Memory Pak: The Exquisite Weirdness of the Sims: Bustin ‘Out

I have forever I loved the house building and life simulation game The Sims. I’ve been on the train from day one, since I met the tutorial family, Bob and Betty Newbie, and found out that they could have a baby kissing for hours. Like in real life, of course.

In most people’s lives, I’d spend hours and hours building huge, hideous rectangles and filling them with stories straight out of a soap opera, except with more pool ladder related deaths than usual.

While playing The sims 2 In my parents’ spare room, I tried to recreate the Olympians from ancient Greek myth, before giving up in a panic due to how much incest was required. In The sims 3, I had a family that fell apart when the husband cheated on his wife with some slut they met in France, but the wife took revenge by running away with the butler. Who was a robot. In The Sims games, the stage is set for whatever weird story you want to tell, and all the tools are ready for you.

But conventional PC games, The Sims 1-4They are relatively normal, all said. Sometimes you will have alien pregnancies and vampire invasions, and some of the expansion packs explicitly add supernatural events, but it is also perfectly possible to live a quiet life in a cabin on the outskirts of town and avoid all the weird stuff. instead, have a totally normal existence where their children have simple origins and all die of old age. BOREDOM.

This is not so with the console-based Sims entries from Maxis and EA, which often stick more rigidly to a predetermined storyline and are completely insane. I have not played too many, because the quality differs greatly from game to game, but I did play a horrible lots of The Sims: Bustin ‘Out on Game Boy Advance. I learned in the years that I intervened that almost everyone, at least in my group of friends, has that Sims spinoff game that they have fond memories of, and also nightmares, so at least I’m not alone.

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 the console version, it involves befriending The Black Eyed Peas or meeting vampires and traveling through time. .

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

(Oh, and by the way, the main writer of all those games, Darby mcdevittHe would later go on to be a main writer on the Assassin’s Creed games and the narrative director for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. What career.)

The premise of The Sims: Bustin ‘Out, however, is that your character is visiting his Uncle Hayseed’s house over the summer, and you’ll have to earn money doing various work minigames in order to move in and buy your own decent house. furniture, rather than living in your barn. Haven’t we all bought a mansion while visiting family in the summer? What a normal thing.

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 to shop; and Olde Salty, a crazy fisherman. Who wouldn’t want to live with a guy you met just two weeks ago? Also very normal.

So far, Sims, right? After all, angry hippies and greedy gold diggers aren’t exactly new to the series. But when they present you with new and strange concepts: a murderous rooster on the loose in the city, an angry ghost who wants you to answer the riddles and the endgame, which makes you acquire riches, a mansion and maybe even a lover before. your uncle abruptly announces that you are an alien and forces you to get on a rocket; the game stands out as something a little more unique than usual.

My experience with Bustin ‘Out was, perhaps, what made it such a memorable game for me: I played it almost entirely after lying down, sitting at my desk, and listening. Pink’s latest album. The sensory trifecta of the game, the darkness illuminated by a single slightly seedy desk lamp, and the sweet hues of Pink are now all linked in my mind; I can not listen ‘Trouble’ without vividly remembering the lawn mowing minigame in which you can “accidentally” run over your uncle’s chickens. There’s just something about playing a spooky game at night, especially that spooky one specific to the kids’ games of the mid-2000s; amplifies rarity by at least 200%. Done.

It’s been ten years since we last got a weird story-based Sims game. There was a brief heyday where we welcomed Bustin ‘Out, Urbz, Life stories, Shipwrecked stories, Y The Sims Medieval Over the span of a few years, many of which were deeply flawed, lacking bottoms, or shallow, but all tried to revamp the well-known series in interesting ways. It makes sense that EA and Maxis are focusing their efforts on the major multi-million dollar selling series, rather than making cult-favorite spin-offs that aren’t even guaranteed to sell by the millions, and I certainly can’t reasonably expect them to return to things. weird, but anyway, I miss it.

Sometimes when I write my Memory Paks, I find that my memories are best preserved as perfect snapshots in time. I can’t replicate the feeling of playing Pokémon Snap in an after-school daycare with too many sticky kids and rugs that smelled like cat pee; even if it could, it wouldn’t be the same. In fact, that could be a good thing.

Other times, the memories of Memory Pak remind me of such great gaming experiences that I can’t wait to relive them, like the twists in Ace Attorney, or the first time Link exited the Temple of Time as an adult. There are memories, and there are moments, you see, some can be revisited and others not.

The Sims: Bustin ‘Out is not something you can revisit. It was a very specific time, place, and game, which was also a very specific product of its time. Is aged relatively well I guess, but I don’t think I’ll be playing it again anytime soon, I just wonder if we’ll ever go back to Maxis’ crazy side … or if we should. Perhaps the crazy days of the 2000s are best left behind.