simcity

EA 'retires' SimCity Social, Sims Social, and more from Facebook

The Sims Social was once heralded as Electronic Arts' "most successful Facebook game," but now it's being laid to rest along with SimCity Social and Pet Society. These three social games will be extinct from Facebook as of June 14.

The game maker made the announcement today, saying that it was a hard decision but had to be done in order to "reallocate servers and resources to more popular titles," according to the FAQ section of its Web site.

"Today we are informing players of the difficult decision to retire some of our Facebook games: The Sims Social, SimCity Social, and Pet Society," EA wrote in a blog post today. "After millions of people initially logged in to play these games, the number of players and amount of activity has fallen off."… Read more

BlackBerry Z10 lands during Galaxy hype

CNET Update gears up for a different March Madness:

AT&T will sell the BlackBerry Z10 on March 22, but Verizon and T-Mobile have yet to set a date. The Z10 is landing in the U.S. within a few days of the Samsung Galaxy S4 announcement. Photos posted on a forum hint that it could look like the Note, but we won't know for certain until the launch on Thursday.

Will Wright speaks about his Stupid Fun Club start-up

For years, Will Wright has been just about the biggest name in video game development. It's hardly necessary to recite his resume, but just in case you haven't been paying attention, he's the creator of SimCity and its many direct spinoffs, The Sims franchise--which long ago surpassed 100 million units sold--and most, recently, Spore.

But last spring, not long after Spore's much-anticipated release, Wright announced he was leaving Electronic Arts, the game's publisher, for the greener pastures of a start-up called Stupid Fun Club. Though the new venture is backed by EA, it is … Read more

'SimCity' arrives on the iPhone

To the stable of games for the iPhone, you can now add the legendary SimCity.

Electronic Arts' city-building game, priced at $9.99, is now available for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Users can take advantage of the touch-screen technology to design and construct their vision of an urban landscape.

MG Siegler at VentureBeat, who's had a chance to play with the game for a while, waxed enthusiastic about the touch-screen qualities and more--"SimCity is a very impressive game on the iPhone"--but warned of some lingering bugs from the game's demo period:… Read more

SimCity Released for the iPhone and iPod Touch

Electronic Arts (EA) has released SimCity (iTunes link) for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The app is priced at $9.99 and is being well received by iTunes customers earning an average rating of four stars.

Movement in the game is accomplished via finger flicks, while zooming in and out is accomplished with the pinching gestures. Helpful tutorials are available to guide you if you are new to SimCity. However even veteran SimCity players will probably need to consult these tutorials due to the iPhone unique interface. Like the regular SimCity you have to decide what you want to do with … Read more

SimCity goes open source under GPLv3

Whatever the proprietary Neanderthals may think, it's becoming clearer by the day that open source is, or will become, the natural state of software. "Nature" exerted her will yet again with the announcement that Electronic Art's SimCity has been released as open source under the GPLv3 license. The game was written back in 1983 (actually, before then) and so much of the code is too old to be useful except for research purposes.

But there's a lot of value in that, as Bill Simser notes:

There's still a lot of craptastic code in there, … Read more

SimCity Societies (review from CNET Networks' GameSpot), the next generation of the SimCity computer game series that releases November 15, is going to simulate the environmental impact of different types of building and energy choices.

Players who choose inexpensive and "readily-available&… Read more