SimAnimals Series
SimAnimals/Spore Hero composer ‘Winifred Phillips’ now on Facebook/Twitter
Jun 21st
Award winning composer Winifred Phillips is now on Facebook as well as Twitter! Perhaps you are not familiar with her name – that’s understandable…but if you play videogames, and enjoy the music, chances are high that you’ve heard of her work.
In the world of EA Games, she was the one responsible for bringing us both the SimAnimals and Spore Hero Original Soundtracks – but she has worked on many other games. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, Speed Racer, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, God of War, The DiVinci Code, The Maw, Shrek the Third (gotta give my love for this game as I am a fan of the movies) and even Little Big Planet 2! I’m sure everyone out there had to play at least one of those games. 
Back to the original point of this post, like I mentioned above she can be found on both Twitter and Facebook. She’s kind of new to social media, so if you have a minute, feel free to drop by either page and give her a warm welcome. I’m sure she’d appreciate hearing from you!
Winifred Phillips on Facebook | Winifred Phillips on Twitter
BayCHI – Easier Said Than Done: One Critic’s Painful Transition to Interface Design
Feb 10th
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.
GamesRadar – SimAnimals Africa DS review
Jan 15th
You’ll love
- Massively cute style
- Tons of fauna facts
- New multiplayer options
You’ll hate
- Not a whole lot else new
- Not very exciting
- Probably won’t hypnotize kids for long
C3 Reviews – SimAnimals Africa Wii
Jan 12th
A portion of the review by C3:
The animals themselves are rather adorable, ranging from the default zebra to furious rhinos, speedy gazelles and snappy, snappy crocodiles. Whilst the selection is fairly varied they all handle in similar ways; think puppy or kitten wearing a giraffe costume. SimAnimals: Africa didn?t need to be all correct to the laws of nature, yet there really needed to be more variety in the animals’ behaviours as an incentive to keep playing through. That said, they each have a distinctive move ? elephants can water your plants and produce more fruit, whilst zebras can kick things about ? but it?s still a very shallow affair.
Chron Entertainment – SimAnimals Africa review
Dec 2nd
The repetitive nature of the game play is a problem. Although there are 8 animals (the DS version apparently has 13), all the animals are effectively the same. Furthermore each of them acts like a dog. You make friends with animals by petting them (Lets ponder for a second the educational value of teaching Texan youths to “pet” digital crocodiles). All the animals have the same personalities and demeanor and react the same way to petting – for example did you know that Hippos twitch their hind legs when you scratch their sides? Educational.
Guardian.co.uk – SimAnimals review for Wii
Nov 25th
The immediate impressions of the game are actually quite impressive – the presentation is spot on, with evocative African music and pleasing cartoony graphics. The tutorial system too is effective – within five minutes you’ll have easily grasped the fundamentals.
SpawnKill – SimAnimals Africa Wii review
Nov 21st
Unfortunately, the Wii edition looks nothing like you’d expect from the machine. In all honesty, I’d liken the graphics to Nintendo 64 fare at best. Some animals have been rendered fantastically, and others should never have seen the light of day. Landscapes are bright and detailed, but this game could have looked much better. Hopefully that polish was put toward making the game better overall, and I believe it was. However, on the flip side, the soundtrack is absolutely well-done. Every animal sounds very much true-to-life, and you can even download the soundtrack on EA’s website should you become enamored with it during gameplay.
Picked up 6 new Wii games last night with SimAnimals Africa being one of them. Now I have…about 10 Wii games to play and 5-6 I have to review! Looking forward to playing SimAnimals Africa when I get the chance.
Black Friday 2009 deals
Nov 16th
Are you excited for Black Friday? I’m not…the fact of dealing with an insane mob of people rushing in to stores trampling over people should be outlawed in my opinion. Instead, I think I might participate online – or just wait until Cyber Monday to see what deals strike. Anyhow, if you’re one of the people who are brave – or crazy – enough to venture out on Friday, November 27… there are a number of good video game deals you can pick up for the gamers in your family.
- 11/19/09 – Added Military PX/BX deals
- 11/18/09 – Added deals from GameCrazy
- 11/16/09 – Compiled list
EA/Maxis Games
- Best Buy – MySims Kingdom Wii – $9.99
- GameStop – The Sims 3 World Adventures – $29.95
- K-Mart – Spore Hero Wii – $29.99
- K-Mart – MySims Kingdom Wii – $14.99
- Target – SimAnimals Africa Wii – $27
- Toys R Us – Spore Hero Wii – $24.99
- Toys R Us – MySims Kingdom DS – $9.99
- Toys R Us – MySims Party Wii – $9.99
- Walmart – The Sims 3 PC – $25
If you are interested in other gaming deals, you can find them after the jump (courtesy of CAG )! Keep checking back for more deals from other retailers!
BlogCritic – SimAnimals Africa Wii review
Nov 15th
A brief snippet from BlogCritics review about SimAnimals Africa for the Nintendo Wii:
The game has a strong concept, and with the neat African theme it really should have been better. However, the problem is that it all gets boring very fast. Even though it is not exceptionally long, one will be tired of the game before reaching the end. I finished it in only a few hours, and after the millionth time petting the zebras until they liked me, it was, simply put, boring. Everything is repetitious, especially the mini-games because there are really only two of them: a ring toss and a drum jumping game. Both are entertaining the first few times, but not after that. Perhaps if each animal had their own special mini-game it could have been spaced out better. There are only eight species too which is a real problem, especially considering the rich world of Africa they had to explore. In SimAnimals there were almost too many animals, but at least that never got very boring.
Gear Diary – SimAnimals Africa Wii & DS reviewed
Nov 15th
While I cannot say for sure what EA’s design goals for SimAnimals Africa were, I know what I have experienced in terms of differences from the original: on the good side the game is much better looking, and the controls and camera are much smoother. However, they have failed to take away the tedium, and while the DS version was much better in the original, they have toned down the DS experience so that now neither version is very good.
The core game play remains the same – you are playing a ‘god game’ where you control a small chunk of Africa that contains a variety of environments suitable for containing a wide range of native African animals. Your larger goal is to keep all of the regions under your control happy; and to do that you need to keep the animals in each region happy; and to do that you need to dive into each area and work on the balance between different animals and make sure the right plants are there in adequate quantities and so on. Sounds like loads to do, right? Sadly it fails to live up to the promise.
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