The Sims 1 Series
The 100 Greatest Games?
Apr 1st
The Jaded Gamer compiled a list of their take of the 100 Greatest Games of all time. You’d figure Maxis would have some of their games on there. Well, they did as both SimCity 2000 and The Sims (1) made the list.
Their take on SimCity 2000:
In SimCity 2000, you can be the mayor of a city with dirty air, lousy schools, a struggling economy, high taxes, and rampant crime. Yet no matter how much your sims hate you, nobody will ever run against you, so re-election is always assured. In that regard, it’s kind of like being the mayor of Buffalo.
No wait, actually, it’s exactly like being the mayor of Buffalo.
Their take on The Sims:
Once I discovered that my Sims were just as happy living on their front lawn as they were in the house, it really made me wonder why I had bothered building a home for them in the first place. This in turn made me wonder why I had ever bothered building them a nice city in the Sim City games. It’s one thing when you play a game and think it was a waste of your time, but when you play a game and it makes you think that other games you had previously enjoyed were also a waste of time, that’s really quite an achievement.
Allakhazam interviews Luc Barthelet of EA Land
Mar 31st
Allakhazam was lucky enough to snag an interview with Luc Barthelet, a Senior Vice President of EA. His current project is EA Land, a revamp of The Sims Online. Many questions are asked and some new details were announced. If you’ve never been familiar with EA Land, then check it out – it’s completely free! Here are a few questions from the interview.
AutumnKiss: With all of the changes being planned and executed, how do you think the future of EA-Land will fare in comparison to past disappointments?
Luc: I hope we will be able to implement user content games and user content editors inside EA-Land in the next few months. This will have a huge impact on the overall game.
AutumnKiss: Editors? As in, true custom content?
Luc: Yes. Rather than using external 3D program, users will be able to create chairs, sofas, tables, etc within the game with shape editors and materials.
We’re incredibly excited about the amazing things the players have been able to do thus far with custom content.
One thing we’re close to releasing (it is still in internal testing) is that players can change how the picture on their bio looks! We’ve been working hard to make sure what we do is very user friendly. For example, for the bio pics, players can simply upload a picture, and once it is approved, they can drag it to their bio.
The History of The Sims
Mar 19th
Can you believe it? The Sims series is 8 years old, and still going strong with The Sims 3 around the corner in 2009. If you’ve been reading the site and keeping up with the Sim news, the series is so huge it became it’s own EA Division. Eurogamer takes a look back of the history of the Sims discussing how the game became to be, the many spinoff’s that were born and what’s in store for the future.
What the…”Songs In The Key of Simlish” Tribute CD?
Mar 9th
This seems extremely fishy to me. Vitamin Records is selling a Tribute CD called “Songs In The Key of Simlish” with various tributes of artist’s songs in Simlish. I haven’t heard a single announcement about this before…is this legimate? I’m no music buff, so I have no clue…
The Soul of The Sims, glimpse of how Will Wright designs games
Feb 20th
Don Hopkins posted an interesting article of what he found while searching thru his old paperwork. He managed to stumble across the prototype coding for The Sims, and with premission from Will Wright, was able to release some screenshots of it. Yeah, it’s nothing of any use, to be honest. The game has changed a lot since Will wrote the code, but it’s a cool find nontheless. Check out the images here.
GDC 2008: Almost 100 Million Sim Games sold!
Feb 19th
Steve Seabolt, EA’s vice president for The Sims label has informed us that sometime next month will mark the 100 million mark in the Sims franchise.
“The Sims is a highly successful entertainment brand,” Seabolt said. “In fact, we’re coming up next month on selling our 100 millionth unit of The Sims, so it’s mega mega. … We make so much money from The Sims–it is so profitable–that unlike other businesses, we don’t have to sell it out with advertising and sponsorship and flog the user with advertising to make money.”
That is a ton of copies…and a ton of money spent. Looking on my shelf, I think I have spent near $400 near Sim games alone in the past years. This count the SimCity Games, Sims 1 plus expansion and Sims 2 plus expansions (and the stuff packs).
Who knew such a small little hobby would cost so much? There is only one thing I cannot justify. If that many people have been introduced into the Sims series, then why is it the twenty co-workers at my work have no idea what I talk about when it comes to PC gaming?
Oh, on a sidenote, enjoy the image I made, LOL 
Source – Gamespot
The Sims Online…now Free!
Feb 12th
I remember playing TSO back when they had their 14 day trial when it was released. It was actually pretty fun, but the lack of any custom content and the fact that you have to pay monthly killed it quick. Well, that is no longer the issue (unforunately it is 5 years to late, but better late than never).
What is EA-Land?
I would like to introduce you to EA-Land, a world that is free-to-play, and based on a re-engineered The Sims Online architecture. Yes, free.
If you played The Sims Online before, we have played together and I would like you to rejoin us in the game: My avatar is MaxisLuc (yes, I work for Maxis/EA). At the beginning of last year I assembled a team to improve The Sims Online. After months of ongoing hard work, we can say proudly that we have been successful and we have made this game fun again!
- Former Members Of The Sims Online: You can come back for FREE right now by just downloading the game and REACTIVATING your account. If you do so before March 2008, you will get your earned ‘account based’ privileges back (gifts, skill locks etc…) when we run our ‘amnesty’ program. So make sure you are in game before that event!
- New to EA-Land and The Sims Online: Sign up for free!
EA-Land will host all of The Sims Online cities.
The Sims Online (TSO) was made of 12 different cities (AlphaVille, Blazing Falls, etc..) and we are moving all of those cities inside EA-Land (this is called ‘the merge’ by the users!). We have a huge new map: it is 100 times bigger than the previous size of any city. We had to add a whole new zoom level to let users see it. The internet is faster now than when TSO was launched, so we have been able to let each house have more simultaneous visitors. A lot of new users are constantly joining us and we expect more. If you played TSO before, I think that you ought to own your lot in this new land, and I want you to have the ability to grab the best location before we open the gates. As an EA-Land subscriber, you will be able to have several Sims in the same “city” unlike in TSO where you were limited to one Sim per city.
EA-Land has been re-designed with Smart Users in mind.
We have a blog where we explain all the things we are working on and the events we are running in the game. We also have a very active wiki web site, named “Game Blueprints“, managed by the community where you can work with others to design the game. We have already implemented many features designed by the users! The stratics forum community continues to be very active.
We have made some big changes already to the game, and many more are coming over the next few months. It is difficult to say which ones of the recent changes are the most important as users have different reasons to play the game, but let me tell you about the changes that I particularly like:
Custom Content
Users have now the ability to upload custom content. Like in the original Sims game, the goal is to let you customize the game completely, but in EA-Land you can see and buy the customizations of the other players! Players have already uploaded several thousands pieces of custom content. I suspect that by some time this year, all of the content of the game will have been replaced many times over by custom content. We started with the ability to upload bitmaps (easiest for the new creative users), then moved on to chairs and sculptures. You can now make your own portraits in the game and “skin” objects like in Sims2 but using your own images. Because we are approving all of the content, this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone! We are working with the main user web sites that have been providing custom content to the Sims users for years (e.g. http://www.TheSimsResource.com) to make sure that their content will be made available in the game.
New Economy
We heard from the community that the economy was broken in TSO. That was true, too many users were billionaires, and the goal of the game was mostly about extracting money from Maxis. I can now say with satisfaction that we have fixed the economy on EA-Land. This took many features, from establishing a real estate market, where users can easily buy or sell lots to one another, and a dynamic object pricing market where the prices of objects purchased from maxis is based on supply and demand, enabling stores and entrepreneurs to earn a living. We also enabled users to buy simoleans directly from Maxis. While there is no need for users to do so in the game (we give subscribers simoleans every week), it can help new users build their dream house faster with a simple paypal transaction secured by us.Web Services and Social Networks
The internet has changed so much since the launch of The Sims Online in December 2002, we had to change the way we think about online games. We have opened the access to most of the in game information to the internet through web services. For example this enables you to add Google or Yahoo widgets to your computer (or iPhone! ) and see if your favorite lots or friends are online.We are providing you with privacy settings so you can decide if or which of your avatar will broadcast what information to the internet. Sims User web sites are already using this feature to create some amazing community sites. We also built avatarbook, to show how that information can be seen and connected to social web sites like Facebook (login to face book and add the “avatarbook” application.
You can search MaxisLuc for example: http://apps.facebook.com/avatarbook
And there’s more to come! We are looking forward to seeing you in the game and having fun with us!
Sincerely
Luc Barthelet,
“MaxisLuc”P.S: This game is continously in development. if you find that you have problems login or installing the game, please check the pages on this site: login issues.
History on Making “The Sims”
Jan 18th
Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, an interesting article was posted about the history of The Sims and the difficulties Will had to go thru (as mentioned in an earlier post). It’s a lengthy read, but it goes quite in-depth and does shed to light what it has been like behind the scenes.
“The Toliet Game”
Jan 18th
Would you play a PC game if it was called “The Toliet Game”? Before you answer no, think twice. That name was the nickname to The Sims before it became a huge hit. Will Wright had to work on this game in secret due to the fact of being shot down by Maxis when he came up with the idea.
“It was a battle, the first few years, inside Maxis,” said Wright. “It was referred to as ‘The Toilet game’. It was the game where you clean the toilet.
“We had a product review meeting at Maxis where we had to decide whether we’d publish this thing or not…and the executive said ‘No, let’s do [something else]‘.”
I wonder what those same people are thinking now…or even if they are still employed. A little creativity, even if it doesn’t sound good on paper, can lead to a major sucess in the end.
Source: Eurogamer
A look back at my older Sims 1 work…
Jan 15th
I miss creating objects for The Sims. I had a very good process going, but then Sims 2 came along and everybody jumped to that bandwagon. I couldn’t keep up with the switch and ended up loosing my ability of creating objects.
Back when The Sims 1 was around, you could find a lot of my work on many sites. My objects are/were on 7 Deadly Sims, the 8th Deadly Sim (Adult Sims Paysite, NSFW), Livin-It Up, The Sims Resource, Sims On a Stick, and possibly some more that I may have forgotten about.
Thanks to a Yahoo Sims Group called Saving the Sims, you can download all of the objects that I created from Livin-It Up. I don’t believe they exist anymore, so this is possibly the only place now to grab them. Check out the picture below for some of the objects I created in the past.
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