When Stephen said an eye needed to be kept out on the “Sims Gone Wrong” tumblr – showing the wonderful ways one of the biggest games on the planet can break – he wasn’t kidding.
The Sims is video gaming’s great virtual dollhouse, inside of which a bunch of virtual people are made to experience joy, heartache and weddings that spontaneously turn into infernos. I found out about that last incident this morning, while helping grab images for our writer Kate Cox’s terrific story about the pros and cons of marriage (according to video games.)
If you’re reading this, you probably wasted hours and hours of your youth on Simcity 2000. Chances are you also know the weird, off-beat soundtrack by heart. But in the ’90s, Will Wright’s Sim Franchise was massive, and SimCity 2000 was only one one game in a series that spanned subjects like healthcare reform and the lives of ants.
Sims modder Pixel Pixies brings a level of wholesome sex appeal to EA’s Sims 3 with her Marilyn Monroe skin, turning a modern family drama into a flick from the ’50s.
“I’m not sure if I want to have children.
“Maybe we won’t have enough money for a new house, or that extension you were talking about. What if I want a TV?
“Didn’t you want to buy all that furniture?”
Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind, wanting to start again? Do you ever feel like you wish you could just, I don’t know, deck out your Sims sim in Katy Perry gear, start a sim-music career and go on tour?
We know that the next game from Will Wright wants to create a unique gaming experience powered by data about how you live your life. Apparently, gamers, your lives include roughage in the bedroom and lots of booze-filled brony love.
Somewhere inside the Beltway today, copies of Just Dance 3 for the Wii and The Sims Plus Pets rode in a presidential caravan with the nuclear football. That, gang, is core game cred.
It looks like Will Wright might be going from manipulating tiny fake people to manipulating normal-sized real ones. VentureBeat’s got news of Hivemind, Wright’s experimental foray into what he’s calling personal gaming. As he describes it, the engines and/or algorithms that power Hivemind will learn and track events in your life and morph the game experience accordingly:
