Universal Binary

Game Media

By Brad Cook

Whether your taste in tales of stranded travelers runs toward “Gilligan’s Island” or “Robinson Crusoe,” you’ll find a bit of both sensibilities in the stories of David Bennett, a luxury yacht crew member looking for companionship, and Jessica Knight, a Sim City journalist on assignment but also in search of a relationship. Both have boarded a ship headed for Club Meet Your Mate resort.

The Sims Castaway Stories

Choose to play as David or Jessica and find out what happens when the ship sinks near a seemingly deserted island. Guide your Sim through basic survival skills, such as gathering food and chopping up wood for a fire, before you can learn more about your new home and the wild — and not-so-wild — inhabitants living there. Luckily, a trunk washed up on shore with you, so you have somewhere to store food and wood supplies; it even came loaded with a few books so your Sim can brush up on their cooking, cleaning, and mechanical skills.

You may be cut off from civilization, but Castaway Stories allows you to barter supplies for accessories ranging from a simplistic lean-to the Two Tickets to Paradise Canopied Bed. You can even trade for a vintage “Destruction Day” pinball machine, which was created by the people working in the secretive research lab you’ll learn more about during the story. As in other Sims Stories, you also unlock rewards by progressing through the story and by doing well in your career, which is limited to crafting, gathering, or hunting in this game.

Building a Social Network

Relationships in Castaway Stories include the non-human variety, as you’ll discover while searching the island. For example, you’ll need to make peace with a local group of orangutans if you want to take the idol sitting at the base of their tree. (Said idol functions much like the volleyball in the movie “Cast Away.”) And watch out for the hyenas, a temperamental group of canines who nevertheless make good pets, if you can figure out how to befriend them. Of course, you’ll eventually meet other Sims, both castaways and local natives. Together, you can build a new Sim community and take David and Jessica’s stories beyond their conclusions.

In free play mode, you can explore everything Castaway Stories has to offer; just make sure you unlock the rewards in story mode first. Use a pre-existing Sim or create a new one and explore Wannami Island, which features a Castaway-themed night club, a village, and even a market where you can trade resources for clothes, food, and stuff for your hut. Don’t forget that you can also download bonus items at the Castaway Stories website.

As in other Sims Stories games, free play mode allows you to build new homes and customize existing ones through the Build menu. While many of the objects have a tropical island theme, such as rusty portholes for windows and bamboo-framed doorways, you’ll also find the “Big Entrance” shop window, among other modern fixtures.

None to Dispute

In addition to streamlining the gameplay mechanics by introducing keyboard shortcuts for important commands and making relationship development easier, Castaway Stories was designed for quick sessions. The game runs in a window, allowing you to check e-mail and surf the Web while playing, and its graphics were optimized to run on laptops, so you can take David and Jessica’s drama anywhere. Castaway Stories even features a laptop battery indicator.

So come with us to a remote island location and get ready to find your guy or gal Friday, build a new civilization, and discover secrets hidden deep in the jungle. We’ll leave you with this quote from the poet William Cowper, who in 1782 wrote this about Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor whose four-year exile on a deserted island inspired Daniel Defoe to write “Robinson Crusoe”: “I am monarch of all I survey; / My right there is none to dispute; / From the centre all round to the sea / I am lord of the fowl and the brute.”

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Climbing a palm tree.

See Anything? Your Sim quickly learns how to climb trees to gather coconuts and have a look around.

Sleeping under the canvas.

Sleeping Under the Stars. Since there are no clocks on the island, that continuum of suns and moons below your Sim’s picture indicates the time of day.

Sims on the beach.

Island Clubbing. Chatting up one of Wannami’s natives.

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System Requirements:

 

Cheat If You Must

Castaway Stories uses many of the same cheat codes found in The Sims 2. As in that game, hold down the Control, Shift, and C keys at the same time to open the cheat code box. Type a code and press Return to activate it. To quickly return to a previously-entered code, press the up arrow. To stop entering cheat codes, type “exit.”

Note that you shouldn’t use a comma in any codes that ask for a number. Cheat codes are only available in free play mode.

The Codes

motherlode — get 50,000 Simoleons

kaching — get 1,000 Simoleons

unlockcareerrewards — unlock all of the selected Sim’s career rewards

aspirationpoints(#) — replace “#” with a number (but keep the parentheses) to give the selected Sim that many aspiration points

aging off — keep all Sims on the lot from aging; type “aging on” to restore it

maxmotives — max out the motives for all of the Sims on the lot

aspirationlevel(#) — replace “#” with a number between 0 and 5, with 0 dropping the selected Sim’s aspiration meter into negative territory and 5 maxing it out

slowmotion # — replace “#” with a number between 0 and 8 (keep the space after “slowmotion,” but don’t worry about any parentheses), with 0 being the slowest game speed possible and 8 being normal game speed

 
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