like you are progressing rather than just making your own story.

I loved The Sims Medieval. Definitely one of their best spin-offs. I wished they did more with it but they focused too much on Sims 3. Which was strange because they never seems to fix the glitches that were there. Sims 4 is getting a lot of attention but it would be nice to see a new story-focused Sims game for the Switch, and not just a port of what is already available on PC xbox and playstation. Sous sous!

I still like the Sims... it's just hard to enjoy when getting the full experience nowadays costs hundreds of dollars. I mean, at least there aren't any loot boxes or microtransactions...I guess. Though getting the late night scary prank phone calls from the original Sims will always be my favorite Sims experience.

The Sims Bustin Out is the version I played the most also. Really enjoyed it, but I had it for my N Gage QD phone at the time...

It was a good port of the game. The N Gage had quite a few good titles, (Ashen, System Rush, Pathway To Glory) even if overall it sold very poorly...

I just finished playing though Sims 2 on PSP two weeks ago and started a second playthrough of the DS version. Haven't tried Bustin' Out but after this I kind of want to. These games are completely bonkers and they just don't make anything like them now!

@BANJO I think the N-gage was terribly underrated due to the form factor and all. There was Asphalt 2 which was a really fun and solid arcade racer and not evil MTX-ridden cash grabs that those have become now. N-gage 2 (the service) had a beautiful fishing game called Creatures of the Deep - I miss it dearly.

@San_D As you say the N Gage was very underrated, the revision with the QD model helped, but it just wasn't enough.

I remember Asphalt 2, a very good racer.

Gameloft also did a few solid Splinter Cell ports for the platform.

I also used the N Gage 2 service on my N95 phone and picked up quite a few of the games. Yes, Creatures of the Deep was a highlight of the service. Pitty the service didn't succeed...

Nokia by that point had quickly slowing phone sales due to the rise of the IPhone. As a consequence the N Gage brand quickly went by the wayside as Nokia had to turn their attention away from games.

I still have my N95 phone with about 20 of the Ngage 2 games installed on it, Creatures of the Deep being one of them. Very tempted to get the phone out of it's box to play some of the games again. (Providing it still works)...

@San_D @BANJO I had an N-Gage as well. Everyone who didn't own one always made fun of it but in recent years I've seen more people like me who had one and agree that it wasn't even all that bad. Or maybe it's just nostalgia.

I had Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Bomberman and Rayman 3. Beat all 3 multiple times. THPS was a solid port of the original game, only missing some music. Bomberman, as far as I know, wasn't a port of an existing Bomberman game. Story mode was fun. Never got to try out bluetooth multiplayer. Rayman 3 is the same game that's on GBA. At least for the most part. Fun game.

It's also fun hearing one of you had N95. I wanted one but ultimately ended up with N81. I didn't get any N-Gage games for that device but I think it had a demo of Metal Gear Solid Mobile. I was really bad at it (I'm still not good at stealth games to this day) but I found it fascinating that you could take pictures with the phone's camera and it would create a camouflage based on the picture.

@nessisonett Funny enough, I wound up with Sims 2: Pets for DS back in the day hoping that it was a continuation of the handheld universe that ran through Sims Bustin' Out, Urbz, and Sims 2. I could go on about how betrayed I felt when I realized they'd pivoted to shovelware with the release of Sims 2 Pets, but it's like you say: Probably the worst game I've ever played, too.

@Late Great to hear from another former N Gage owner. The original sold 2-3 million, so a few people had one. I remember a couple of people making fun of it at the time also, but I didn't mind, it had some great games. (More people asked to try out the games on it than criticised it overall).

Regarding the games, Tony Hawks was a fantastic port, it controlled really well and looked amazing, PS1 graphics on a phone in 2003 made it ahead of it's time. I remember trying Bomberman too, it was a good game to pick up and play for a few minutes, Rayman 3, a solid port also.

The exclusive FPS Ashen was a great exclusive shooter, with solid level design and eerie music. Glimmerati another favourite of mine, a top down racer with lots of style and a decent career mode were other highlights.

The N81 was a decent phone, I remember thinking about possibly getting one when I ultimately got the N95.

I have the Metal Gear Solid game you speak of. It's one of the best games on the N gage 2 service. I tried out the photo taking feature which you could implement into the game, it worked quite well.

There was also a Resident Evil title which had fantastic graphics for a mobile phone game when it released.

i opened this article expecting the ps2 (and i believe gcn?) version, which i still go back to sometimes. its easy as hell as an adult, but somehow i hugely struggled with it as a kid lmao. now im really curious about the handheld game

@Late @BANJO N95 was THE phone. It even had TV out, which pretty much meant you could play it like a mini console. It wasn't super polished though and modern day HDMI ports are much better, but back in those days N95 seemed like magic.

The Sims: Bustin' Out (GBA) is one of my absolute favourite games of all time. I was crushed when it didn't release in Australia. I didn't even have a GBA, but I would have spent all of my pocket money on one had it been released. I had no other choice at the time but to play it "via other means", and man, oh, man, I absolutely loved the game so, so much, which made its no-show status all the more baffling (though the N-Gage version was later released in Australia to little fanfare). The music, the atmosphere, the characters. It was such a fun and satisfying game and so, so memorable. I eventually procured a copy via eBay and fell in love all over again. In fact, I played it as recently as last year, and I would strongly disagree with the notion that the game hasn't aged well. I think it's just as much fun now as it's ever been, and I still yearn for a new game (or even a remake) in the same spirit, though I won't hold my breath.

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