Archive for February 2010

Kotaku has posted an article discussing The Sims for the latter’s 10th anniversary:

One hundred million copies sold, 36 magazine covers and 100 game critic awards: The Sims franchise continues to thrive ten years after its launch, basking in the uncommon flattery of having no real competition.

 > “The Once and Future Sim” at Kotaku

Following GameSpot’s video feature about the 10th anniversary of The Sims that I reported on earlier, rival site IGN has posted one of its own. It’s worth a watch as it doesn’t cover all the same topics as GameSpot’s one:

(Please note the link below the player came with the embed code.)

UGO has posted a small feature covering its top ten ways to kill Sims:

10 – Death By Fire

There is no greater power to kill Sims than the power of fire. Everyone who owns a Sim game is sure to set at least one Sim on fire. Low cooking skills? Cook a steak, moron! Low on cash? You don’t need a smoke detector! Throwing an indoors party? Where are the bottle rockets, loser!?

 > “The Top Ten Ways to Kill Your Sims” at UGO

The latest episode of GameSpot’s video show Today on the Spot included a feature on The Sims’s 10th Anniversary, featuring Tim LeTourneau, John Riccitiello, Will Wright, Rod Humble and Lucy Bradshaw. They have posted the video separately, and you can watch it below:

The onslaught of features to celebrate 10 years of The Sims continues – in the latest, some of G4′s staff tell stories of their “favorite moments of digital depravity carried out against our Sim friends”:

A few weeks pass without incident until one day [my Sim] wakes up to find that his one bedroom, one bathroom home has transformed into a giant glass cube. Since having a guy slowly starve to death wasn’t all that interesting, especially to the rest of my town’s residents who would walk past his house everyday, I decided to drop in a fridge, a table and a chair every once in a while, and then take it all away after he had eaten and placed his dirty dishes/trash on the floor. After a while, his cube became a rancid, toxic, boxed-in waste dump.

 > “What We Learned From The Sims: We Are Bad People” at G4

VentureBeat has posted an interview with vice president and general manager of The Sims Studio Tim LeTourneau about a decade of The Sims:

VB: What has it been like?

TL: It’s been 10 years of the most fascinating virtual neighborhood you can imagine. Every one of the neighborhoods is the creation of an individual person. When you think about it that way, as a game where you create the experience, where you can create your own person, houses and neighborhoods, I think that’s why The Sims has endured so long. It changes so easily with the times because people can put themselves into the game.

 > “Interview with Tim LeTourneau on 10 years of making The Sims” at VentureBeat

GamePro has posted an article looking at 10 things about The Sims that have evolved over the last 10 years:

The jobs your Sims could have in the original The Sims always sounded interesting (Policeman, Professional Athlete, etc.) but you had no control over your Sim once they’d left the house. Sometimes you’d get a random Chance Card at the end of the business day, telling you your Sim had been fired or promoted; but that was about as fun as work got.

 > “Older and Wiser: How The Sims Has Evolved” at GamePro

EA has wrote a feature for GamesRadar about the ten best places for WooHoo in The Sims games, to celebrate the series’ 10th anniversary:

The Heart Bed

Though the act was disguised as the choice “Play In” for the original Sims, the heart bed has since featured more provocatively in The Sims 2 Apartment Life and The Sims 3 High-End Loft Stuff.

 > “10 best places for Sims sex” at GamesRadar