Mina Rose here! I’m excited to announce the release of The Sims 3! EA’s done it again, making the newest installation of the Sims one of the highest anticipated PC games to come out in a long time! This sequel takes place in the town of Sunset Valley. Yes, it’s only one town right now, but after you register your game, you can download the town Riverview. It also will have online interaction! Whoo!

Something I’m not too excited about is the Sims online store… The whole idea of paying money to buy my Sims couches, clothes, accessories, or game applications seems really silly. Of course, like all of the other games, I will be creating my own game content and putting it into my game. BUT if you really wanna know more about EA’s online Sims store, here’s what I’ve learned:

“To get you started, EA will give you 1,000 SimPoints in your account. You can purchase more SimPoints in 500-, 1,000-, and 2,000-point packages; 1,000 SimPoints costs $10, so basically think of it as 100 points as costing $1.”
The store will feature exclusive items made by the creators and development team. There are 5 sections, and I also read that you can shop in different ways. You can buy whole sets, different room sets, or items individually.

I just bought the game today, and haven’t had time to play it. I’ll be sure to write a follow up article, and post pictures of my character, as well as a video of me playing it.
For now, I’m outtie!

Yours cruelly,
Mina Rose

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Maybe it’s neat, childish, lucky, ambitious and insane – just depends on what traits gamers choose for their neighborhood of virtual playthings in “The Sims 3,” Electronic Arts and Maxis’ popular life-simulating game for the PC and Mac.

Executive producer Ben Bell said it will focus more on social behavior than ever before.

“‘The Sims 3′ is a huge step forward for us,” said Bell. “You can create incredibly detailed people who have real personalities that you get to design using a feature we call personality traits. By combining words, you can create a new kind of a person that has totally different desires in life and then you get to go fulfill their destiny in the game.”

Unlike previous editions in the series, every character will live their lives simultaneously in the fictional town of Sunset Valley.

Bell said “The Sims 3,” available June 3, will also feature a moviemaking tool and more options for players to customize their Sims’ homes, furnishings and clothes. Gamers can even turn their Sims into kleptomaniacs.

“A Sim who has this trait is going to have wishes in life to steal things from other people,” said Bell. “They also have the ability to sneak into a friend’s house, walk into a room where nobody happens to be hanging out and maybe swipe something. One of the fun things I’ve seen people on the team do is build up a whole household of stolen things.”

In perhaps a case of life imitating art, a pirated copy of “The Sims 3″ has already been leaked on several file-sharing Web sites two weeks before the game’s launch.

EA said the pirated version “is a buggy, pre-final” version of the game.

“It’s not the full game. Half of the world – an entire second city – is missing,” said spokeswoman Holly Rockwood in a statement.

Electronic Arts has announced it is publishing “The Sims 3″ without restrictive anti-piracy software known as DRM, a form of copy protection that requires online authentication.

(Newsweek) – Will Wright and his buddies are terrorizing the city of Berkeley again. They walk down University Avenue, sending their 250-pound “Reality Robot” into cafes, art stores and shopping centers. The robot is, frankly, deranged. Equipped with a microphone, speakers and artificial-intelligence software running off a 1-gigahertz IBM ThinkPad, it’s just babbling things like “I feel your pain” and “I like to drink beer.”

But demonstrating the robot’s nascent intelligence isn’t the point of this afternoon’s adventure. On one level, this is a TV pilot–the crew is videotaping the endeavor, perhaps for pitching as a reality-TV show (“When Good Robots Go Bad”?). But the real goal, explains Wright, designer of the computer games The Sims and SimCity, is to gauge people’s reaction to an alien, mechanical intelligence in their midst. “This is meant to be an experimental tool to uncover aspects of human psychology,” he says. And in that respect, the escapade is a success. One man in the cafe wants to behead the robot for blocking his way; a woman suggests the robot wear female clothes. Later, a grandmother asks to have her photo taken with the robot, and when the photographer begins shooting, she starts muttering, “Sexy, sexy, sexy.”

So what’s the guy behind two of the most popular videogames ever doing on the streets of Berkeley, Calif., when he should be furiously working toward the December launch of the hotly anticipated The Sims Online? This is the 42-year-old Wright’s other project, an unbridled creative collective called the Stupid Fun Club, which occupies a 3,800-square-foot warehouse along the Amtrak train tracks in Berkeley. The club, which is funded entirely by Wright and has two full-time employees and a small army of part-timers, falls somewhere between a think tank and an incubator for wildly innovative TV ideas. The concepts are eccentric, genre-busting–and all focused on Wright’s first love: robots. And if the reactions of TV execs are any indication, the Stupid Fun Club could be the vehicle that finally takes Will Wright, the Cecil B. DeMille of the videogame world, to Hollywood.

Wright has a long history of following his curiosity and swimming against the tide, with consistently successful results. As a novice designer of videogame shoot-’em-ups in the 1980s, he spent two years trying to sell the idea for SimCity, a player-controlled simulation of a dynamic metropolis. In 1987 he hooked up with entrepreneur Jeff Braun to form Maxis Studios and produce the game. More than 18 million copies of SimCity and its sequels have since been sold. Throughout the ’90s Wright moved on to his next big idea: The Sims, a living-room simulation where players control avatars who do exciting virtual things like… clean the floor and take showers. Focus groups and even his own colleagues didn’t get it. But The Sims and its many add-ons are now the best-selling PC videogame franchise in history.

Wright’s earliest passion was building machines, not software. A fixation on creating model ships and airplanes during his childhood in Georgia led to building mechanical creatures like Mr. Rogers, a three-wheeled robot with ultrasonic sensors that traveled around Wright’s house mapping the rooms and radioing readings back to his Apple II. The point of his robot building, like his games, explains Wright, is to watch how people identify with and humanize his artificial creations, and then test how far those perceptions can be stretched. “Will has an interest in things that test people’s tolerance,” says a friend of his, artist Marc Thorpe. “He has an amazing appetite for understanding the human condition.”

Check out Will Wrights new project at www.stupidfunclub.com.

(CNET) — In an industry dominated by men, leave it to women to come up with the winning idea in a contest to create a concept for a video game about losing one’s virginity.

Two women won a contest this week to create a concept for a video game about losing one’s virginity.

On Wednesday, at the Game Developers Conference here, the two-woman team of Heather Kelley and Erin Robinson won the Game Design Challenge with just 36 hours of preparation, while their competitors had weeks to come up with concepts for a game about “your first time.”

This was the sixth straight year of the design challenge, hosted annually by New York-based game developer Eric Zimmerman. The contestants are generally top-tier game designers like two-time winner and Spore and The Sims creator Will Wright, Deus Ex lead designer Harvey Smith, or 2008 winner and Leather Goddesses of Phobos creator Steve Meretzsky.

The contestants are generally given several weeks to come up with a concept for a game based on some sort of unusual challenge posed by Zimmerman. Past themes have included a game about love, a game based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and a game that could win the Nobel Peace Prize.

“We are in a medium that is just incredibly plastic,” Zimmerman said. “We can put anything up on the screen…Still, we find every year that most of the money being put into games is put into a relatively narrow (set of) genres” that tends to include monsters, dragons, and the like.

Zimmerman added that the purpose of the challenge is “to think about how we can create games that really break away” from what’s been done so many times before.
(more…)

Since most us here over at Busy Gamer spend a big chunk of our social time in cramped office rooms, we obviously wish we were playing more games instead of planning our yearly events and next game reviews to tackle. Yeah, we actually have to perform some sort of work around here, it would be great if we could twiddle our joysticks and money would fly out of our butts. Well, maybe anyhow…

Regardless, one of this year’s most anticpiated releases will be Sims 3, and according to EA today they are pushing the game back to the fourth quarter to ‘ensure the best marketing representation’. Well whatever that means, what I’m saying is that we here at BG headquarters love to delve into the world of the fast simolean lifestyle to create some better, and much more interesting life encounters. Actually I prefer to create all of my friends in the game, trap them in a room with no doors, give em a coffee machine and let nature take it’s course. Hehe, call me a sick b*stard but I think it’s damn funny.

This is what it looks like we are getting from Sims 3 sometime this year (from The Sims website):

Explore a Seamless, Living Neighborhood
Your Sims can roam throughout their neighborhood, visit neighbors’ homes, and explore the surroundings. They can stroll downtown to hang out with friends, meet someone new at the park, or run into colleagues on the street. If your Sims are in the right place at the right time, who knows what might happen?

I’d like to see them add some GTA4 features, sometimes you just don’t have time to court your neighbor’s wife, you just want some ahem “comfort” and some increased “social” points, so what if it costs you 30 Simoleans?

New Create a Sim
New easy-to-use design tools allow for unlimited customization to make truly individual Sims. Determine your Sims’ shape and size, from thin to full-figured to muscular—and everything in between! Choose your Sims’ facial features, their skin tone, hair color and style, eye shape and color, and select their clothing and accessories.

Seems fairly the same as the others, probably better graphics and emotions. I think they have done a great job in the past. I’d like to see better tattoos, and maybe some scars. Hey, we here at Busy Gamer like to flaunt our battle wounds.

New Personality Traits System
Create realistic Sims with distinctive personalities. Select from dozens of personality traits and combine them in fun ways. The combination of traits you choose—brave, artistic, loner, perfectionist, klepto, romantic, clumsy, paranoid, and much, much more—help shape the behavior of your Sims and how they interact with other Sims. They are complex individuals with unique personalities who can now rise above their basic set of everyday needs.

How about crazy psycho ex-girlfriend trait? Oh wait, we are trying to get away from real life.

New Customize Everything
Build your dream house and design the ultimate home. Customize everything from floors to décor, shirts to sofas, wallpaper to window shades. It’s fun and easy to change colors and patterns, giving you endless personalization options. Or you can choose to easily populate your Sims’ neighborhood with pre-designed buildings and furnishings. Which of your Sims will live in high-end mansions, cool bachelor pads, ultimate dream homes, or cozy cottages?

Of course we like to re-build our infamous “Trailer-House of Doom” we spent our early twenties in. Now that’s putting some flavor into the game.

Over all, I can’t wait until it hits Xbox 360 (which I couldn’t see it not landing on). Hopefully it will feature some crossing over to my friends neighborhoods, messing up their house and sleeping with their wives and girlfriends. Oh wait, it is supposed to be unlike real life…haha.

-Crutchboy out