Flashback: The Sims Bustin' Out GBA and N-Cage

The Sims Bustin’ Out came out on GBA on December 16, 2003, and N-Cage on May 12, 2004! (it also came out on PS2, Xbox, and GameCube around this time, but we’ll cover those later.)

The GBA and N-Cage versions of The Sims Bustin’ Out had a lot of firsts in the Sims Franchise.

It was the 1st Portable The Sims Game.
The Sims Bustin’ Out was the 1st Open World! Sims game.
It was the 1st Sims game to let you control your Sim directly using the directional pad.
And it was the 1st Sims game that let you explore outside of the house!

The Sims Bustin’ Out takes place in SimValley. There are mission tasks which progressively unlock new minigames and jobs for the Sims as they are completed. After some mission tasks you can even unlock new areas to explore and new houses to live in! Minigames are games like darts and jobs like lawn mowing. There was also lots of shops you could buy stuff and lots of restaurants you can eat at.

The Sim Creator and Sim Relationship Syste, which first appeared in previous The Sims games, return in to the GBA and N-Cage versions of The Sims Bustin’ Out. Both versions of The Sims Bustin’ Out were nearly identical but the N-Gage had an exclusive feature that allows Sims to collect three cartridges from various locations and play classic games such as Snake on the Sims’ mobile phone!

The 2nd Portable The Sims Game is The Urbz Sims in the City. We will do a post about this later! A Remastered Collection of these portable The Sims games would be great! The portable versions of The Sims are some of my favorite Sims Games! I hope in the future they make more open world style Sims Games!