Canceled Games
OMG Even More Concept Art!
Jan 2nd
Here’s some from the cancelled SimCity game for PS2 and Xbox and Urbz 2. There’s also a little bit from The Sims 3 using TS3 textures on Sims 2 stuff. This time by Suzana Brown.
Source: Ricon Del Simmer
My Sims is officiailly dead…
Nov 19th
We knew it was gonna happen and now it has. EA has removed everything MySims excluding the domain name on the mysims site. They’ve now made it into a generic Sims hub site, just like the sims 1 site.
Thanks to Rincón del Simmer for the reminder.
Goodbye Online Services for MySims
Oct 27th
If this isn’t a sign that the MySims spin-off of The Sims is dead, I dunno what is.
The decisions to retire older EA games are never easy. The development teams and operational staff pour their hearts into these games almost as much as the customers playing them and it is hard to see one retired. But as games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level — fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles — where it’s no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running. We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99% of customers playing our more popular games. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of the games and we appreciate your ongoing patronage.
November 26, 2011 Online Service Shutdown
MySims™ for PC
Source: The Sims Slovenija
EA Blowing The Dust Off Of Old Franchises
Aug 18th
According to ComputerandVideogames.com, EA is currently in the process of looking over many of their older and neglected franchises, thinking about bringing new life to some of them. Fingers crossed that SimCity is one of them. Oh what i would give for an HD SimCity that goes back to traditional gameplay of SimCity 3000. Fingers crossed!
Speaking to CVG in Cologne, the former EA Games boss stressed that the pubishing giant – which wowed showgoers with Battlefield 3, Mass Effect 3 and more today – needs more reasons than just updated tech to revive one of its many vault classics. “We do have a couple of old franchises that we’re looking at right now… reimagining them and bringing them back,” he said.
“We’ve got 25 years of good IPs and I’ve worked on a few of them in my career like Road Rash and the Strike series. So I have a strong affinity for a lot of the things we’ve done in the past.
Thanks to Rincón del Simmer for the tip.
MySims Agents 2 (canceled) boss details on Morgan
Nov 15th
Dentface, from MySims Wiki has shared with me a few more tidbits on the canceled sequel to MySims Agents. Posted yesterday, a number of concept art sketches were shared depicting the character ‘Morgan’ as a number of monsters.
Turns out the game was scratched in Fall of 2009 (same time MySims Agents was released as it is typical for studios to plan sequels when the first game is wrapping up) and that Morgan was the final boss of the game that could take on different forms like a Lamia, Black Widow, Wraith and a Tentacled Siren. Her human side gave subtle hints of what her creature form would be.
I’m curious to know what the storyline on this would be and whether it would involve Morcubus. Nightmare crown? I dunno, details about the storyline or other characters cannot be disclosed at this time.
SimMars Concept Art – a game that should of never been canned
Oct 13th
Why, Maxis & EA, why?!?! We know why, so you could go on to create the blockbuster hit: The Sims…and you know what, I thank you for that. Now just get back to work on SimMars! Reach back to your roots and work on the games you are most known for! It pains me to see we will never see the light of day…The closet thing we have is a mod for SimCity 4 but we want the real deal.
What brings this up? Well, one of the artists for the game (Ward Moore) published a few concept art pieces at his site.
SimMARS was intended as a role playing game, using KIM STANLEY ROBINSON Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) as an inspiration. The goal is to successfully colonize Mars using NASA inspired technology. The user had to creatively impliment the available martian resource and plan their living around the 6-month cycle of supply ships. (6 months being the time Earth launch to Martian arrival). Because of this premise, aesthetics revolved around the real world constraints of habitats and supplies being packaged and arriving in a chemical propelled rockets, arriving on the martian surface, after which they endure the corrosive effects of wind and radiation. Bots and Rovers are the preferred method of maintenance and travel. Coordinating assets and creatively recycling existing material creates martian civilizations.
SimCastle – another Maxis game that never was…
Oct 12th
Did anyone ever get the chance to play the kid versions of Maxis games? SimTown, Sim Safari, even SimTunes? I wish I could get copies of these past games just for collector’s sake. Speaking of being a collector, one of the most disappointing things to experience is the cancellation of certain products. We’ve seen it with SimMars and Simsville… But little was known about another game aimed at kids called ‘SimCastle‘.
According to GameSetWatch,
“[SimCastle] was a cheery medieval simulator based on the popular SimTown engine,” says illustrator Corey Keller, who worked on the game for the company’s “Maxis Kids” label (Toshio Iwai’s SimTunes).
A number of concept art images was released at Corey Keller’s website which you can view below:
Remembering Simsville…taking a look back – with pictures!
Jul 28th
SimCookie created an image gallery of the old Simsville project Maxis decided to drop in 2001. These pictures brought back memories, as the first time I saw them was in a PC gaming magazine. Heh, even though Maxis had a good excuse to ditch the project, I wouldn’t mind playing it.
Drop by SimCookie to see the artwork if you too are interested!
Impostering in Simsville
May 8th
Not a day goes by that I wish I could of played Simsville. Too bad it was canceled. Spore’s art director Ocean Quigley shares a moment of his time to show us what he accomplished in the game.
I’d just finished up SimCity 4, where we’d made our buildings using this technique called “impostering”. It involved building out really detailed models in 3DStudio Max, rendering them out to sprites, and then applying the sprites to simple geometry (often not much more than boxes).
For SimCity we used the simple geometry to sort the buildings, so that they would have 3D shapes instead of being flat textures.But impostering can do lots more. The camera can move around within constraints, and the simple geometry makes the textures look like really complicated models. And it allows for all kinds of illustrative styles in a 3D world, because the elements are really just fancy sprites.
Simsville (Old Cancelled Game) Gameplay Footage
Apr 16th
Who remembered when we first heard about Simsville? I do! It’s been ages, but the idea of merging the original Sims and SimCity together blew my mind. Too bad it was canned…however, various aspects were used in Sims 2 and expansions. I wish they could put out what they have as a free download. It’ll probably be filled with bugs, but I was looking forward to that game.
Anyhow, found this oldie on YouTube of footage from the game, thought I would share with you:
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Master Suite Stuff
Sims 3 Showtime
