EA release list for the summer period (june to september) in Europe shows a mysterious new Sim City game headed to the Wii:

SimCity Creator 26-Sep NDS
SimCity Creator 26-Sep Wii

SimCity 3000 (1999) – Simcity 3000 certainly isn’t a bad game; but, as a sequel to SimCity 2000, it falls a little short. Essentially, 3000 is little more than a gussied-up version of 2000 with a handful of new features—which is fine for anyone who never played 2000. But if you happened to play 2000 to death, there really wasn’t much new fun to be had here. To be fair, the game could have been much worse; Maxis originally conceived 3000 as being in 3D, but dropped this idea when they realized that rendering really brown rooms in Quake was the only 3D late-90s PCs could do.

EA Unveils The SimCity Box

Popular PC Gaming Franchise Offers Five Innovative City-Building Games in One Box at One Low Price



REDWOOD CITY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) announced The SimCity™ Box, a bundled pack of five games from the world-renowned SimCity™ franchise. The SimCity Box contains SimCity™ Societies, SimCity Societies Destinations, SimCity™ 4, SimCity™ 4 Rush Hour and The Sims Carnival™ SnapCity. Valued at approximately $100.00 USD, The SimCity Box will be available this June in North America at the affordable price of $39.99 USD.

“The SimCity Box is the perfect opportunity to discover the fun of city building with SimCity,” said Rod Humble, Head of Studio for The Sims. “This is the greatest value SimCity has ever offered and players everywhere can get hands-on with a wide range of SimCity products from one box at an amazing price.”

• SimCity Societies: In SimCity Societies, players construct not only the cities they desire, but 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 launch, 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 UI functions, new buildings and much more. More free content and features are being planned for future updates.

• SimCity Societies Destinations: 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. With an enhanced map generator, players can identify each city’s opportunity for diversion and the city can capitalize on that draw. 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 4: Right from the start in SimCity 4, players will experience new God-like powers of creation as they lay the groundwork for their cities by molding mountains, carving valleys, seeding forests and laying rivers. With these new landscape creation features, players can now construct the most realistic metropolis imaginable.

• SimCity 4 Rush Hour: In SimCity 4 Rush Hour, players take control of their city’s transportation with a wide variety of new options. They can create the elevated train networks of Chicago, the wide-avenues of New York, or the one-way streets of San Francisco. Players can develop a seamless mass-transit system including monorail, subway, or even a scenic ferry service that connects to a greater regional travel network. With all-new problem-solving maps and tracking tools, players can see the pulsing flow of traffic, map out the most efficient routes, and quickly get their Sims from one city to another.

• The Sims Carnival SnapCity: The Sims Carnival SnapCity is a unique city-building simulation game with a puzzle twist that is both strategic and accessible. In a fun, open-ended gameplay environment, players are challenged to position falling, colored blocks in just the right places to build the best possible cities. Featuring an array of industrial, commercial and residential neighborhoods, it’s never the same city twice! The fun never stops as you save your city from natural disasters, man-made catastrophes, even out-of-this-world alien attacks!Players can also pick-up-and-play by jumping into 25 unique existing neighborhood levels.

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.

About the SimCity™ Franchise
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.

About Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), headquartered in Redwood City, California, is the world’s leading interactive entertainment software company. Founded in 1982, the company develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, cellular handsets and the Internet. Electronic Arts markets its products under four brand names: EA SPORTS™, EA™, EA SPORTS BIG™ and POGO™. In fiscal 2007, EA posted revenue of $3.09 billion and had 24 titles that sold more than one million copies. EA’s homepage and online game site is www.ea.com. More information about EA’s products and full text of press releases can be found on the Internet at http://info.ea.com.

EA, EA SPORTS, EA SPORTS BIG, POGO, SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000 and The Sims are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

New features:

In all modes of play:

• Added The Burgazoid 6000 disaster. he product of an experiment in efficient cheeseburger service gone awry, the Burgazoid 6000 shoots laser beams. His footfalls cause mini-earthquakes
• Added The Ornithosaurus Wrecks disaster. A gigantic horned bird-like monster who hurls fire from his beak; his footfalls cause mini-earthquakes.
• Six new events: Epidemic, investment bubble, riot, strike, scientific breakthrough, and pilgrimage,
• Two new crises: Religious holiday and counter-cultural revolution.
• New building abilities including Eyesore, Minor Eyesore, Contagious, and Inspiration.
• Mod management tool, accessible from the main menu. Enables you to enable/disable or delete mods. Provides link to the mod exchange online.

New Buildings:

• Additional variants of 15 home types.
• Two new venues: The Supermarket and Carousel
• Two new workplaces: Warehouse and Low-Rise Office Building

Fixes and improvements:

• Fix for Having a very large city with a very high worker population while the Happiness Icon indicator is turned on causes the game to crash
• Fix for - GREEK - The HotKeys “V” and “Shift+V” are not functional
• Fix for crash that could occur on exit with a fire in the city
• Fix for: Hitting return to the main menu skipping prompts for save/load when it comes after an achievement
• Fix for goto nearest firestation button not working with district fire stations
• Fix for camera not focusing on UFO attack after focusing on Fire (However, it is still possible for the camera to be below the UFO if the UFO is very high when the button is clicked.)
• Fix for Creepy smoke and ghost effects don’t activate when entering haunted profiles
• Fix for building costs not updating in gallery when cost modifier is in effect
• Fix for crash for unaligned particle memory with new ATI Catalyst 8.3 drivers
• Fix for Building Ghosts not displaying Custom Textures as they are being placed
• Fix for Culture Car Sets not being expandable
• Fix for ambients being unable to be overwritten by mods
• Fix for custom bump maps not showing up in game
• Fix for: high-resolutions textures are not swapping out even when camera is too high to benefit from their detail. Reduces memory usage.
• Fix for: error in shadow and batch rendering that may have been causing some DirectX errors / slowdowns
• Changes in materials handling and in UI texture pinning reduce memory usage

Also includes Game Updates #1, #2 and #3
No need to install previous Game Updates; the improvements and content from Game Updates #1, #2 and #3 are included in Game Update #4. Game Update #4 can be applied to the base game or the game with any of the previous updates already applied

And that’s exactly where the beauty of Wright’s games lie; they’re “pointless” in the best sense of the world. While the term has never been entirely pinned down, Wright’s games are essentially of the “sandbox” variety: you’re given a space to play in with some confines, and the goals are determined by the player rather than the sandbox itself. So, if you were the type of kid who loved building intricate sand castles, your personal goal in a SimCity game may be to make a one-horse town grow to the size of a teeming metropolis; but for any juvenile delinquents out there who buried their sisters’ Barbies head-first in the sand, the SimCity series offers many natural disasters to inflict on a terrified populace with just the push of a button. And unlike a lot of other games featuring the hot topic of morality, SimCity will never judge you.

Next week - The worst moments of the Sim- series, and the copycats that tried (and possibly failed) to capture that Sim-Magic.

Look what I found from the SCS-files (Localization, en_us, NewsTickerStrings):

“NT_MonsterSighting”>Gigantic mega monsters terrorizing nearby cities! Will ~CityName~ be next? and
“NT_MonsterSightingAftermath”>~CityName~ residents breathe a sigh of relief, ignored by rampaging monsters.

edit: More news:
“NT_Ornithosaurus”>Giant beast rampages through downtown ~CityName~. Skeptics doubtful of monster’s existence,
“NT_Ornithosaurus1″>Traffic backup caused by presence of gigantic terrifying monster in ~CItyName~. Irate commuters to arrive home late,
“NT_Burgazoid”>Robotic rampage apparently caused by baconless burger. Area bacon merchants assemble stock to appease monster and
“NT_Burgazoid1″>New and improved Burgazoid 6000 unleashed on ~CityName~, wreaks havoc. Upgrade expected shortly to remove havoc-wreaking software

edit2: More news:
“NT_OrnithosaurusAftermath”>Mysterious monster returns to nether regions of the universe — ~CityName~ prepares to rebuild, over ~cash1~ in damages sustained.,
“NT_BurgazoidAftermath”>Monster profiteers expected to do well following giant robot attack. and
“NT_BurgazoidAftermath1″>Sales of toy robots see sharp decline in wake of Burgazoid 6000’s rampage.