Who is the Freezer Bunny?

Who IS that bunny who sometimes lurks the corners of TheSims3.com pages?!

Sometimes he’s toting a cupid’s bow and arrow, sometimes he’s dressed up like a leprechaun!

We’ve noticed many of you wondering who or what he is, and…what does he have to do with The Sims?

Many of you may remember him from The Sims 2. You might have seen him staring back at your Sims when grabbing something from the frozen section at their local grocery store. Or you might see him on any of your Sims’ clothing.
http://thesims2.ea.com/community/game_secrets_1.php

But where is he in The Sims 3?
Have your Sim kids dig out some toys from their toy box – you just might see a pink, wide-eyed critter. In CAS, you might see a kid’s tshirt with the bunny riding on a skateboard.

Last, but not least, visit his Facebook page!

Posted by SimGuruHydra.  I would totally love to own a freezer bunny like the one above.  Yeah, it’s a stuffed animal….so sue me

Meet the people behind EA Play public relations

Meet the way we (sites in general, mostly) get our news – through the public relations representatives at various EA departments.  Both Rachel Steinberg and Lauren Svensson are the ones responsible for sending out press releases and sending replies to our questions of the various games coming out of the EA Play label (Hasbro, MySims, The Sims, Spore and other EA casual games).  At the official EA Play blog, they decided to share with us information about themselves and of course, pics of their offices:

Here at EA Play, we’ve got a great family of people who are super passionate about making (and playing) video games.  We thought it might be kinda fun to introduce you to some of the real people who work here and make games for a living.  Each month, we’ll share a short profile of one of our coworkers so you can get to know the people behind the games.

First up?  Us!  The EA Play Twitter feed is run by Lauren and Rachel.  We’re no corporate robots—just two girls who love to talk about video games!  Get to know us a little bit more by checking out our profiles below, and feel free to give us a DM or @reply to say hi and introduce yourself to us too!

read about them at the EA Play Blog

WiiNintendo – MySims Camera DSiWare review

Have you ever gotten bored with your DSi cameras?  Well, if you are a MySims fan, EA has the product for you.  MySims Camera is essentially a camera “add-on” for your DSi.  You can either take photos from within the application or use photos already saved on your DSi system memory.  What do you do with these photos?  Add in MySims characters (8 available at the start) and draw on them.

The control is done entirely via the DSi touch screen (except for the ability to also take photos with the L or R buttons if you choose to do so).  The app starts with the menu screen that looks similar to the DSi Camera.  You get options to exit, get help, access your photo album, create or use a photo frame, take a photo, and edit a photo.  In the center, you can cycle through all the photos on your DSi system memory.  While inside the editing room, you get a menu bar across the top and left side of the touch screen.  Basically, you will choose a MySims character, change their size/angle/placement, cycle through to get a desired pose and expression, and that is it.  You can place up to 3 MySims in your photo.  You also have the option, as stated earlier, to doodle on your photo using pens of various sizes and colors. You can also use the eyedropper to use doodling colors that aren’t available by selection (red, yellow, blue, black, white, and rainbow). I honestly have no problem with the touch screen controls. It only seems logical for a camera application.

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Activision passed on Maxis & The Sims

We all know the end of the story. Activision today is one of the biggest and most successful publishers in the world and owns the rights to some of the most popular gaming franchises, including 2009’s blockbuster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

But Kotick said that his high-level management style has proven costly on occasion. For instance, when Activision had the chance to buy Maxis, the developer of SimCity 2000. He visited their offices and spent an entire day looking at SimCity 2000, which was said to be buggy and unpolished. He thought the only reason to buy the company would be for the game and the franchise so he didn’t even bother to look at another title codenamed Jefferson in one of the back offices. It was being worked on by Will Wright and it turned into The Sims. 

I don’t know what would have been better – the way it is now or if Activision had bought the company.  Personally I’m kind of glad it’s at EA…It’s been a pretty good run all the way up until 2007 when EA switched CEOs.  Bobby Kotick of Activision probably would have ran the Sims series into the ground faster than what EA could ever do.  I mean how many Guitar Hero games did they produce last year?  7?  I used to love that series, now I despise seeing the game in stores…

IGN – Activision passed on The Sims

BayCHI – Easier Said Than Done: One Critic’s Painful Transition to Interface Design

Last night, Jeff Green gave a special presentation at The San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI in which he dicussed his time spent on SimAnimals Africa and MySims Agents.  He spent 15 years in the journalism field before jumping over and spending ‘1 year of hell’ before jumping back out and becoming a writer and podcast editor for EA.  I was digging around on Twitter and found someone live blogging the event.  It’s not that interesting, but I enjoy Jeff’s humor so I’d figure I’d go ahead and post it.  Keep in mind that some of these tweets may not make any sense as…well the person was tweeting live.

Second #BayCHI talk: “Easier Said Than Done: One Critic’s Painful Transition to Interface Design” Jeff Green, EA

Green: critics vs. artists (by Spinal Tap)

Green: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ruDdcd8G-g

Green: … those who can’t teach PE review video games for a living

Green: Spent 15 years as a critic. Wanted to move on.

Green: “rotting rat in a shoebox for $20″ review

Green: “Game design is easy” search YouTube for Westwood College for game design

Green: Designed SimAnimals, MySims Agents

Green: lessons learned:

Green: Wii has unique problems: hard when game actions don’t correspond to input device actions

Green: had to find things to do justify being on the wii, but not feel contrived

Green: kids not paitent when devices don’t work reliably

Green: button controls serve as a good backup when other input modalities fail

Green: hard to deal with controller and still have a good user experience

Green: plumbob: a design accident

Green: plumbob started as placeholder art. needed to identify player, mood visually Wanted to use smiley face. Weren’t ready in time

Green: execs loved it!

Green: spent a long time designing interactions around actions and objects

Green: never told players what blue plumbob meant; assumed players would figure it out

Green: how to design interaction with other characters? Tried many plumbob solutions.

Green: Adopted exclamation point as icon. (Stolen from WoW) despite being inconsistent with rest of design.

Green: players got exclamation, didn’t get blue plumbob

Green: SimsAfrica: teaching kids to pet and feed lions.

Green: characters have motives; player needs to take care of them.

Green: how to get kids to understand motives?

Green: icons hard to understand.

Green: focus testing puzzle example didn’t produce consistent results.

Green: hard to motivate complex tasks without any instructions on the screen

Green: feedback of actions in another puzzle proved effective at guiding interaction without explicit instructions

Green: press doesn’t know and doesn’t care (and shouldn’t care) about the amount of effort goes into interaction design.

Green: things that affect experience, cost, people were often arbitrary, based on interpersonal relations of design teams

Green: hard to agree on what makes a good game

Green: not thinking about the greater good (of the team) often lead to failure

Green: technical opinion vs. manager’s priorities

Green: advice: think of the consumer frist, ALWAYS.

Green: if they have to “figure it out” you failed

Green: just because you did it, doesn’t mean it’s good

Green: just because it’s good, doesn’t mean a critic has to care. (That’s what you’re momma is for)

Green: manuals were written well before design was completed.

The Sims 3 on consoles, MySims Sky Heroes & Spore to have online support?

EA COO John Schappert said during the company’s Q3 financial earnings call Monday that “every one of EA’s releases will have an online component—both downloadable content and online play.” That goes for Dead Space 2, the two Need For Speed titles, and Crysis 2, as well as Fighting Title and Action Title. Everything.

Now, does everything even go as far as MySims Sky Heroes, the new Spore games and the various console/handheld releases of The Sims 3?  Cause if so, it’s about time!  There are a number of EA games that would of been perfect for online play – MySims Racing and MySims Party for one.  I wonder what online feature’s they’ll consist of…leader boards, a library of downloadable content (like the Sporepedia), a Sims 3 Store (no thanks!).  Better keep your word, EA.  I want to start playing your games online!  Source:  Kotaku

EA reports 3rd Quarter Fiscal Year 2010 Results; new MySims, Sims 3 & Spore coming

EA’s results of their 3rd quarter fiscal year 2010 is in!  The bad news?  They lost more money (like we didn’t see that coming).  The good news?  We’ll be seeing new games in the MySims, Sims 3 and Spore franchise announced soon, with a timeframe to be released anywhere between now to March of 2011.

We already are aware that The Sims 3 will be hitting consoles and handhelds…but we are still left wondering for which ones.  The new MySims game they mentioned is probably ‘MySims Sky Heroes’ that was trademarked last week.  The Sims 3 has a new expansion coming out for PC – but no information for that.  Oh, and Spore will be having two titles – one for PC and the other for consoles coming out as well, so long live Spore!  Hopefully the PC one isn’t a spinoff but I have a feeling it’ll be Spore Creature Keeper… 2010 is shaping up to be a pretty good year for Sim/Spore fans… Can’t wait until we start getting actual news to report on!

Breaking into the Gaming Industry with Emmy Toyonaga, MySims Concept Artist

Imagine the pressure of coming up with a character design for a game….The whole process begins with what you put on paper.  Just ask Emmy Toyonaga, the artist that is responsible for the way the characters look in MySims.  EA Underground published an interesting article in which they interview Emmy about her work with Maxis and EA.   It is fascinating to see how a person can go from recoloring couches for The Sims 2 to become a Lead Character Artist for the whole Sims Label, but she managed to pull it off.  Kudos to her, I love the way the MySims Characters turned out.

Tell me about that. When you created the MySims characters, where did you start?

Everything starts from design. The lead designer wanted characters that appealed to the Nintendo market and the game was to be more light hearted and approachable, so I tried to create something that would appeal to that market.

I referenced current Nintendo games and looked at urban vinyl toys as reference. The small characters resonated well with the team so we went with that. Also, in games and animation, I found that more cartoon-like, squat characters are used in light-hearted situations, and realistic and gritty characters work better for serious situations. Since the Sims characters have always been more realistic in style, I thought a lighter hearted version of the Sims should have characters that are small and cute, like toys coming alive.

What happens after you finish the concept art?

Concept art in gaming has multiple purposes. For characters, like on the Sims series, you draw the character and the clothing and get approval from design and management. It’s kind of like drafting out a building design before you build it. You make changes in the drawing so you don’t spend time fixing it while you’re building it.

The concept art then goes to the 3D Modeler, who makes the character out of the drawing. On MySims 1, in the beginning of the project, I was both the concept artist and the character modeler so I performed both tasks.

full interview

Playfish working on a ‘well-known brand’ from EA

So what’s will be the first project from Playfish now that they are owned by EA?  According to the following Gamasutra article, it is based on a well known brand.  Now of course this could mean it could be a Dead Space, Harry Potter, Need for Speed or any other game, but I’d love for it to have something to do with either MySims or The Sims series.  We already have  SimSocial on Facebook, and pretty much has been proven to be a dud so I hope it’s MySims related.  Of course it is all speculation right now…for all we know they could take their ‘Pet Societies’ game and slap ‘The Littlest Pet Shop’  label on it and call it a day.

Amazon’s DOTD (2/1/2010) – MySims Agents Wii & DS

I still need to pick up the DS version of MySims Agents and $15 sounds like a steal!   Hurry, as it’s only for today!