The first patch for the latest expansion pack for the Sims 2, Bon Voyage, has been released. The list of fixes is still small, and if history repeats itself a bigger patch will be out later - probably a number of weeks or months. The six problems that have been solved are as follows:

• Sims will no longer have the option to call vacation service NPCs after acquiring the business perk "Head for Numbers" which was causing a crash.
• Sims will no longer have the option to "Call Taxi" using their cell phones if they have driven to the community lot with an own-able vehicle which was causing a crash.
• If the Sim misses the shuttle, it will no longer return to a vacation lot without the Sim at the end of the vacation. Sometimes, this caused the vacation lot to become unusable.
• Game will no longer create new vacation NPCs each time a lot is visited which was causing many issues due to character file overload. Any existing extra NPCs will be unlinked and their character files greatly reduced in size.
• Periodic Events Controller will no longer loop twice per hour through each neighbor which was causing extreme lag on certain machines.
• Autonomous water-balloon and snowball fights have been tuned so the interaction will occur less frequently.

Unlike previous patches, there is one patch for the CD, DVD and download versions of the game. Head on over to the Bon Voyage Patch page to download the patch at the cost of 15.9 Mb of bandwidth and hard disk space. Just run the file as any other program to install the patch.