Well, technically it’s not “wine,” it’s nectar. But the new nectar-making skill fits the France theme in World Adventures perfectly. Some other theme-appropriate features include cafes, scooters and a general air of snootiness among the local Sims of Sim France.

Oh, and don’t forget about the tomb-exploring. That’s the main thrust of the World Adventures expansion. In France, the tombs have a Celtic and Faerie theme to them. So tell your graphics card to expect lots of intricate carvings on walls and fountains.

Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.

This review was submitted by Ben Latimore, his second byline on Kotaku following his Quake Live review. If you’ve played The Sims 3, or just want to ask Ben more about it, leave your thoughts in the comments below.

The Sims 3 (PC)

We’ve come to love the little computer people, with the whole Sims series selling 11 million+ copies. Does this live up to the good name of the series?

Loved
Open World: Sunset Valley is the new environment of the game. There are lots of places to go and see. And there’s another city for free download. It’s all seamless too – get a bike and ride to the park, or the beach, and there’s NO loading screens.

Smarter, More Unique: Many new systems are introduced in The Sims 3, including Moodlets, Wishes, Traits and even hidden skills, such as chess or hacking. There’s even Opportunities for rewards and new stuff everywhere, not to mention Lifetime Bonuses. You’ll enjoy guiding each Sim through a completely unique life. Promise.

Even More Customisation: Nearly anything is customisable here – wall textures, patterns, Sim clothes, Sim body features… anything.

Aging Off: There are lots of miscellaneous details that will appease fans, including the abilities to place furniture on multiple angles, the good old Ctrl+Shift+C motherlode for newbies, branching careers, and my personal favourite – aging can be turned off.

Community Content: Content created by the community can be accessed using the launcher interface and downloaded by anyone, and you can upload anything from Sims and houses to blogs and videos. Not only is the system flawless, it’s also FUN.

Hated
Not Much Else: I could say there was bugs, but they’re gone. I could say the lack of ‘true’ multiplayer is a downer, but they tried that already.

The Sims 3 keeps an awesome blend of the old, introduces a crapload of the new, and pulls it off in such a great way, I’ll be back time and again. I recommend this to anyone who can actually play it.

You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 300 words – yes, we’ve upped the word limit. We’ll publish the best ones we get.

How much it lost is either a little or a lot, depending on which accounting principals you prefer to hold your publicly traded companies to. EA raked in $US644 million its first quarter of the 2010 fiscal year, down from the $US804 million it took in the year prior. That’s a $US234 million loss, going by GAAP. It’s a $US6 million loss if you’re going non-GAAP. Regardless of your personal accounting compass, John Riccitiello seemed pleased with the company’s results.

He points to strong sales of The Sims 3, which sold 3.7 million copies during its first month on the market. The company was similarly proud of its Wii Fit competitor EA Sports Active, which helped the publisher double its Wii sales, selling 1.8 million copies during the quarter.

That title, along with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, EA SPORTS Grand Slam Tennis and Rock Band 2, helped the company secure a 21 percent share on the Wii in North America, a 13 percent share on the Wii in Europe. Not too shabby for a third party!

EA will hold an investors call today to talk more about this money making business, which we’re about to listen to.

The Sims 3 World Adventures introduces several exotic new locales for your little fake people to visit, all based off of real-world locations. China, France, and Egypt are represented in Shang Simla, Champs Les Sims, and Al Simhara respectively, allowing your Sims to explore strange new lands, hunt for treasure, meet new people, and discover new styles unique to each region, bringing foreign influence into your happy little town.

The expansion will bring with it exclusive online content, with the Mac and PC versions including 1,000 SimPoints that can be used to purchase said content. The expansion should be in stores the week of November 16th, with iPhone and mobile versions due out in early 2010.

I’ve never been a Sims fan, but I have to admit that The Sims 3 struck a chord in me. When I’m not playing it, the game isn’t far from my mind. Thing is, it’s the character interaction that keeps me occupied for hours, so I could care less whether I get to go to Sim-Egypt or Sim-China. I find the aspect of cultural exchange fascinating, however. It makes me want to send random Sims off on vacation, pay no attention to them, and then see how they’ve changed when they return.

Oh god. I’ve become one of them, haven’t I?

While the top-selling console game was Prototype, with 419,000 copies sold, EA shifted an impressive 820,000 copies of The Sims 3 in the US market. And that number only includes the copies sold via traditional retail channels (stores, major mail order outlets), so when you factor in digital sales, the number may well be approaching the million-sold mark.

That’s a more successful launch than the Sims 2, which “only” moved 700,000 units in the US in its first month on sale. And considering The Sims 2 is still a heavy-hitter in the PC market, we can only imagine/fear what kind of success The Sims 3 will have.

Obviously, the game stopped the NPD Group’s monthly sales charts for June, but if you’d like to see what ran 2-20, the full chart is below.

1. The Sims 3 (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
2. The Sims 3 Collector’s Edition (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
3. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
4. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (Blizzard Entertainment)
5. World of Warcraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
6. Spore: Galactic Adventures (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
7. World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment)
8. Spore (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
9. Empire: Total War (The Creative Assembly, Sega)
10. StarCraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
11. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (Blizzard Entertainment)
12. Reel Deal Slots Adventure (Phantom EFX)
13. Civilization IV: Complete Edition (Firaxis Games, 2K Games)
14. WarCraft III Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
15. SimCity Box (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
16. Diablo Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
17. The Sims 2: Apartment Life (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
18. Prototype (Radical Entertainment, Activision)
19. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GOTY Edition (Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks/2K Games)
20. Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Terminal Reality, Atari)

Exclusive: The Sims 3 Breaks 800K, Tops U.S. Game Sales In June [Gamasutra]

The solution to the illegal copying of video games perhaps isn’t a law enforcement task force or volley of lawsuits, but the legitimisation of the act itself.

Last week news broke that The Pirate Bay, one of the largest websites in the world dedicated to the illegal downloading of video games, was being purchased by a business group in Sweden with plans on turning the site into a purely legal operation.

Global Gaming Factory X doesn’t plan on stopping the downloading of video games, but rather hopes to make enough money to pay the publishers for those downloads.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site, ” Hans Pandeya, CEO Global Gaming Factory, said in a prepared statement. “The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary.”

The news comes just months after a nine-day trial against Stockholm-based Pirate Bay found four guilty of making copyright content available. The four were sentenced to a year in prison each and were fined more than $US3 million.

While heralded by the Entertainment Software Association, the ruling and even the possible closure of The Pirate Bay would likely have little lasting impact on piracy. That’s because it doesn’t address the people pirating games, just those making it easier to do so.

Billy Pidgeon, an analyst with Game Changer Research, feels that piracy can only really be dealt with by some meeting of the minds.

“I hate to hear the industry talking about how they have to crush piracy, throwing down the gauntlet,” Pidgeon said. “The last thing the industry wants to do is alienate their customer base.”

People saying that they deserve to take a game for free, Pidgeon adds, is just as absurd.

That’s why Pidgeon was so delighted to hear Electronic Arts’ reaction to news of their game, The Sims 3, being pirated.

Three weeks before the game was released for sale, it showed up on pirate sites.

John Riccitiello, the head of EA, told Kotaku that they were initially very nervous about the leaked title.

But because the game relies so heavily on online play, something EA can control, gamers who grabbed an early, free version of the title didn’t get the full experience, only a taste.

In the end, Riccitiello said, EA decided to think of it as the publisher putting out a really good demo of the game, instead worrying over lost sales.

“That’s great, I love to hear them talk like that,” Pidgeon said of EA’s take on the issue. “Super distribution (like piracy networks) can be turned into an advantage. It’s not necessarily lost sales.”

In other words, when you can’t beat them, use them.

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

By 9000, as seen on Offworld

But it doesn’t. Not really cranky, anyway. EA boss John Riccitiello can see the positives in the piracy, and provide a refreshingly realistic outlook on the effects of piracy on a major game release.

“You identified our secret marketing campaign!” Riccitiello says, jokingly, to IndustryGamers. “That was a very large scale – concentrated on Poland and China – demo program.”

“In the game that was pirated there’s [only] one city [out of two]… and Sims 3 has a massive amount of content, and a lot of it is downloaded once you register with EA… and join the online community” he elaborates. “So you get that content in addition to the second city [which is downloadable for people who register], and that’s a major component… A huge amount of the gameplay is an overlay for the community, where you are sampling assets created by other people”.

“So for the pirate consumer, they don’t get the second town, they don’t get all the extra content, and they don’t get the community. It was only concentrated on Poland and China, but I think of it as not being that different than a demo.”

Man has an excellent point. It’s like the old shareware model that companies like id used to specialise in. Give ‘em half the game, get ‘em hooked, and they’re more likely to buy the rest.

Works for publishers in terms of sales, works for publishers in terms of combating piracy.

EA Views Sims 3 Leak as ‘Demo Program’ [IndustryGamers]

Alice and Kev are the creation of UK game development student Robin Burkinshaw, who decided to see how the old poverty challenge idea from The Sims 2 played out in the recently released The Sims 3. Robin set the pair up in a lot made up to look like an abandoned park, gave them a couple of park benches to sleep on, and then stripped them of their money to see how they would fare in the simulated world. Thanks to some insightful writing from Robin and The Sims 3’s new living community and traits system, the story of Alice and Kev is nothing short of completely enthralling.

Alice is a good-natured, affection-starved girl with a penchant for falling asleep anywhere imaginable, while Kev is a crass, inappropriate miscreant who blames his daughter for all of his failings. Their adventures are often as completely heartbreaking as they are humorous.

I mentioned that Alice is feeling stressed out now that she’s a teenager. When she was a child, she used to always get her homework done on time, worked hard every day at school, and got constant A grades. She would often come home from school feeling strained, and the only way she could relax after working that hard was by cuddling her teddy. She’s too old to cuddle teddy now. All she’ll do is hold him, but gets no enjoyment from it. She can’t even pretend that somebody loves her any more.

See? I am tearing up just re-reading that bit right now.

Alice and Kev have gained quite a following since Robin launched their blog, which is kind of depressing in and of itself, as you generally won’t find a real homeless family on the receiving end of this kind of attention. Perhaps the fake family will help raise awareness of real families in similar situations. If not, perhaps they should.

You can follow the entire story so far at the link below, where you can also download Alice and Kev, placing them into your own Sim town to see how they get on.

Alice and Kev [Robin Burkinshaw via BoingBoing]