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EA ANNOUNCES SIMCITY SOCIETIES DELUXE EDITION, A BUNDLE-PACK WITH BOTH SIMCITY SOCIETIES AND SIMCITY SOCIETIES DESTINATIONS
Create the City of Your Dreams with New City-Building Compilation
REDWOOD CITY, CA — May 12, 2008 —Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) announced today SimCity™ Societies Deluxe Edition, a bundled pack of SimCity Societies and its newest expansion pack, SimCity Societies Destinations that can transform the players’ city into a tourist destination. Available only in Europe, the bundled pack will be available on June 27, 2008.
“SimCity Societies Deluxe Edition combines two fun city-building tools to players and is the perfect opportunity to expand their city into a traveler’s paradise,” said Rod Humble, Head of Studio for The Sims™. “With SimCity Societies players can create almost any type of city with its own unique cultural and societal behaviors. SimCity Societies Destinations adds new transportation options, long-term game-play features including challenge mode, and the tools to build destination cities full of tourist attractions, business centers and cultural hubs.”
In SimCity Societies, players construct not only the cities they desire, but are able to mold their cultures, societal tendencies and environments as well. They can build artistic cities, authoritarian dictatorships, spiritual communities and many more. With this accessible, innovative and versatile city-builder, players can create the city of their dreams, or their nightmares. With more than 500 buildings and decorative objects to place, the possibilities are almost limitless.
Since the launch of SimCity Societies, four free game updates have added new strategic modes that will challenge your mayoral skills, three new exotic disasters (UFO invasion, giant robot attack and a massive fire-breathing monster), new crises, new user interface functions, new buildings and much more. More free content and features are being planned for future updates.
SimCity Societies Destinations enhances the SimCity Societies experience by providing all the tools players need to create an entire city or town based on attractions and amenities that visitors enjoy. The enhanced map generator creates landmarks such as ancient ruins, shipwrecks, old missionary buildings or beautiful shores, letting players develop their cities strategically to leverage the attractiveness of these landmarks. From sprawling theme parks and tropical beach resorts to country hiking trails, players can control more than 100 new buildings to create their customized destination.
SimCity Societies Deluxe Edition is rated PEGI 7+.
About the SimCity™ Franchise
The SimCity franchise is one of the most popular PC gaming franchises in history, having sold more than 17 million games worldwide to date since the SimCity launch in 1989. The original SimCity was distributed in 1989 and was critically acclaimed garnering dozens of awards and selling millions of copies both domestically and internationally. SimCity 2000™ followed in 1993. SimCity 3000™ released in 1999. SimCity 3000 and SimCity 3000 Unlimited both released in 2000. EA shipped SimCity 4 Rush Hour and SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition in 2003. SimCity Societies shipped in November 2007.
If the Danish Sims 2 site is correct, we should be seeing SimCity Societies Deluxe next month around June 27. It will come packed with the original SimCity Societies game as well as it’s expansion, SimCity Societies Destinations. While that is nice and all…I’m still waiting to hear of a seperate stand alone retail version of SimCity Societies Destinations….
Surfing the net, I came across Chris Heckler’s website. He is one of the developers on the Spore team and his work “centers around using proceduralism to enhance player creativity and agency”.
He wrote an 11 page draft paper on the Spore procedural animation system. According to his page, it gives a reasonable overview of both the authoring system, using our custom OpenGL animation tool Spasm, and runtime playback system.
Character animation in video games—whether manually key-framed or motion captured—has traditionally relied on codifying skeletons early in a game’s development, and creating animations rigidly tied to these fixed skeleton morphologies. This paper introduces a novel system for animating characters whose morphologies are unknown at the time the animation is created. Our authoring tool allows animators to describe motion using familiar posing and key-framing methods. The system records the data in a morphology-independent form, preserving both the animation’s structural relationships and its stylistic information. At runtime, the generalized data are applied to specific characters to yield pose goals that are supplied to a robust and efficient inverse kinematics solver. This system allows us to animate characters with highly varying skeleton morphologies that did not exist when the animation was authored, and, indeed, may be radically different than anything the original animator envisioned.
Spacy Oddity’s blog has found the system requirements for the Spore Creature Creator.
OS: Windows XP/Vista (FAT 16/32 file systems not supported for Digital Download) Processor: 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent Memory: XP needs 512 MB RAM / Vista needs 768 MB RAM HDD: At least 300 MB of space for installation, & additional space for created creatures. (600 MB for digital download) Video Card: A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0* Input: Mouse,Keyboard
For computers using built-in graphics chipsets, the game requires at least:
* Intel Integrated Chipset GMA 950
* Dual 2.0GHz CPUs, or 1.7GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent
A comic on SecuROM and Spore has been posted on Penny Arcade. Who knows? One day it may very well they may need a sample of DNA from us to make the game work
Maxis has mailed the fansites today, here's the complete letter:
Hey Spore Fans -
We wanted to let you know that we've been hearing your concerns about the online authentication mentioned earlier this week. I didn't want to head into the weekend without getting back to you with some information about how Spore is planning on using this new system.
A few things we wanted you to know:
-- We authenticate your game online when you install and launch it the first time.
-- We'll re-authenticate when a player uses online features, downloads new content or a patch for their game.
-- The new system means you don't have to play with the disc in your computer. And if you are like me, always losing discs, this will be a huge benefit.
-- You'll still be able to install and play on multiple computers.
-- You can play offline.
We do hope that players will play online - sharing creatures, buildings and vehicles with other players is something that is unique to Spore and one of the coolest features of the game. Every day, when I play the Creature Stage, I get to see wacky and awesome new creatures from my Buddies on the team coming over the hill at me and I can't wait to see what happens when our creative, passionate community starts sharing their creations.
I'd love to write more - but I need to get back to work. We've got a game to finish. :-)
-caryl
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caryl d shaw (aka MaxisLucky)
online producer
spore
MaxoidShannon posted the first picture from The Sims 2 Apartment Life in this thread at the official Sims 2 BBS. She wrote:
My name is MaxoidShannon, I’m the Producer on The Sims 2 EP/SP products. I was playing The Sims 2 Apartment Life the other day and thought you might like to see a sneak peak at some of the cool new objects. Check out the ceiling!!! (Yes, they are real!!) You will be able to change the texture on the ceilings. I know this isn’t much of a news item, but we are a bit early in development and we will have much more in the coming months. I hope you like what you see!
Supports GeForce FX, 6, 7, 8, and 9 series GPUs including these newly released GPUs:
GeForce 9800 GX2
GeForce 9800 GTX
GeForce 9600 GT
GeForce 9600 GSO
GeForce 8300
GeForce 8200/ nForce 730a
GeForce 8100/ nForce 720a
Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI™ technology* on DirectX 9 and OpenGL.
Adds new PureVideo HD features for GeForce 9800 GX2, 9800 GTX, 9600 GT and 9600 GSO:
Dynamic Contrast Enhancement
Dynamic Blue, Green & Skin Tone Enhancements
Dual-Stream Decode Acceleration**
Improved performance on many DirectX 9 and OpenGL applications.
Numerous game and application compatibility fixes. Please read the release notes for more information on product support, features, driver fixes and known compatibility issues.
Users without US English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver here.
* Note: Quad SLI technology with GeForce 9800 GX2 and 3-way SLI technology are only supported on Windows Vista.
** Note: Users will require updated software from third-party movie players to experience the new Dual-Stream decode acceleration for Blu-ray and HD DVD playback features.
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Urban Online Entertainment
Press Release: 
