Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a transcript of John Walker’s dinner conversation with EA Sims VP Rod Humble. Like all interesting dining chats, it covers a lot of ground.
And this bit from Rod Humble shows that the Redwood City campus isn’t staffed by corporate robots.
The one game that affected me, and it didn’t stop me playing […]

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I was playing Kane’s Wrath with a friend a couple of weeks ago and mentioned that I thought Command and Conquer 3 was the best AAA strategy game of 2007. Like a lot of people, he thought I was crazy, at least until I mentioned that I wasn’t including expansion packs. Let’s face it - […]

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The cover story in this month’s Games for Windows is the grand unveiling of Sims 3. Writers Sean Molloy and Jeff Green seem to be very pleased with what they’ve seen, and I’m already wondering how it will run on my numerous machines. Seamless neighborhoods, a community that evolves on its own without human intervention, […]

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My review of Sims 2: Free Time can be found on the new and improved Games Radar. It’s a decent expansion - nothing like the joy of Pets or openness of University. And most of the stuff it adds is covered in one way or another by other expansions; do we really need a hobby […]

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March 19, 2008, we get a preview of The Sims 3.
I am an unabashed Sims fan. Every time I load a new expansion I get hooked all over again. Even when the expansions aren’t that good, or are just more of the same, the underlying game is beautiful in both its simplicity and its frenetic […]

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At a lunch meeting I was not invited to, Firaxis designer-in-chief Sid Meier told Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal that he’s fine with EA buying Take Two.
We worked with Electronic Arts ten years ago. We respect them highly as a company. They’re a great company. We enjoy working with Take-Two. We’ll let them sort that out.
If an […]

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Spore may be delayed.
Damn you to hell.

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Jeremy Greenfield of Gamers With Jobs has just posted an interesting summary of his attempt to drive a city into the ground in SimCity: Societies. He found, as many critics did, that the system was too forgiving of screw-ups and that it may be harder to kill a city than to create one.
Thanks to the […]

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A few months ago I wrote a piece on games journalism for The Escapist. Not a bad little article, though it didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked. In it, I had a throwaway line about how the success of The Sims is still a story but no one seems to be […]

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The fruit of my brief trip to EA Headquarters ten days ago can be found now on Gameshark.
A lot of people will not like this game. Societies turns its back on so many SimCity assumptions that the hardcore city building audience will be astonished. Not that this is a bad thing. I agree with Rod […]

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