Re: F1 Challenge DELUX 2010 (English Version) Cheat Codes
Onofre Alamillo
Social simulation wasn't an entirely new genre, and indeed Wright drew inspiration from 1985's Little Computer People (alternatively known as House-On-A-Disk). This Activision title was reasonably well-received in its day, but largely dismissed as a low-challenge educational game suitable only for young children. LCP also doesn't seem to have met sales expectations, judging by the fact that a series of planned add-on expansions never ended up getting made.
For most of The Sims' four-year lifespan, I was in lockstep with every new expansion pack release. As a pre-teen, I eagerly awaited the biannual visit to Toys R Us that would see me return home clutching my latest digital plaything. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to hang on to those original CD-ROMs, so revisiting the franchise's origins to see how it's holding up these days was comparatively easy.
I elected, on this occasion, to install The Sims on a Windows Vista machine from 2008, five years after the game's final expansion/update. Even though the computer was old, the game was even older; thus it was a little over-specced, and the game didn't look or run quite as fantastically as it did in its prime. Still, it's true that the original graphics still look surprisingly good: stylistically it's properly retro, as in it's what a retro-inspired artist would probably put together today. What I mean is that it looks nearly as good as I remember it, which is actually impressive when you think about it. And in performance terms, if it's a little creaky at times (and my return did include one particularly distressing two-hours-of-gameplay-down-the-drain crash), it's certainly no worse now than it was back in the day. I remember when this was my everyday life, oh I do.
It reminded me of how, perversely, technical and graphical improvements in games can actually be limiting our creativity in a way. It may be embarrassing to admit this, but my play-style in The Sims hasn't changed a huge amount in the last 20-odd years. As a 10-year-old, I went in already wanting to use The Sims to re-create my favourite characters from pop culture. None of the skins in The Sims 1 remotely resembled them, but I was able to read onto them the references I wanted. Fast-forward a couple of decades and I'm frowning in bemusement at my screen because none of these faces look exactly right, and that's unacceptable! I didn't start this article expecting to be arguing that detailed character creators are the death of imagination, but here we are.
The 25-point personality build system introduced in The Sims feels quaint when you're accustomed to the trait-based system used from The Sims 3 onwards, but nowhere near as jarringly limited as the skin-selection for physical appearance. Even the lack of any kind of aspiration mechanic to guide your Sims' lives didn't feel all that weird to me. I suppose I must be better at reading those ideas onto my Sims than I am ascribing personalities to those weird off-the-peg faces. Maybe there is hope for my imaginative capabilities after all.
My single biggest take-away, though, was how much the Sims' AI has improved over the years. I'd last played The Sims 4 only the day before embarking on my retro adventure, so the comparison was fresh in my mind; and yes, while Sims to this day still engage in a fair bit of artificial stupidity, you don't really appreciate how far things have come along until you go back to the very beginning.
Sims in newer games may still be dumb as rocks, but at least they're more polite now, in as much as they display some awareness of where other nearby Sims are and what they're doing. They at the very least understand when someone's using the loo behind that closed door, meaning that such invasions of privacy when they do occur are the result of flawed personalities and social situations (or a wicked player forcing the issue), not just an unavoidable result of needs-based pathfinding with no appreciation of context.
Somewhere early on in my return to The Sims 1, I got it into my head that it'd be a great idea to challenge myself not to use cheats. I thought it'd be more authentic, somehow, to play the game as the developers intended, at least for the first little while. Within a couple of in-game days, I'd remembered why The Sims and cheat codes are so deeply intertwined in our cultural consciousness. The odds of success in the original The Sims are massively stacked in the favour of the pre-created households, who land in the world with at least two or three basic necessities denied to player-created characters: a fully-furnished house, pre-existing relationships, and maybe even an entry-level job to tide them over in addition to a comparatively generous savings fund.
Creating two Sims of my own and moving them into one of the game's "affordable" starter homes together, with the full intention of hooking them up as soon as possible, revealed no end of problems. All they could afford to begin with were the basic kitchen and bathroom utilities, a modest dining room set-up, a bookcase, and two single beds. A double-bed would have been cheaper, but brand-new Sims in this game don't know each other yet, and resent the hell out of the implication that they could bunk up for practicality's sake. They need a full-on declaration of everlasting love before they'll concede to snore the night away while lying chastely side-by-side, which is all that Sims in this game can really get up to in bed anyway.
But in order to get their relationship to that level they'll need to be in a good enough mood to get to know each other, which is hard to achieve when they're constantly cranky, sore, hungry, and tired due to living in a barely-furnished three-room cottage that looks infinitely more depressing than my first student house-share. And trust me, that's saying something.
Of course, the first game's seven eventual expansion packs would add in more optional side activities, like going on holiday or adopting a pet. While The Sims was very much built from the offset around the idea of selling regular add-on content, you can see Maxis gaining a better idea of how people actually wanted to play as the series' first generation wore on. The Sims base game and its first couple of expansions presented a fun resource management challenge, don't get me wrong, but the endless cycle of living to work to consume is a bit dystopian when you stop to think about it. It shouldn't come as a surprise that later expansions showed a greater interest in getting Sims out of the house, and breaking up the daily grind with hobbies and excursions that presented the player with something a bit more aspirational, or even fantastical.
Cheat Codes, also known as Floppy Disks or simply codes or disks, are collectables in Doom Eternal. They can be collected in missions. Then, when using Mission Select, they can be activated to make tasks less time-consuming for the player. For example, in the mission Taras Nabad, one of the challenges is to get three different glory kills on Pain Elementals. When using Mission Select, the player can activate the Instant Stagger cheat, which makes all non-boss enemies stagger upon one hit.
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