The Sims 2: Castaway (Wii, 2007)

Castaway might just be one of the best iterations of The Sims 2 on consoles yet.
To be fair, Castaway has a lot of the same features as The Sims series. You create a custom "sim" character with certain vocational skills and personal needs (such as hunger, fatigue, and social interaction), but this new game takes a creative approach to the use of these features. Rather than build a small group to live the life of a nuclear family in the same house, you create a crew of castaways who end up shipwrecked on a tropical island and must make a new home for themselves a la Swiss Family Robinson. To that end, you'll guide your characters to collect driftwood and other building materials, along with various wild fruits and vegetables to eat (some poisonous, some not). You'll also catch fish with a spear, fashion clothing out of tropical leaves, and build primitive shelters and even rafts to explore the surrounding islands. You'll also fulfill your characters' need for social interaction by either finding the lost members of your crew, or making friends with the local monkeys, who can be bribed with bananas and eventually trained to gather materials or food for you.

Castaway builds on the "mostly open-ended game with some goals" design that previous games in the series followed by also heavily emphasizing collection gameplay. You spend a great deal of time picking up stuff or harvesting supplies (in some cases, to build tools to let you harvest other types of supplies). However, you certainly don't have to pick up everything unless you're an obsessive collector type who has to discover every variety of plant, collect every type of seashell, or catch every species of fish. In many cases, you'll instead be exploring new areas in search of new materials and clues to advance, such as discarded books that contain plans for new items to craft, as well as random messages in bottles that wash up on shore.

If you can tolerate the collection gameplay, which occasionally gets a bit repetitive, the game actually offers a surprisingly varied experience reminiscent of games such as Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, or the Seasons expansion pack for The Sims 2 PC. All of those games were relaxing, leisurely experiences for players of all ages, and they let you interact with a colorful, nonthreatening world to accomplish your goals when you cared to. In Castaway, you'll basically always have at least a few different easy tasks on your plate to accomplish, as well as some slightly longer-term goals for which you'll need to collect a few more resources or make a few more discoveries to complete. Your sims do suffer from their physical needs, but they're generally easy to maintain. Likewise, some of the more advanced crafting recipes require your characters to develop higher skill levels in vocational areas such as body strength and mechanical skills, but these skills develop naturally as you continue to explore, harvest, build, and interact, so they're usually not a burden to deal with.

Castaway also offers a fresh new visual look that features slimmer characters with a more-stylized look. They're not necessarily better than the typically more detailed, more colorful characters from previous games, but they're certainly new, and they still move with the kind of expressive animations you'd expect from a Sims game.

The Sims 2: Castaway (Wii)-this is a great game if you like the Sims. This game is far more creative than the Sims 2 for Xbox. Maybe it is the whole survival angle. The fun starts with creating your Sims and designating a captain. Then comes the ship wreck and you find yourself alone on a tropical island. You have to survive somehow, find the crew, if they're still alive and get rescued. You get rewards, make friends with the chimps! It is really lots of fun. There is one limitation or flaw, if you will, you can only save one game at a time. You are not able to have multiple saved games going for different users or players.

Good, addicting - many layered game - endless versions are possible. When I read that many would muddle their way through this simulation once then they get rid of it, I was surprised because this can be played over and over again with each outcome being totally different. One does get tired of picking up everything in site and also having to eat eat eat! The mundane tasks of survival take up a lot of the time, slowing down the game - but I guess that's the nitty gritty world of real survival.

this game takes you away from it all you get so involved in the game and the characters you almost feel like you are there so many different storie to follow you could almost play this game and come out with a different ending everytime cant wait to see where i end up this time great game you have to get it

The game is not the same as we know it on PC, but very interesting. You must collect thing in order to satisfy basic needs, construct things, etc... I find the graphics, pretty poor, but gameplay is fairly easy to figure out. Having fun with this game... but it's a game to play alone.