The Sims Official Magazine, announced during the Maxis Live Broadcast, is now available to download for free for iPads and Android tablets:
If you’re a fan of The Sims looking to go deeper into the world surrounding your favorite game franchise, look no further than The Sims Official Magazine! This free and fully interactive digital magazine will offer you exclusive tips and tricks for decking out your Sims’ worlds, from remodeling homes to snagging the hottest gear and styling your Sims with the coolest fashions and more.
Here’s a video showing it off:
You can get from the iTunes App Store or Google Play by clicking the buttons on the website:
> The Sims Official Magazine
1UP.com is counting down the 100 most important video games of all time, and at number 33 is The Sims:
I’d be willing to bet that a lot of you found yourself in a similar situation that I did back in 2000. The Sims caused me to become fused to my monitor as I developed a sort of digital OCD for my virtual family. I had to make sure that their house was spotless, their lives were perfect, and their futures were bright. I spent hours upon hours pecking away at my mouse to meet this goal, until suddenly it hit me: Why was I cleaning up a virtual room when my actual room needed cleaning?
The results are in and it seems a lot of you only play The Sims 2 — about 26% to be more specific. But the next most popular answer was only playing The Sims 3 — about 17% for that one. Click below to have a gander at the full results, then return here to comment on them.
> Poll Results
The Sims 3 Supernatural was announced recently, with it allowing players to create one of four different types of supernatural Sim directly from the Create-a-Sim — but which one are you most looking forward to creating? That’s the question in this month’s poll. Vote to the right of any page, and if you have a particular reason for your choice that you’d like to share, vote with explanation. If I’ve received enough votes by then, the poll will end on Tuesday 7th August with the results revealed then.
PC Gamer has posted a preview of The Sims 3 Showtime:
To get the big gigs, your Sim has to somehow make contact with a venue owner and persuade them to let them have a try-out. Once this happens though, the game really ramps up. From here on in, players can start building their own custom stage sets, complete with themes, special effects, fireworks, light shows and so on.
That’s not all though, they’ve also interviewed executive producer Ben Bell. The interview focuses on the games and expansion packs in general, so don’t expect to learn anything about Showtime, but it’s an interesting read:
PC Gamer: How do you pick the expansions?
Ben: It’s a pretty organic process. One of the fun things about working on The Sims is that you can reflect on your own life and the ideas you find are totally relevant to the game. Very few people have fortunately been at war, so there aren’t that many human beings who can relate to that experience. Everyone can relate to the idea of wanting to be a star or basically to being a human being with basic human needs, so the first step is we look inward, at ourselves.
Today is the 12th anniversary of when The Sims shipped to US stores, and to celebrate, EA has released some fun facts about the series, including this:
THEY’RE JUST LIKE US
The average household family size in The Sims 3 is 2.93 Sims. The average US household size is 2.58.
Click the link in the tweet below to see the other fun facts — you’ll need a PDF reader.
Celebrate The Sims’ birthday and check out some fun facts! bit.ly/A5YD8m RT and say Happy Birthday!
Will Wright was inspired to create The Sims after he lost his home in the Oakland-Berkeley Firestorm:
The process of assessing his losses and material needs after his home burned down set Wright to thinking about the value of possessions and the promise they hold of fulfillment. Having always been passionate about architecture, he began to develop an idea for a game where players would simulate daily activities in a suburban household, including building a home from scratch: The Sims was born.
Shortly after Will Wright’s departure from EA, Tristan Donovan conducted an interview with him for his book “Replay” – a history of the game industry. The interview has finally been published on the internet, and it has some quite fascinating information about how The Sims came to be:
I’ve read that home design software was the inspiration.
WW: I was always interested in architecture, and so one of the original things that was a really inspiration for The Sims was this book, A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander. He’s very much into trying to apply formula. He’s a physics guy that went into architecture and was frustrated because architecture wasn’t enough of a science. But at the same time, he’s got a very interesting humanist side. He felt all the principles of architecture should be clearly reducible back to fundamental principles, which is what he kind of tries to do in that book.
According to Joystiq, Will Wright has said that a previous game of his, Sim Ant, was a key inspiration for The Sims, and the basis of its gameplay:
“We decided to program Sim Ant as close to how real ants work as we could, which means that they’re actually responding to pheromone trails, and the intelligence is distributed environmentally,” Wright recalled when asked how The Sims came about. “We were able to get very complex behavior out of the ants just using these pheromone distributions. So I started to wonder how much of human behavior I could simulate the same way.” As it turns out, a lot.