The Sims 2 Castaway (PSP)
Product: The Sims 2 Castaway for PSP
Publisher: EA
Release Date: October 23rd, 2007
Official Site: TheSims2.com
Purchase: Amazon | Ebay
The Sims 2: Castaway is a continuation of the Sims 2 universe. This time around the player takes control of a Sim washed ashore on a deserted island and must help him/her to survive and find a way home.
The game has the player explore the island, collecting supplies and materials for food and shelter while exploring for clues to help them home while trying to survive the many obstacles scattered throughout the island including the forces of nature. Exploring and finding treasures can also teach their Sims many useful skills, including fashioning better shelters and making meals that their Sim can stomach.
Players can also create their own Sim much like the other versions, customizing from the hair and skin color to height and weight. The games are almost identical, excluding the graphics and control scheme (the Wii utilizes the Wii remote while the PSP and PS2 are almost identical).
-From MobyGames
Help your Sims build a life from scratch after washing ashore on a deserted tropical island. Overcome the forces of nature to help them become the ultimate survivors and thrive in this undiscovered paradise while unearthing clues that will lead them back to civilization. Build shelters, craft unique items, and discover many useful treasures and ancient mysteries hidden deep within a diverse jungle environment filled with plants, fruits, and even wildlife. Your Sims change as they take on the challenges of island life and learn to survive in style. Create a new life for your Sims on an uncharted island in The Sims 2 Castaway.
- Stay Alive! – Help your Sim meet basic needs to survive.
- Discover Diverse Islands – Explore a variety of new environments: beaches, caves, lagoons, jungle, plains, and volcanic mountains.
- Craft Everything – Create a new life from scratch. Develop tools, build shelter, craft furniture, create clothing, and make art & entertainment.
- Gather and Collect – Gather fish, trap animals, raise plants, collect shells, scavenge and decode treasure maps.
- Flourish or Escape – Build a life comfort on the island or find a way to escape back to civilization.
- Create a Crew – Choose from a wide range of Sims: Auto Mechanic, Chef, Doctor, Musician, Teacher, Executive, or Park Ranger. Each one brings a unique Sim humor and quirkiness to your crew. Reunite members of your crew and build a thriving community.
Castaway is pretty much open ended like all other titles in The Sims franchise, so the mileage you get out of the game really depends on how much you enjoy the gameplay. There is an overriding goal that players can build up to in leaving the island, but you’re never required to finish the game within a certain amount of time – you can pretty much just live life as you please. There is a bit of a significant difference between playing with one Sim, and playing with a group, so it’s definitely worthwhile giving the game at least two playthroughs. Castaway does have a number of minor issues with long and frequent loading sequences which will have a negative effect on player’s enjoyment of the game. Some of these sequences can be alleviated thanks to the game’s quick map, which will let the player jump to any previously discovered sector.
As with most other Sims games, you will be required to maintain your character’s wants and needs while assuring his overall well-being. Castaway has you monitoring and reacting to eight different and fairly self-explanatory “motives”: bladder, comfort, energy, environment, fun, hunger, hygiene and social. The “environment” motive is about making improvements to the Sim’s environment so he feels more at home.
The title does a good job of easing you into the care of your Sim, as not all motives need to be satisfied at the beginning; instead, they’re systematically unlocked as you progress. Although there can be a great deal of tedium as you have to regularly attend to each of the motives, you’ll discover numerous methods of streamlining the process of filling each of the needs. For example, it is possible to train chimps found on the islands to help gather food and other resources. Also, learning to cook meals and adding various ingredients also helps manage the hunger motive much more efficiently than simply eating bananas and coconuts. There are basically three jobs that need to be performed on a regular basis to be successful at playing Castaway.: gather fish and other food, collect building resources and cook food.
The experience is in your hands and the open world is available from the start, provided that you reach parts of the Sims 2 Castaway universe with the aid of your hand-made boats. You control the character you’ve created in the beginning and there are tons of options to customize, ranging from the person’s looks to his/her garments, zodiac sign and abilities. My greatest fear before playing the game was that the controls had been poorly implemented. I has half right, as you’ll have a hard time adjusting to the camera angles and the constant rotation of the view angles, which becomes a must when you’re trying to figure out what to do next. The famous list of needs associated to your character is available at all time on the left side of the screen and it will greatly influence your play and actions. If you’ve played a The Sims title before, you might know that you’ll always have to keep your eyes on a hunger meter, a comfort meter, a hygiene meter, a sleep meter and many other gauges that dictate the mood of your character.
The biggest complaint with Castaway is how boring and repetitive the Sims’ action animations are; while the game can be sped up, players will still find themselves having to wait while their Sims perform each of their given tasks. For once we actually found ourselves wishing that there were some sort of minigames to help make gathering materials feel like something more than a timesink before progressing with construction. Watching your Sims construct an item or hack a tree has a certain novelty to it the first time you see it, but becomes tedious as you do it over and over.
The Sims 2: Castaway differs just enough from previous iterations that fans of the series and newcomers alike can find plenty to enjoy. However, how long the entertainment lasts will boil down to how long it takes the player to grow tired of the repetitive tasks of Sim survival. It’s hard to say whether you’ll have the patience to create a life of virtual luxury, or lose your sanity and find yourself seeking the quickest way out of the life of a castaway.
Life on a deserted island is a bit more adventurous than the ordinary drudgery most sims are forced to live through over and over again. It’s understandable, then, why they throw fits over the size of their bed or the color of the wallpaper. The sims are less prissy now that they have to find a way to survive on the island with only a pocketknife and a roll of toilet paper. Sims 2: Castaway takes the adventure game feeling to heart and adds a journal that gives you a feeling of progress, some exciting island discoveries and over-the-shoulder direct control of your sim.
The beginning of the game starts with one sim and an ever-expanding list of thing to do. You’ll start by spending a lot of time gathering berries, palm tree leaves, driftwood and whatever. And it is a lot of time – this is a simulation after all. Eventually, you’ll locate the other crewmates stranded on the island and build ’til your island home becomes a virtual Club Med, but it takes carefully scheduling how to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes, work and repetition.
Unfortunately, the PSP version of the game does a horrendous job when it comes to determining what each Sim looks like. As a result, you’re practically stuck focusing upon the profession to dictate what someone looks like instead of trying to pick out a specific face, which doesn’t appear to change much anyway. Even these delineations seem sparse, with rangers packing the cargo shorts and high socks versus doctors wearing tweed sweaters and appearing very scholarly. Anyway, regardless of what you choose, your story unfolds in pretty much the same way; told via cell phone photos, you see your Sims having fun on the boat until they’re thrown from the vessel in the middle of a storm. (It’s strange to see a phantom photo taker snapping shots if you’re the only one on the boat, but I digress…)
Your Sim is guided by the analog stick with the remote pointer handling menu selection duties. While the usual drudgery exists – eating, pooing in the ocean – the plot-driven exploration focus is a neat addition. There’s real reward in uniting your castaway band – each member contributes skills from the jobs they held before they took a trip on the wild side.
Wisely, the hardcore survival aspect of Lost in Blue has been toned down. Konami’s moppets would kick the Sims’ collective asses in a survival-off, but we don’t think the mass Sims audience is ready for the grueling sight of their beloved gibberish-speakers eating sand, crapping their pants and being eaten by bees. Wise move, EA.
As we’ve already mentioned in previous coverage, Castaway follows a group of Sims who become stranded on a desert island during their tropical vacation. Now cut off from the world and devoid of the normal luxuries they are accustomed to in their suburban lives, these digital folk need to struggle to build new homes on the island and adapt to make the most out of their environment’s resources. For the most part, you have full control over one Sim at a time as you direct them around the island locales and instruct them to explore, gather, build and simply live. Most of the interface is intuitive in this regard, and using an item or gathering a material is usually just one button-press away. And while you do have to monitor the health of your Sim and keep them in good shape, micromanagement has been dramatically scaled back to emphasize accessibility and casual play sessions.
Electronic Arts was showing off more of its deserted island Sims departure, The Sims 2: Castaway, at GC 2007 today. The Sims: Castaway Stories, a separate product scheduled to arrive next year, was receiving good internal feedback at EA and inspired this spin-off. Instead of endlessly customizing your Sims and leading them through their suburban lives, The Sims 2: Castaway drops your Sims into the elements and requires you to help them survive in the wilderness. Don’t worry, though — it’s still a casual Sims title, and you’ll have to work pretty hard to make your character perish.
The Sims gang decided to take a cruise that ended up as a shipwreck. Your character (whom you’ll be able to create and customize) washes up on the shore of a mysterious island and must set about foraging for food and shelter. Luckily, you find books lying about left by other castaways that will show you the ropes of island living. Eventually the player will be able to escape the island — if they want. It’s up to them. If they end up thriving there they may not want to leave. This island comes complete with day and night cycles, weather, and seasonal changes.
One of the first things we noticed was that our female character’s clothes were in tatters. Her T-shirt was as substantial as a rumor and her pants were so short they were half belt. The presenter informed us that clothes degrade, so you have to make new ones, otherwise your character will get really uncomfortable and unhappy. A nearby villager was wearing pants made from banana skins. Another character had a surprisingly nice cotton shirt that he’d made from harvesting cotton on the island. While your fashion choices will be limited at first, you’ll have some interesting accoutrement options later in the game.
But if our girl was feeling insecure about her wasted clothes, she was feeling twice as hungry. In fact, she was so famished, she was about to die, so we headed to the water for some spear fishing. This was a simple game where we stood near a pool of fish, held our spear aloft, and waited for one to jump. When it did, we struck and wound up with a nice, fat tropical fish that we cooked then ate.
Remember the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, where he plays a guy stranded on a tropical island with only a volleyball for a friend? The Sims 2 Castaway isn’t based or tied in any way to that movie, but it could be the closest answer that gaming has for it. You’ll be trapped on a tropical island, but being a Sims game, you’ll also have plenty of things that you can do.
Like any Sims game, you can create your own unique sim. In fact, you’ll create a group of them and watch as they board a ship and go out on the ocean, only to have the ship sink and each of them wash ashore on different islands that make up an archipelago. You’ll then control one sim as you have a couple of choices. You can try to figure out how to survive and get off the island, or you can figure out a way to thrive and turn the place into a tropical paradise home.
THE SIMS 2 CASTAWAY OUT THIS FRIDAY
For the first time ever, your Sims can survive and thrive on an uncharted island
CHERTSEY, UK. – October 23, 2007 –Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) announced that The Sims™ 2 Castaway for the Wii™, the Nintendo DS™ and the PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system will be available in all main UK retail outlets from October 26th. The PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system will follow closely on November 2nd. New and old fans of The Sims™ will now be able to leave the urban jungle for an uncharted island filled with sandy beaches, blue lagoons, explosive volcanic mountains and more! Will your Sims choose to survive and thrive on a tropical island or begin planning their escape back to civilization? The choice is yours in The Sims 2 Castaway!
As The Sims 2 Castaway begins, players will have the opportunity to create a crew of Sims. And in true Sims fashion, each character brings a unique skill, humor and quirkiness to the crew, promising an entertaining adventure in this new island environment! Upon setting sail, a storm quickly approaches casting your Sims overboard on a beautiful beach all alone. Having no other items but the shirt on his back, your Sim will embark on a tropical journey, choosing to either subsist on the beautiful island or flee altogether. Will your Sim choose to reunite with the crew and enlist the help of clever monkeys to make a flourishing community with the Musician, Doctor, Park Ranger and more? Or will they follow the treasure map island to island in search of clues that will eventually lead them to freedom? How your Sims survive, or thrive, is up to you.
Studio Head of The Sims Label, Rod Humble said, “Whether you’re spending hours collecting resources to build the ultimate island hut, or passing time taming wild boars with your crew, there is a new adventure for all types of players this holiday season in The Sims 2 Castaway. The gameplay is magnificently tailored to each of the four platforms – we can’t wait to see how players are going to help their Sims survive and thrive on this beautiful, uncharted island.”
Regardless of their destiny, your Sims will explore a variety of new environments, from lush green jungles and dark spooky caves to forbidden plains and more! In addition to new environments, Nintendo DS players will also hone their Sims survival skills such as spear fishing, fire starting and bug squashing in one of the six fun mini-games. Whether your Sims are collecting unusual shells for crew members, crafting furniture out of palm leaves or creating dry shelter out of bamboo, what you build and collect makes all the difference!
The Sims 2 Castaway ships today on the Wii, Nintendo DS and PlayStation2 to retail stores across North America and Europe. The PSP version ships today across North America and on October 26th across Europe. For more information – and to check out the hilarious, recently-launched webisodes – please visit The Sims 2 Castaway website at www.foundthesims.com
The fear (or anticipation) of being stranded on a desert seems to be something inherent in the human psyche. Even before Desert Island Discs, Lost, Castaway, Survivor or even the DS’ very own Lost in Blue, there was Robinson Crusoe – supposedly the first proper novel in the English language.
We doubt The Sims 2 Castaway will have anything like the staying power of that almost 300-year old book, but if history of The Sims is anything to go by, it will spawn plenty of fan-generated tales of From Here To Eternity-esque beach romances, as well as fig-leaf-removing nudity hacks.
In development for DS and PSP (as well as an array of other consoles), The Sims 2 Castaway will place you in the position of keeping your sims alive, both in terms of protection from the elements, crafting tools, and dealing with the other forces found on their desert island.
Because, like Lost, this is one mysterious location. Hidden treasures and ancient mysteries are there to be uncovered – as well as providing a route back to civilisation that hopefully doesn’t involve the discovery that it was only a reality TV program after all.
The Sims 2 Castaway is due for release on DS and PSP this autumn, as is the new community-building DS game MySims.
PocketGamer – EA castaways The Sims 2 onto deserted DS/PSP island
Guides for The Sims 2 Castaway for PSP from GameFAQS
Gnome Cheat & Cheat List
You may enter the cheat at anytime during LIVE mode.This cheat will activate the knome cheat. A knome will appear in a different spot on every Island. To use knome walk up to it and press x. You can then access the other cheats you have activated.
- Left Trigger, Right Trigger, Up, X, Right Trigger —– Unlocks Gnome (activate first)
- Triangle, Left Trigger, Left Trigger, Left, Triangle —– Add Skills
- Square, Triangle, Right Trigger, Down, Down, Up —– All Craft and Resources
- X, Right Trigger, X, Right Trigger, X —– All Plans
- Right Trigger, Up, X, Square, Left Trigger —– Full Motives
- Square 4 times, Left Trigger —– Max current Food and Resources
- Left, Right, Square, Right Trigger, Square —– Max inventory
- Left Trigger, Up, Right Trigger, Left, Triangle —– Max out Relationships
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