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Sims 2 Goes Gold
Dan Farina writes "The long awaited 'The Sims 2' has gone Gold, as seen on the latest posting on Maxis' The Sims 2 updates page. It appears that it will be on time after all, an unusual occurrence in this industry." I'm already having a strange obsessive twitching in my left leg. I think I might need to use up some vacation time in September.
It appears that it will be on time after all, an unusual occurrence in this industry.
I'm sorry what did you say? I was busy playing Half Life 2.
Wil Wright has just finished work on his Money Printer 2.0 (TM). Much like his original Money Printer, this will allow Wright access to enormous sums of money, and all he has to do is insert the monthly "expansion pack" to print even more!
This sig has been stolen. Return it to its original user for a reward.
Anyone else ever thought that the sims was a glorified doll house game?
Probably why I never play it... dolls and doll houses don't interest me. I'm not saying it shouldn't interest you, it just doesn't interest me.
Money cannot buy happiness, but can buy something soo darn close, that you can't really tell the difference
http://thesims2.ea.com/images/screenshots/screensh ot_91.jpg I hope we finally get to see some ACTION! Or at least make an adult patch..pleeeasee ;)
You don't need to call off, you only have to go to work every other day to not get fired. I always hate when the boss calls to yell during the middle of my nap after a long morning of weight lifting, doesn't he know that's only going to make me skip work the day after tomorrow too?
Seriously, it looks like they did a great job with this game. Don't know if I'll like having my sims age and die on me but we'll see.
Also gamespy has a brand new interview with Will Wright about the game.
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
I played The Sims when it first came out. First, I loved it. Then, I ended up realizing that I was neglecting my real life chores in order to make sure that I played the game and got my Sims to do their chores.
I'd like to play The Sims I some more, but what I want is a way to get the base game + all the expansions in one easy box. I don't want to buy a $30 game plus 5 or 6 expansion packs at $20 a piece. If I can plop down $50 for everything, I'd do it (on my Mac, Aspyr). There is "The Sims Mega Deluxe", but that only has 3/7 of the expansion packs.
I don't need a prettier version, I enjoyed the game play of the first one a great deal.
Sequels by wal-mart style developers (like EA) usually are on time when you consider the main part of the game has already been made.
It would be far more poignant to ask how late the first one was!
Anyone know when, if, there will be a Linux / Mac whatever version.
They could have paied monkey boy for the year they were late to do a port and ship the binaries on the release disk.
That's probably about a extra 10% to the market, or mabe upto 20% if you look at the minimum specs.
Mac and Linux have less games so they get more bang for the advertising buck, so they could possibly end up shipping 25% to Linux and Mac.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Damn Sims, people who play this sucky game are the same fancies who watch Survivors and cry when their favourite drops out. Or watch Queer Eye For Idiots to get tips on how to dress. Real men play Doom3 and Half-Life 2, when they are not training to become better ninjas.
Only way for The Sims to become playable for us Real Men, would be to include ninjas and pirates ( also replace all relationshipstuff with killing, and "build your own house" should be changed to "destroy your neighbours house").
I've had it with you linux-loving, Sims playing fairies, I will no longer read any other website than the best page in the universe. You can keep on discussing about the latest Barbie's Pony game and when it's linux port is coming out.
( I don't need to include the smiley, now do I? )
Are you freaking kidding me?
Sims2 was due out in _MARCH_ originally.
Not only that, it was supposed to have precursor tools/applications out in Nov 2003.
The project in fact is about 6 months overdue.
PLD.
Right, user created content. The expansion packs are bought less for the extra content but for the extra capabilties given to content creators. New type of chairs, new types of clothing. It may sound strange but the original game had some severe limitations on what kinda seating you could have. You could create a low seat but any sim sitting on it would float.
So why are Mac and to a lesser extent Linux versions important? I think it is save to say that the Mac crowd has a higher percentage of people who like to create artwork. Linux has a higher percentage of coders.
It is telling that a lot of the free content sites I visited had very clear instructions for how to use their content on the mac version.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The Sims Franchise Celebrates Three Years at the Top (feb. 2003)
The Sims franchise has shipped over 24 million units, including more than eight million units of the core product, The Sims.
Since the launch in 2000, The Sims franchise has spawned five expansion packs and a deluxe, console, and online version. The Sims has been translated into more than 17 languages and is sold worldwide.
According to The NPD Group, The Sims base product was the number one selling PC game in 2000, 2001, and 2002.
The Sims franchise games held five of the top ten spots on the 2002 best-selling PC games in North America chart, released by The NPD Group.
The game's long list of honors has included being selected "Game of the Year" for 2000 by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences and by numerous other publications in the United States and abroad. The creator of The Sims, Will Wright, was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in February 2002, joining such industry legends as Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto. Will Wright has also been recognized by ISDA in 2002 for his extraordinary body of work and enduring legacy he has established in the interactive entertainment industry.
Are they doing the merchandise yet?
I want to get one of those green diamond things above my head!
It is also one of the best selling games of all time. Any game company with a brain would love to have a game like this. It is like having a money press in the basement. Just keep pumping out tiny little version improvements (the expansion packs) and reap the money. Just check the sales charts of the last few years. Not bad for a game engine wich even at launch wasn't that hot.
The most amazing story about The Sims is that no-one seems to have tried to copy it. You got the recent "Singles" and that is it. There seems to be a market for a non-violent, non-competitive game yet all we get is more FPS with extra-gore. Don't get me wrong I LOVE GORE. Just not all the time. Sometimes I want to play a nice game where I can control a households of lesbian teenage girls and get them to pee their pants in sync. Is that really so much to ask?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ulrik
But ofcourse this is possible. In Sims 1, there were numerous ways to send you Sims to Sim-graveyard:
- Lock them inside a room with a nice flaming fire, near some combustable furniture.
- Make them swim, then take the ladder away.
- Starve them in a room.
- Give them a guinea pig for a present - guaranteed fun !
Heck, if there ever was proper modding for the Sims 1 (creating objects yourself, it never arrived...), I bet people would even find ways to generate some attributes that would make this more 'easier'.
But somehow I got the feeling that Sims blazing around the house with uzi's, bazooka's and the ever-so-funny boobytrap behind the new door was not the intention of the original Sims creators.
However, now the Sims 2 is out, perhaps they put out some more of those long-promised development tools for Sims 1 ?
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I bought the original Sims when it first came out, more interested in the actual concept and implementation than the gameplay. Anyway..my girlfriend at the time tries it out and gets hooked. The creepy part - she's built a model of my apartment with me and her as characters. One day she comes into the room crying - apparently my character spontaneously combusted. We didn't last much longer after that :)
My favorite thing to do in the first Sims was to get my Sims addicted to Linux. Then I would switch them all to Windows and watch them slowly die. Good times.
Oh yeah. That is fun.
All games get old really fast. The trick is not to make the gameplay to varied. It is to make the basic gameplay so much fun that people want to do it again and again and again. Kinda like sex. Except is usually a lot easier to cheat in a maxis game.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
My biggest hope for Sims 2 is that it won't take my Sim 15 in-game minutes to walk from the bedroom through the living room to the bathroom. I mean, I have my sluggish days, and my house is big, but...
We talked alot about the Sims and TS-Online in my philosophy class. We were having a discussion about human nature and virtual reality, and whether it would eventually lead us to a more enlightened era or if we would sink further into the dregs of humanity. I used The Sims to show that if there were no repercussions, people are generally going to do bad things - TSO is a haven for prostitution, crime and just all around deviance. Hence, we pretty much came to the conclusion that human nature is to do as much as you can get away with... So aside from spending hours on end playing the sims, you are also taking part in a really cool psychology and philosophy experiment. Check out the Second Life (formerly Alphaville) Herald for some more insight. http://www.alphavilleherald.com/
Bullshit. All it means is that we keep getting more and more free time and we don't know what to do with ourselves.
And as far as Asian culture goes. The Japanese are addicted to dating simulators and who do you think MAKES anime. Not to mention the endless dramas on Japanese television. And an amazing number of video games come out of there too. Then we have Hong Kong. Come on. You've never seen a HK Action flik? Those are about as far out as you can get.
And I don't know the numbers, but Korea is, one of, if not the most wired country in the world. And do you know what they do with it? They have a computer in their homes, then go out to a PC Bang (PC room) to play Linage, Linage 2, or Starcraft for hours at a time, then decide which hotel to stay the night at with their boyfriend by which hotel has a computer in the room. How much more addicted and withdrawn from real life can you get? I know Japan isn't quite as bad, but they like their video games too.
I won't comment on the Arabic world, but I think they'll need to stop killing each other before they do much more than control a lot of oil.
I do agree that Asia will over take the western world, but I don't see the western world declining as you say, I just see their economy growing much faster than ours. We've just become laxidazical about staying out front.
Just a quick blurb on family and religion in Japan and Korea (these are the only countries that I can personally vouch for), but if you ask a Japanese person what religion they are over 90% of them would say none. And in both Japan and Korea the family is just what you call people you live with because you never see each other. The mom/wife is the only one that will see everyone. The husband will generally work all day, then go drinking with co-workers until late (several times a week) and MAYBE come home that night. Then you have the child that goes to school followed by cram schools (to learn everything else they should have learned in school if they were taking another 4 classes) followed by a couple hours of homework...I don't really see much of a family there.
Finally, I'd like you to name one city (anywhere in the world) that couldn't be hit by a well planned air strike by an extensively trained, well funded group that has no problems with knowing they won't live though the mission (Knowing you'll die doing this mission no matter what goes a long way in how far in you can push).
Disclaimer: All of this is very general and is not ever case or even close to it, but I've seen all this happen WAY too often not to mention. (Can you find the part that I've actually done?)
"Curiouser and Curiouser" - Alice
I think the success of games like the Sims and the near-inevitable success of its sequel point to the increasingly fragmented nature of the gaming demographic.
In the past, it was simple. You had PC gamers and console gamers. The former mainly played simulatorss, strategy games, fpses, "Western" RPGs and the more "highbrow" sports games. The latter had platform games, beat-em-ups, "Japanese" RPGs and the "arcade" sports games. There was a bit of crossover and plenty of people owned both a PC and a console.
These days, I follow what would once have been the "mainstream" games for both PC and consoles. The games I've been excited about include Doom 3, Half-Life 2, the next installment of the Final Fantasy series and pretty much anything from Bioware. However, in terms of games sales, I represent an increasingly insignificant force. The Sims and its expansions represent an entirely different gaming demographic all on their own, reaching out to a group which would never have been marketed to in the past, but who have brought a whole new level of purchasing power. Similarly, we've seen much-ridiculed genres such as the "deer hunter" games spring up and be largely ignored by the classic "mainstream" gamers, but go on to huge commercial success.
I don't think this is a bad thing; it's just an inevitable part of gaming moving further into mainstream society.
That news is freydushey!
(When my wife and I purchased The Sims, we found the language they were speaking, "Simlish" to be really funny. Every time one of the characters got excited about something, she'd use that word. Then we started using it. "Honey, this pie is freydushey!")
...that you're NOT supposed to judge the market by yourself. If I was an exec presented with this game, I would have sent them packing. [Insert que of music exec turning down Beatles here] I tried it for a little while, and I must say I simply didn't get it. I still don't get it. I probably never will get it. It feels like a crappy DIY reality show. Then again, people play solitaire too. If I do, my mind goes "boring. Boring! BORING! B O R I N G ! ! !" Ah well, wouldn't be any fun if we were all alike anyway.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
i used to start my wives sims game and put heavy metal music and horror movies on and let it run all night. she hated that. the simes would have lost almost everything and were crazy as hell the next day. i can't wait to see what i can do with the new sims. lol.
Visit the Mother Site !
Why do people keep saying that The Sims 2 is being released on time? It was delayed AT LEAST once from its scheduled March release, and I think possibly once before then.
I wish I could find the article to link here, but I can't, I thought it was on gamesutra but I can't find it there either.
Anyway, I just wanted to comment that I read an article about how the game was designed a couple of months ago and I thought it was very interesting. Basically the objects have all the code, and the sims have minimal coding. The expansion packs (for the most part), just contained new objects with new code that the sims reacted too. I thought this was a really neat and insightful way to code the game.