The Sims Message Board

Creepy Sims Santa doesn't care if you've been naughty nice. He's partial to either, especially when it's on the living room floor.Read more...

EA’s recently-announced The Sims 4 may in fact be a new Sims game, sources have revealed to RPS.

The source, who did not wished to be named but who purports to have strong ties to the press release-reading community, claimed that The Sims 4 is in fact the fourth in the Sims series.(more…)

EA has revealed that The Sims 4 is coming to Mac and PC is 2014, likely followed by updated versions of the same expansions they've already released for The Sims 2 and The Sims 3. Expect more information later today via EA's The Beat.

#ruhroh The Simlish alphabet has been translated before, but The Sims Freeplay, the game's mobile edition, appears to use a different one. Redditor Bump424 this morning published what figures to be the game's Rosetta Stone, and found some wirty-dords hidden in the signs. More »

#thesims Over the weekend, Ars Technica wrote a great feature on hackers who abuse remote administration tools (RAT) in order to gain access to the computers of strangers. The purpose of using a RAT in this case is to gain control of computers featuring webcams—these allow the hackers to spy on their targets, which they call "slaves." More »

#movies When it hit movie theaters last year, Wreck-It Ralph had tons of little details that made the Disney film feel one of the few that got video games right. It's available for download today and a new interview at MTV reveals that some of the best stuff—an open-world social game where Ralph goes to mope after pivotal events in the film—never made it into the final cut of the movie. (Spoilers if you haven't seen Wreck-It Ralph yet…) More »

#thesims Meet Reddit user BourgeoisBanana. Like many people, he watched Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained—a hyper violent Western film that deals with slavery. Unlike most people, the movie inspired BourgeoisBanana to recreate a colonial-era plantation in The Sims 3 according to PC Gamer—slaves and all. More »

#thesims Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I quite want to be, your mountains so lofty, your development studios dedicated to creating more mobile games for The Sims franchise so fresh and new. EA Maxis has opened Maxis Helsinki to focus on making virtual people for us to torture on our tablets and phones. More »

#lawsuits Publisher Electronic Arts has sued Zynga for copyright infringement, it said today. More »

#thesims 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.) More »

#marriage Roughly two million couples in the United States get married each year, give or take a hundred thousand. Every pair does it for their own reasons, from the idea of a fairy tale happily-ever-after to the decidedly more prosaic need to share health insurance costs. More »

#kotakumelodic 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 90's, 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. More »

#style Known for her starring role as Alice in her husband's Resident Evil films, actress Milla Jovovich is sporting a new look these days, torn from the graphics of one of her favorite games. Which game inspired that asymmetrical undercut? More »

#thesims Republished from Kotaku Australia. More »

More from the archives, this time a 2007 piece on the dark eroticism inherent in The Sims, penned by the sorely-missed RPS co-founder and giant of words Kieron Gillen.

It was the phone calls that made me certain. The Sims was going to cross over, one way or another.

I worked in a cramped games magazine office for just shy of five years. There were only three times that we really knew the eye of a media mini-storm was circling somewhere above us. We knew we were being watched at those moments, because every time we answered the phone the same questions came from different missionaries from the Real World Media. The first and biggest spike in calls was part of the fallout of 9/11 when every journalist in the world needed to ask us whether Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear or Microsoft Flight Simulator could be used to train terrorists to take over commercial airliners. Majestic, prompting the second and smallest peak, was publisher Electronic Arts’ great failure – a reality-blurring attempt to commercialise the alternate-reality game before anyone really knew what an alternate-reality game was, which bombed in the States and was never released in Europe. The third was sparked by The Sims, Electronic Arts’ great success and one of the most popular and groundbreaking games of recent times.(more…)

#thesims 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: More »

#fineart You know, this being video games and all, most of the concept art we feature shows men with guns, or destroyed landscapes or sometimes men with swords. Today, we'll change that. Well. Mostly. More »

At EA's E3 2011 press conference, CEO John Riccitiello was excited to announce The Sims Social, which is ... The Sims on Facebook. That's basically it. You'll be able to "play" a lower-res version of The Sims on Facebook.

There wasn't much talk in the way of features, but the announcement trailer was pretty hilarious and ultra creepy. We'll try to track that down for you guys so you can share in our misery right now.

#video If you've ever seen Will Wright, the big brain behind games like The Sims, Spore and SimCity, deliver one of his humorous, hypnotizing talks, you're probably going to want to settle in and watch this one too. If you've never had the good fortune to be assaulted by Will Wright's smarts, well, you're in luck. More »

#executivedecisions First Rod Humble worked on EverQuest. Then he headed the EA Play label, which manages The Sims franchise. After those jobs becoming the new CEO of Second Life creator Linden Lab seems like a natural progression. More »

Years of action gaming have instilled deep within us an irrational phobia of standing anywhere near red barrels; a syndrome we're sure many of you can sympathize with. But a study from the University of Rochester says those same games might also be helping us make even non-barrel-centric decisions faster.

After giving audio and visual tests to two groups of college students that had recently played either an FPS or The Sims, researchers found that while the two groups got the same amount of answers right, action gamers were able to arrive at those answers about 25 percent faster.

Sadly, the testing had to be discontinued when the FPS players refused to stop marking their triumph by knocking The Sims players to the floor and repeatedly jamming their crotches into the losers' horrified faces.

We are now less in the dark about the Dark Ages version of The Sims. During its Gamescom 2010 presentation, EA announced a March 2011 release date for The Sims Medieval.

This iteration of the mega-popular life adds more than the poor plumbing and widespread illiteracy of the age: it also adds quest-based gameplay that allows you to gradually expand your kingdom with the help of a user-created "hero."

EA is sending The Sims back in time to the dark ages -- wait, is it time for DarkSims already? The publisher has just announced The Sims Medieval, a new series for the PC and Mac that lets you "build up a medieval kingdom, controlling characters from all walks of life, from Kings and Queens, to Knights and Wizards, Blacksmiths and Bards." This is accomplished through a new addition to the series: quest-driven gameplay.

As you complete quests in The Sims Medieval, you'll be able to shape the kingdom as you see fit, and either expand it internally or through conquest. And with every new game, you'll create a hero with a variety of traits and the obligatory "fatal flaw." (Ours always forgets to wash his hands, for example.)

The Sims Medieval is currently slated to launch in Spring 2011. Head into the gallery below for the first screens.

#mobile Sequels of Need for Speed on DSiWare and Madden NFL on the iPhone highlight Electronic Arts' upcoming mobile and handheld catalog of 11 titles, formally revealed at today's Studio Showcase event. More »

#thesims Morgan Freeman's "Through the Wormhole" show on the Science Channel had an interesting guest a few weeks back: Sims creator Will Wright, who was there to talk about video game games, and gods. More »

#offtopic In November 2009, golfer Tiger Woods' life changed forever. So did TV news in Taiwan. More »

#clips From the folks that brought the http://kotaku.com/5551651/molester-monk-lured-boys-with-his-wii">Wii molester "monk" and the Tiger Woods brouhaha to life with the magic of computer animation comes this: an Al Gore avatar trying to get some lady to grab his junk. Technology! More »

Gaikai may not be ready for action just yet (the service doesn't have a release date), but the company was more than happy to drop news of a multi-year licensing agreement with Electronic Arts today. The news appears to be delivering on promises that the company's fearless leader, Dave Perry, made back in April of a big E3 announcement. Among the games Gaikai will be bringing to the web-streaming service are The Sims, the Battlefield: Bad Company series, the Dragon Age series, the Mass Effect series, Medal of Honor and Need for Speed.

"Gaikai's innovations open whole new experiences for both current players and new customers looking for the best of interactive entertainment," EA's Richard Hilleman said of the licensing deal. We're open to both "whole new experiences" and "interactive entertainment," so that sounds just fantastic to us.

#humor I'm not sure who would grant a medical license to such an inattentive Sim, but then, there are millions of Sims tragics out there who would do anything for their series of choice. Even endanger the lives of small children. More »

As seen on GoNintendo. More »