Sims 3 due out in June

Despite the fact that EA recently announced laying off about 1,100 employees, they also had some good news to report: The Sims 3 will be in stores by June 2. Sims 3 is another upgrade of the Will Wright franchise that has become one of the best-selling video games of all time with about 100 million units sold.

New features of Sims 3 are a seamless neighborhood where a player can visit neighbor’s homes and explore surroundings. In short, it’s like stepping out on the street in your own neighborhood, where you can run into anyone and talk about anything.

Another update is the new customizable Sim character creator. It allows the player to choose even more detailed facial features, including skin tone, hair color and style, eye shape and color, as well as clothing and accessories. Also included is a personality traits system that allows more realistic Sims with traits of brave, artistic, loner, perfectionist, klepto, romantic, clumsy, paranoid, and more. A player can also mix several of these traits together to create a Sim that is very unique. Customization is also a key factor in designing a Sims dream house. A player can change floors to dƒÂ©cor, shirts to sofas, wallpaper to window shades.

In addition to the many customizable options, one of the biggest changes that Sims 3 plans to make is a new gameplay that EA describes as rewarding and quick to play.  I don’t really have more details on that, really, but you can read more details about all the new features on the Sims 3 Website.

I’m sure that there are some who are reading this who are die-hard Sims addicts who are going to be waiting on pins and needles until Sims 3 is finally on their PC. Just to let you know, versions of Sims 3 are also going to be available for the Mac, iPhone, and iPod Touch later in the summer.

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SimCity Released for iPhone

Today EA announced the release of the classic game SimCity for the iPhone and iPod touch.

SimCity, a game of city construction and management, is one of the first significant games made by Will Wright, creator of the imaginative, and highly hyped, Spore. As the name suggests, SimCity was also among the first in the line of “Sim” games, made widely famous by Wright’s game The Sims.

The iPhone and iPod touch version hasn’t been stripped down for this touch-based version, and brings all the features that players would expect in a SimCity game. From the looks of it, SimCity for the iPhone bears many similarities to SimCity 3000, the third game in the series.

There seems to be a trend lately of developers re-releasing old games on portable hardware, and SimCity seems like the perfect choice for this sort of thing. SimCity is an old favourite of mine, even though whenever I play it I always end up with massive debt and a stagnant slum, so the chance to play it on the go is pretty neat. Especially nice are the touch controls, which in my opinion are well-suited for the type of game SimCity is.

SimCity costs $10 and is available at the iPhone app store.

Interview with Best Buy Blueshirt and Geek Squad Agent

I was glad to get the opportunity to interview the professionals at Best Buy about gifts for the holiday season. I suppose I could write about the experience, but personally, I think you should just watch the video of it below. In case you don’t have the 20 minutes to spare, here are the highlights.

First of all, the biggest gadgets this year are the video game systems, GPS units, digital cameras, digital frames, web-cams, and photo-printers.

When I asked about video game systems, I was not surprised when they told me that the Nintendo Wii is hard to keep in stock. PS3 is also popular since many people want Blu-ray for their home theaters.

Speaking of Blu-ray, I asked if the resolution of the format wars this year affected sales of the X-box 360. Oddly enough, it does not, because X-box 360 has the ability to download HD-quality movies. I feel sort of silly for not knowing that.

Video games that Best Buy has to stock daily are the WiiFit, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Resistance, Madden, NBA 2K, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band 2.

I asked the Best Buy guys what GPS devices that they would recommend, and they didn’t really give me any particular brand. They discussed that Garmin and TomTom are the big brands, and you can hear about the technical differences as to why some GPS devices are more expensive than others.

I also talked to them about digital cameras, and what makes Sony different from others. They talked about why Casio is getting popular, especially amongst YouTubers. Since I’ve tried out the Nikon, I had to bring up the COOLPIX and its ability to take a shot and email it.

My interviewees also told me that Home Theater is beginning to take off, and Blu-ray is slowly gaining popularity. The Vudu allows you to get Blu-Ray quality movies. Best Buy also recommended their in-home consultation services for setting up a home theatre.

By the way, since I had someone from Geek Squad on the phone, there was a question I had to ask: If Geek Squad and the Nerd Heard from TV’s Chuck ever got into a fight, who would win? Find out the answer in the video.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6297291551207338808

Ziibii iPhone App Keeps You Close No Matter Where You Go

Ziibii fuses a number of social networking sites in one stylish iPhone application. It’s RSS meets communication.

Ziibii combines Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, RSS, Twitter and more into one convenient and pretty application. We almost depend on social networking sites to stay in touch with many of our friends today, and this little app helps you stay close to them no matter where you go. You are teased with status updates, brief news feeds, newly uploaded pictures, and videos that float down a river on your iPhone (Ziibii is a term for “river” Native Americans according to Zumobi, the creators of the app).

Floating headline snippets stream across your iPhone, full of all the information you have subscribed to and customized. You control the pace at which these travel and can pause it whenever you like. Clicking on one of the floating selections will bring you to an extended view where you can choose to see the full version on the web.

The app is fun to use, but improvements can be made. The current release has problems with twitter, and it feels like you do not have enough control over choosing the Flickr photos and Youtube videos you want to access. I would also like to see more social networks supported by the app, including MySpace, Vimeo, Hulu, Vox, and Bebo.

Ziibii is a fun time waster and great for taking a peek at what your friends and family are up to while you’re on the go. The version from the initial release is a little clunky, but a few minor improvements could make this app a must have for any iPhone owner.

What are your thoughts?

Deal Seekers Will Love Woot.com

Shoppers who love a good deal will find it hard to pass up visiting woot.com on a daily basis.

Woot.com is an Internet retailer that sells one item per day at one low price until the product sells out or the day ends (it rarely ends before the item sells out). Once it hits 11:59pm central time, the previous day’s item is replaced by a new deal, anything from tech gadgets to TVs to hammers. Items are often from recognizable brands and cannot be found at a cheaper price.

Some items are refurbished, but many are brand new and often times released on the website before they are available anywhere else in the marketplace. You cannot purchase items from previous days and you will never find out what products will be released in future days. It’s a day by day thing.

Woot offers witty and informative product reviews and descriptions that are fun to read and sometimes brutally honest, usually poking fun at the item being sold. As soon as a new item is posted on the website, the Woot community will contribute opinions on the product, reviews, and other relevant information.

The company holds a policy to where they are not directly responsible for the products sold. There is no customer support (unless you can get help from the community on the forums), and all returns must be sent directly to the manufacturer of whatever product you purchased. The products being sold are held to high standards and they will not knowingly send you faulty products, but they are not your typical retailer with warranties and a return policy, in fact they discourage returns.

Woot keeps tracks of stats as well, in case you want to know how fast something sold, where it sold best, or what didn’t sell at all. Items sell fastest between 12am and 1am, as soon as a new item is released on the website. You never know how many of an item there will be, so many stay up until midnight to see what new item is on sale just in case the deal is so absolutely amazing that their life would be ruined if they missed it.

The site also offers specials and surprises. A Woot-Off is when a number of products will be on sale for an unannounced period of time. The Bag O’ Crap is sold for $1 and is a random selection usually offering nothing but crap, but once in awhile a person will be awarded with something as grand as a flat-screen TV. “2-for-Tuesdays” is an event every Tuesday where the site sells two or more products at once, and product launches are special events where Woot partners with other companies for a special pre-release of a product.

This is a warning, do not check out Woot.com if you despise glorious deals and interesting products caressed with enjoyable commentary and informative description.

Good Old Games Releases Beneath a Steel Sky For Free

The classic gaming site Good Old Games has added two free games to their collection of downloadable oldies.

This week Good Old Games released Beneath a Steel Sky, the classic post-apocalyptic point-and-click adventure game, to their catalogue as a completely free download.

Beneath a Steel Sky puts the player in the shoes of the main character Foster as he makes his way through the dystopian Union City in a quest to save his tribe.

Lure of the Temptress, another classic adventure game, was also released for free by Good Old Games.

Besides these two free games, Good Old Games also offers a host of other vintage games available for a fee. Every game is completely DRM free, meaning you don’t have to hassle with copy protection, and is compatible with Windows XP and Vista, removing the need to mess around with DOS emulators and virtual memory and all those headaches.

Each game costs either $5.99 or $9.99, which is a small price to pay for such high-quality, hassle-free classic gaming.

Some other titles in Good Old Games’ catalogue include some personal favourites of mine, such as Simon the Sorcerer, the Jagged Alliance series of strategy games, and the original Fallout series of RPGs.

It’s always a pain navigating seedy abandonware sites trying to track down a copy of a game I loved as a kid but can’t play because my old floppies have become corrupt. And it’s always made worse when I find that they don’t work on my modern computer, or that they can’t be downloaded for legal reasons, but also aren’t available for purchase due to their age.

Good Old Games looks to remove all that hassle for a price that is well worth the admission. As a fan of old games it is nice to see a site like Good Old Games give classic video games the attention they deserve with a professional distribution system, comprehensive support and a slick website.

Good Old Games updates their catalogue every week, and you can click here to check it out.

Toshiba Announces Exceedingly High-Capacity 512GB Flash Drive

Today Toshiba released details of the world’s first 512GB flash drive.

The solid-state drive, which is part of a new line of 43 nanometer multi-level cell drives that includes 64, 128, and 256GB models, will come in a 2.5 inch format and is designed mainly for use with notebook computers.

Other technical details include a 280MB per second read speed and a maximum 200MB per second write speed.

With this announcement, Toshiba has become the first company to make a 512GB flash drive. I have to admit, this blows my mind just a teeny bit, since when I got my 512 megabyte flash drive a couple years ago it was the biggest available, and also wasn’t cheap. I look forward to the future, when, seeing someone combing through the carpet, I will ask, Can I help you find your contact lense? and they will respond, Oh, I didn’t lose my contact. I’m looking for my 4,000 terabyte flash drive. It slipped through the fabric of my jeans.

No price has been announced yet, but Toshiba plans to showcase the new 512GB flash drive at the next Consumer Electronics Show, January 2009, in Las Vegas before its April 2009 release.

Stuff2Send.com Provides Valuable Service of Courier

Remember back when eBay first hit it big, and now there are a plethora of Internet auction sites? This next website, Stuff2Send.com, could be the next big thing on the Internet when it comes to shipping goods.

Stuff2Send is a simple concept to help a user find a courier. So if you are in need of someone to deliver some goods (perhaps stuff that someone brought from you on eBay), go ahead and post your need on the site. With any luck, someone who lives in your neighborhood will be going to where you need your goods delivered.

It also might be a good way to get some extra money if you want to be a courier. Let’s say you work downtown, and if you plan it right, you can deliver someone’s goods during your lunch hour and make some extra money.

Of course, there is a matter of how can someone trust the courier, but there is apparently some sort of safeguard procedure so this doesn’t take place. Things like feedback ratings and criminal record checks, for example.

Unfortunately, this service is currently available only in England. However, I think this is a service whose success will be seen by its number of imitators, and it will be available worldwide. The signup isn’t free, as it costs about £5-£15 a year.

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Club Nintendo Offers Free Gaming Swag

Nintendo has quietly released their North American Club Nintendo service, allowing customers to earn coins for purchasing Nintendo products.

These coins can be earned by purchasing and registering your Wii games for 50 coins, DS games for 30 coins, and Wii Shop games for 10 coins (after linking your Wii Shop account to your Club Nintendo account through the settings tab in your Wii Shop channel). More coins can be earned by completing surveys, purchasing new releases, or indicating games you’re going to purchase before you actually purchase them.

Prizes range from 300 to 800 coins for items such as Wii remote holders, DS cartridge holders, and exclusive games (such as a Game & Watch Collection for the DS that is going for 800 points). The full list of prizes can be seen here.

The initial offerings are swell, but the Japensese Club Nintendo selection is full of popular DS games, music CDs, and more. The Japanese club has been up and running for some time now and has built its collection of offerings over this period of time. Hopefully this means that the North American club will see an increase in offerings over time as well.

The current state of the website is clunky at best. Right now if you go on the Club Nintendo website, you are going to run into error pages, timeouts, and issues with log-ins and switching accounts over from My Nintendo. This may be why Nintendo hasn’t made a big deal of the site yet, it’s more like a beta version than a finalized website. The constant interruptions are extremely frustrating, I am grinding my teeth to dust while trying to fill out these surveys.

Registrations are not retroactive either. If you’ve already registered games with Nintendo, you will not be able to get your coins for those games, and of course you cannot register them again. This is almost like a punishment for users who registered their games for the extended warranty Nintendo offers and is a slap in the face. I’ve heard from a couple of users that they received coins for their previous Wii and DS registrations, but most say they can’t and I am unable to test it out right now because of how buggy the site is.

But at least we do finally have a North American version. Purchasing Wii and DS games now is a little tastier since Nintendo is offering us some nice rewards for being loyal customers. Even with the current technical problems and non-retroactive registrations, I am a fan of this new service. The North American offerings are slim right now, but they are quality goods which would be nice to own or fetch a decent price on eBay with since many of the items are not offered anywhere else. If’ I’m going to purchase a game, this service isn’t going to convince me to buy anymore than I would otherwise, I’m glad I can add to my stockpile of coins and get some free swag. It really won’t take that many games to rack up enough coins to buy things anyway. Free swag for me!

This Week’s MacWorld and Environmental Performance News May Reflect Badly on Apple, Apple Probably Doesn’t Care

This week has seen two news reports about Apple that are more bitter than sweet: the announcement that Apple will no longer attend MacWorld, and a third-party report ranking Apple very low on its environmental performance.

In a press release yesterday, Apple announced that the January 2009 MacWorld will be the last one that sees Apple’s presence. Further, Steve Jobs will not be giving the keynote speech, and instead Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will be replacing Jobs as keynote speaker.

MacWorld has long been a primary event in announcing new Apple products and news, so Apple’s omission of itself from the event comes as somewhat strange news. Without Apple’s attendance it seems the “Mac” will be taken out of MacWorld, although MacWorld plans to continue its exhibitions regardless.

According to Apple’s press release:

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.

Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.

So what does this mean? On the face of it this seems to be a counterintuitive move for Apple to make; most companies would kill for an entire expo named after their products. MacWorld offered Apple a platform for advertising, publicity, worldwide hype, and highly anticipated product announcements, so Apple cutting itself out seems to be a waste of a deep connection with consumers and media.

But like anything Apple does this was not a brash or uneducated move. Removing itself from MacWorld is a move that is in line with much of Apple’s increasingly isolationist policy, as Apple tries to further itself as much as it can from any organizations or publicity that could shape its image in a way that deviates from its advertising plan. The language of Apple’s press release seems to support this, as it implies that Apple is looking to directly reach its consumers, presumably with no middle men in between to fuzzy the image.

Much of Apple’s success has come from its calculated advertising campaign, and MacWorld simply isn’t part that campaign; even though MacWorld is essentially free publicity for Apple, it is not publicity that is controlled by Apple, and so it might not be the sort of free publicity that Apple wants. It looks like a slap in the face to dedicated Apple fans, but Apple’s main priority is control over their image, and this move was made with that in mind.

In related Apple news, Apple was recently given a very poor grade on environmental performance by Ceres, a coalition of North American investors, public interest groups and environmental groups that does independant evaluations of industry leaders.

The report, which ranks companies from all sectors of industry, ranked IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems the highest in environmental performance among the technology industry, with scores of 79, 77, and 63 out of 100, respectively. While this puts the technology industry at the higher end of the environmental performance scale, Apple scored particularly low with a 28 out of 100.

According to the report, Ceres’ ranking method is based on five factors: board oversight, management execution, public disclosure, emissions accounting, and strategic planning and performance, which are divided into fifteen sub-factors. That’s probably almost incomprehensible to most readers, including myself, but the main takeaway point is that each factor is weighted differently, with strategic planning being the most important and board oversight being the least.

This report comes on the heels of a Greenpeace report that parallels Ceres’ negative evaluation of Apple’s performance. With two independent groups giving Apple the thumbs down on environmental policy it’s difficult to ignore the criticisms.

In response, Apple has made some moves to answer its critics by making its policies more transparent: Steve Jobs made this press release, outlining Apple’s plan to remove PVC and mercury from its products, reach a 28% recycling rate, and decrease its carbon footprint. Apple has also released information on the environmental performance of each of its products.

It’s encouraging to see Jobs taking the initiative to make his company’s environmental plans more transparent, but this is just a first step. If the Ceres and Greenpeace reports are any sign, more needs to be done, and this is reflected in Ceres’ evaluation method. Transparency, or public disclosure, makes up only 14% of Apple’s environmental evaluation, so it’s safe to say that Apple is faltering in the other areas that matter the most.

Whether or not you agree with the Ceres report, or Apple’s decision to cut itself out from MacWorld, it seems obvious that these recent bits of news don’t exactly reflect well on Apple. I’m a fan of Apple products; their computers just work, which is all I ask for. But Apple’s corporate policy has always struck me as being somewhat unfriendly, and these recent reports seem to support that.

Cutting out MacWorld shows disregard for a community that has supported Apple for a long time, and lagging behind so badly in environmental respects shows what a low priority Apple puts on its environmental image. But the fact of the matter is that this approach has worked just fine for Apple up to this point, and will likely continue to work, meaning Apple probably sees no need to change its behaviour.

These calculated corporate decisions, chosen seemingly with only advertising image and profit in mind, contrast heavily with the hip and popular advertising image that Apple wants to protect. It may only be a matter of time before the public’s perception of Apple begins to shift due to news like this week’s.

As such, Apple might do well to worry less about the public image they acted to protect by removing themselves from MacWorld, and focus more on the real corporate image that is being tarnished right now by their environmental performance.

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