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The Japanese version of Will Wright's Sims - for the Wii - is already up in Japan - and it imports your Mii characters from the Wii to create Sims from.

Yes, they're adorably cute, and very manga or anime influenced.

More info at The Sims website - follow the Wii link.

If you go to the Sims website, you see a link now for the Japanime version of the Sims for the Wii (which I would guess they're going to call Wii Sims unless they are clueless.

It's hyper-cute.

Japanese-only at this point, but let's hope they don't region-encode it since so many US and Canadian gamers can handle it.

I'll reply with the link to the Japan site once I figure it out.

Limbaugh said he reviewed four different video games and found "no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures."

Obviously Limbaugh never heard of The Sims, or read any of the stories in The Sims Exchange, where players have uploaded more than 50,000 families with their stories, each of which certainly qualify as free speech.

The Sims has much in common with web publishing tools, word processors, graphics editors, 3D CAD tools, storyboarding and movie production tools, all of which essentially support free speech, storytelling and public expression.

The Sims supports the expression of free speech in several ways. You can take pictures of the scenes in the game, collect them into your family album, and write stories about them. You can create your own characters, props and scenery, construct sets with the built-in architectural tools, and direct the plot of your own story as it unfolds on the screen. You can take snapshots and write text to record your stories, and share them with other people.

The Sims lets people of all ages produce illustrated web pages about their house, family, and an album telling their story. It lets you upload your web pages and games to The Sims web site, were many other people can read the stories, and even download and play with the families.

The Sims is an example of a video game that essentially supports free speech, which should clearly be protected by the Constitution.

-Don

It was a Loki problem, too...I tried really hard to buy their games, but they never released a single game I was genuinely interested in playing, and buying games I didn't play to support them got old fast...

Yeah. I've got about five that I bought, but I wasn't really interested in them.

Now, I am interested in The Sims, so I'm very happy that they did a WINE bundle with Mandrake Linux!

I'm not an OS purist about games - I like buying one disk that works for Mac, Win, Linux. And I want to buy what I'm interested in.

Is that so wrong?

-

thesims.com uses PHP and Oracle, and had to be done in not much more than a month, I believe.

The Sims uses Pie menus. Click on a character, and various actions you can do pop up around his/her head. Clicking on an action sometimes brings up a second, similarly styled menu. Aside from the excessive use of Comic Sans MS font, The Sims has an interface that's very easy on the eyes and very easy to use.

~=Keelor