The organization has lauded EA's life simulator as the "most animal-friendly game" of the year, otherwise known as PETA's Proggy Award. The animal-rights group praises The Sims 3 for its option to let players "choose a vegetarian lifestyle," making Sims, "like their real-life counterparts, live longer, age more slowly, and feast on cruelty-free delights-from tofu dogs to ratatouille."

"EA's compassionate update to its perennial favorite shows commitment not only to animals but also to the game's players," writes PETA, claiming that the previous iteration was only vegetarian friendly by way of mods.

I'm curious what PETA would consider 2009's least animal-friendly game. My best guess is Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for the Wii, but that seems almost too obvious.

The Sims 3: Most Animal-Friendly Game of 2009 [PETA via Gamasutra]

The Sims 3: World Adventures opens up three new remote locations your Sim can visit: China, France and Egypt. The purpose of visiting the exotic locations is to give your Sims the chance to complete adventures inside local tombs and temples. The gameplay in these sections is very much like old school point-and-click adventures where your Sim needs to explore nooks and crannies to find keys, treasure and secret locks to hidden doors. Completing these expeditions nets your Sim Visa Points so they can stay longer in foreign countries and eventually purchase vacation homes.

In addition to the gameplay, however, World Adventures also augments the Sims experience with a bunch of new skills, traits and Lifetime Rewards to update your ho-hum Riverside or Sunset Valley gameplay in the core game. But is it an adventure worth taking?

Loved
Adventuring: Taking your Sim into a temple or a tomb for some exploration turns out to be a pretty intimate and oftentimes hilarious experience. In tombs, Sims encounter all kinds of danger that they don't normally back at home — like mummies that can infect them with a fatal curse or traps that can burn them alive. This makes you anxious for your Sim in a way that encourages bonding — I totally reloaded a game once when my Tenzing Norgay got charred in an Egyptian pyramid puzzle. Aside from that aspect of gameplay, the Sims themselves entertain you with their own feelings on the adventures. If you've got a Sim with a good set of traits (Adventuring, Bravery, etc.), getting through the winding passages and around dangerous traps is a healthy challenge that sometimes really makes you think like a puzzle game. Sending a Sim in with bad traits, though (Cowardice, Loser, etc.), while frustrating for treasure-hunting definitely yields laughs when your Sim flees from a mummy.

New Skills: World Adventures adds Photography, Martial Arts and Nectar Making to the Sim skill set. I spent most of my time on Photography and Martial Arts — making Tenzing Norgay something of a photojournalist monk in the process. The Photography skill gives Sims access to different types of camera (crappy, decent and awesome) and lets them take pictures from the first person perspective pretty much anywhere in the game. Depending on the subject of the photo (and you can tell what you're capturing via little labels in first-person mode), your Sim can score major money by taking pictures of foreign landmarks. Martial Arts, meanwhile, is exactly what it sounds like. Your Sim can learn Sim Fu and compete against other Sims in karate tournaments or just sit around and meditate until they float in the air. Lastly, Nectar-Making builds off your Sims' gardening skills by letting you combine various fruits to create original nectars that you can sell for mad bank.

Elements of Multiculturalism: The native Sims in China, France and Egypt actually look like Chinese, French and Arab people. This alone is a big step for The Sims in terms of multiculturalism, but there's also a lot of little things about local Sims you start to notice that keep up the foreign facade. For example, every location has a set of songs that people sing to themselves in the markets or at their homes. There are also local books and recipes your Sim can pick up (like Dim Sum and Frogs Legs) to read or make at home. My all time favorite little touch, though, is still the part where children with at least one Asian parent eat with chopsticks. So cute!

Hated
It's A Little Bit Broken: There is a major gameplay bug I encountered that should never have made it to retail. Sometimes when sending your Sim abroad (and usually when they've got a child or a teenager Sim with them), the game makes your family vanish. Like, completely disappear both from the foreign location you were sending them to and from the home location. In my case, I sent Tenzing and his teenage son to China while his wife was laid up at home with twin girls. Mid-load into China, the game suddenly deposited the camera view into China — only there was no family there and no Sim in the control bar to keep track of. I could do thing — not even edit the town. So I quit out and went back to Sunset Valley expecting to find them there, but the same thing happened. The wife and babies were gone and in the family viewer, there was only a placeholder graphic of a dotted outline where the Norgays should have been. I was able to fix the problem after consulting a fan forum, but it wasn't a simple solution (having to move around backup files and save files) and I lost data.

Loss of Continuity: A big selling point of The Sims 3 was the persistent environment. Sims around your Sim grew old and died and the world moved within the same time frame. World Adventures wrecks the continuity by making China, France and Egypt into stagnant environments. It's like time stops when you go abroad and your Sim doesn't age and life back at home freezes until you come back. On the one hand, this is convenient when you want to dodge an age transition without just turning aging off. However, on the other hand, it also creates weird situations.

Take for example my French mistress's "abortion." I had invited her from France to stay with Tenzing and then Tried for Baby. She got pregnant and when the morning sickness started, she ended her vacation and went home early. I followed her to France the very next day, expecting to visit my pregnant mistress. However, when I got there, she was no longer pregnant and there wasn't a baby anywhere. I contacted the developer to make sure I hadn't encountered a bug and they told me that because infants and toddlers simply can't exist in the foreign environments (for all kinds of development issues), the child should have been "aged up" automatically to childhood when the mistress went back to France. What I should have seen was a child Sim in the mistress's household with her last name that the game would still recognize as Tenzing's kid and "the fiction" would be that a significant amount of time has passed between the time my mistress left Sunset Valley and the time Tenzing arrived in France. This kind of continuity is not only confusing, but also kind of against the persistent environment The Sims 3 is popular for.

The Sims 3: World Adventures is an experience that deserves the title "expansion." It adds a lot to the core experience of the game, it offers an alternative style of gameplay and it's pulled off in a way that blends pretty well with the game (with the exception of the hiccups mentioned above).

If you're a Sims fan, though, you've probably already guessed this having played the game for the last month solid. But if you're not really a Sims fan, or you were one of the skeptics who were holding back because the rampant expansions of the Sims 2 tired you out, don't hold back. There's a whole wide world out there for your Sim to explore (three of them, in fact) and you won't want to miss it.

The Sims 3: World Adventures was developed and published by EA for the PC. The game released November 17 for $40 USD. A copy of the game was given to Kotaku by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Created Tenzing Norgay as a young adult and raised his Visa level to at least eight days' worth of travel in each country. Maxed out the Photography and Martial Arts skills.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The video does make a good point, however, especially to those of us who begin playing The Sims games with the purest of intentions, only to discover that we're really sadistic bastards when no one is looking. Show of hands, please!

How much it lost is either a little or a lot, depending on which accounting principals you prefer to hold your publicly traded companies to. EA raked in $644 million its first quarter of the 2010 fiscal year, down from the $804 million it took in the year prior. That's a $234 million loss, going by GAAP. It's a $6 million loss if you're going non-GAAP, which sounds a lot nicer, doesn't it? Regardless of your personal accounting compass, John Riccitiello seemed pleased with the company's results.

"Good execution delivered better-than-expected financial results in the first quarter," said John Riccitiello, Chief Executive Officer, via press release.

He pointed to strong sales of The Sims 3, which sold 3.7 million copies during its first month on the market. The company was similarly proud of its Wii Fit competitor EA Sports Active, which helped the publisher double its Wii sales, selling 1.8 million copies during the quarter.

That title, along with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, EA SPORTS Grand Slam Tennis and Rock Band 2, helped the company secure a 21 percent share on the Wii in North America, a 13 percent share on the Wii in Europe. Not too shabby for a third party!

EA will hold an investors call today to talk more about this money making business, which we're about to listen to. We expect enthralling safe harbor statements to be read flatly.

The Sims 3 World Adventures introduces several exotic new locales for your little fake people to visit, all based off of real-world locations. China, France, and Egypt are represented in Shang Simla, Champs Les Sims, and Al Simhara respectively, allowing your Sims to explore strange new lands, hunt for treasure, meet new people, and discover new styles unique to each region, bringing foreign influence into your happy little town.

The expansion will bring with it exclusive online content, with the Mac and PC versions including 1,000 SimPoints that can be used to purchase said content. The expansion should be in stores the week of November 16th, with iPhone and mobile versions due out in early 2010.

I've never been a Sims fan, but I have to admit that The Sims 3 struck a chord in me. When I'm not playing it, the game isn't far from my mind. Thing is, it's the character interaction that keeps me occupied for hours, so I could care less whether I get to go to Sim-Egypt or Sim-China. I find the aspect of cultural exchange fascinating, however. It makes me want to send random Sims off on vacation, pay no attention to them, and then see how they've changed when they return.

Oh god. I've become one of them, haven't I?

I'll spare you the story (you can read up on that yourself if you're interested), and instead just focus on what he's done to the characters. Well, what The Sims 3 character creation suite has done to them. Ben's done the best he could.

Zoey looks fine, and Louis is one sharp guy having finally gotten a chance to both wash and tuck in his shirt. But Bill? Bill looks like a Scout leader with predatory tendencies. And Francis? Oh, what have you done, Maxis, to my beloved Francis? I liked him when the girly name was ironic.

Chapter One: Welcome to Riverside [DoubleYouTeeEff, via Offworld]

While the top-selling console game was Prototype, with 419,000 copies sold, EA shifted an impressive 820,000 copies of The Sims 3 in the US market. And that number only includes the copies sold via traditional retail channels (stores, major mail order outlets), so when you factor in digital sales, the number may well be approaching the million-sold mark.

That's a more successful launch than the Sims 2, which "only" moved 700,000 units in the US in its first month on sale. And considering The Sims 2 is still a heavy-hitter in the PC market, we can only imagine/fear what kind of success The Sims 3 will have.

Obviously, the game stopped the NPD Group's monthly sales charts for June, but if you'd like to see what ran 2-20, the full chart is below.

1. The Sims 3 (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
2. The Sims 3 Collector's Edition (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
3. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
4. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (Blizzard Entertainment)
5. World of Warcraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
6. Spore: Galactic Adventures (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
7. World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment)
8. Spore (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
9. Empire: Total War (The Creative Assembly, Sega)
10. StarCraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
11. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (Blizzard Entertainment)
12. Reel Deal Slots Adventure (Phantom EFX)
13. Civilization IV: Complete Edition (Firaxis Games, 2K Games)
14. WarCraft III Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
15. SimCity Box (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
16. Diablo Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
17. The Sims 2: Apartment Life (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
18. Prototype (Radical Entertainment, Activision)
19. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GOTY Edition (Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks/2K Games)
20. Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Terminal Reality, Atari)

Exclusive: The Sims 3 Breaks 800K, Tops U.S. Game Sales In June [Gamasutra]

The solution to the illegal copying of video games perhaps isn't a law enforcement task force or volley of lawsuits, but the legitimization of the act itself.

Last week news broke that The Pirate Bay, one of the largest websites in the world dedicated to the illegal downloading of video games, was being purchased by a business group in Sweden with plans on turning the site into a purely legal operation.

Global Gaming Factory X doesn't plan on stopping the downloading of video games, but rather hopes to make enough money to pay the publishers for those downloads.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site, " Hans Pandeya, CEO Global Gaming Factory, said in a prepared statement. "The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary."

The news comes just months after a nine-day trial against Stockholm-based Pirate Bay found four guilty of making copyright content available. The four were sentenced to a year in prison each and were fined more than $3 million.

While heralded by industry lobbying group the Entertainment Software Association, the ruling and even the possible closure of The Pirate Bay would likely have little lasting impact on piracy. That's because it doesn't address the people pirating games, just those making it easier to do so.

Billy Pidgeon, an analyst with Game Changer Research, feels that piracy can only really be dealt with by some meeting of the minds.

"I hate to hear the industry talking about how they have to crush piracy, throwing down the gauntlet," Pidgeon said. "The last thing the industry wants to do is alienate their customer base."

People saying that they deserve to take a game for free, Pidgeon adds, is just as absurd.

That's why Pidgeon was so delighted to hear Electronic Arts' reaction to news of their game, The Sims 3, being pirated.

Three weeks before the game was released for sale, it showed up on pirate sites.

John Riccitiello, the head of EA, told Kotaku that they were initially very nervous about the leaked title.

But because the game relies so heavily on online play, something EA can control, gamers who grabbed an early, free version of the title didn't get the full experience, only a taste.

In the end, Riccitiello said, EA decided to think of it as the publisher putting out a really good demo of the game, instead worrying over lost sales.

"Thats great, I love to hear them talk like that," Pidgeon said of EA's take on the issue. "Super distribution (like piracy networks) can be turned into an advantage. It's not necessarily lost sales."

Using the grassroots networks of pirates could allow publishers to reach a much larger audience, including people in regions they don't yet reach. It could also create a sort of ad-hoc iTunes for game distribution, helping publishers and developers get games to people who can't or won't use the standard distribution channels.

In other words, when you can't beat them, use them.

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

But it doesn't. Not really cranky, anyway. EA boss John Riccitiello can see the positives in the piracy, and - in a repeat of what he told us a few weeks back - provide a refreshingly realistic outlook on the effects of piracy on a major game release.

"You identified our secret marketing campaign!" Riccitiello says, jokingly, to IndustryGamers. "That was a very large scale – concentrated on Poland and China – demo program."

"In the game that was pirated there's [only] one city [out of two]... and Sims 3 has a massive amount of content, and a lot of it is downloaded once you register with EA... and join the online community" he elaborates. "So you get that content in addition to the second city [which is downloadable for people who register], and that's a major component... A huge amount of the gameplay is an overlay for the community, where you are sampling assets created by other people".

"So for the pirate consumer, they don't get the second town, they don't get all the extra content, and they don't get the community. It was only concentrated on Poland and China, but I think of it as not being that different than a demo."

Man has an excellent point. It's like the old shareware model that companies like id used to specialise in. Give 'em half the game, get 'em hooked, and they're more likely to buy the rest.

Works for publishers in terms of sales, works for publishers in terms of combating piracy.

EA Views Sims 3 Leak as 'Demo Program' [IndustryGamers]

Alice and Kev are the creation of UK game development student Robin Burkinshaw, who decided to see how the old poverty challenge idea from The Sims 2 played out in the recently released The Sims 3. Robin set the pair up in a lot made up to look like an abandoned park, gave them a couple of park benches to sleep on, and then stripped them of their money to see how they would fare in the simulated world. Thanks to some insightful writing from Robin and The Sims 3's new living community and traits system, the story of Alice and Kev is nothing short of completely enthralling.

Alice is a good-natured, affection-starved girl with a penchant for falling asleep anywhere imaginable, while Kev is a crass, inappropriate miscreant who blames his daughter for all of his failings. Their adventures are often as completely heartbreaking as they are humorous.

I mentioned that Alice is feeling stressed out now that she's a teenager. When she was a child, she used to always get her homework done on time, worked hard every day at school, and got constant A grades. She would often come home from school feeling strained, and the only way she could relax after working that hard was by cuddling her teddy.

She's too old to cuddle teddy now. All she'll do is hold him, but gets no enjoyment from it. She can't even pretend that somebody loves her any more.

See? I am tearing up just re-reading that bit right now.

Alice and Kev have gained quite a following since Robin launched their blog, which is kind of depressing in and of itself, as you generally won't find a real homeless family on the receiving end of this kind of attention. Perhaps the fake family will help raise awareness of real families in similar situations. If not, perhaps they should.

You can follow the entire story so far at the link below, where you can also download Alice and Kev, placing them into your own Sim town to see how they get on.

Alice and Kev [Robin Burkinshaw via BoingBoing]

Thing is, The Sims 3 was released this month, and retains its #1 position ahead of the hoodie-clawing simulator. Something it'll probably do for a few weeks to come, because when you see a PC game atop the charts in Britain, you know it's selling well.

The Kübler-Ross model of grief proposed in the 1969 book Death and Dying is actually a theory about dealing with death and terminal disease, both of which are way worse than just calling it quits with your special someone.

But breakups – even the mature, amicable kind where you know even before you split that you're going to be better off – still suck and sometimes you've got to let yourself go through the five stages in no particular order just to adjust.

1) Denial – Lord of the Rings: Conquest – "This can't be happening to me."
Here's a game that's very good at denying that anything is wrong. It's got a blockbuster movie license behind it, a dream team in development and publishing and the gameplay is based on the Star Wars: Battlefront series. Conquest had it all… so how could anything be wrong?

Even after reality set in for everybody else when the reviews came out, the the game kept right on denying with a big, fat downloadable content pack.

But no matter how many big-name characters are included from the book, sometimes you just have to face facts and move on.

2) Anger – Prototype – "It's not fair!"
Life isn't fair – particularly when it gives you body-morphing, people-absorbing powers that send the whole US Government after you as a terrorist. But there's no time to be sad when they send in the helicopters and the tanks. Sometimes you just have to get mad and Prototype is the game to do it with.

Between flinging pedestrians into helicopters and elbow-dropping tanks, you'll get rid of a lot of bad feelings and find healthy ways to entertain those revenge fantasies about your ex. Way better than boiling bunnies.

3) Bargaining – The Sims 3 – "Just one more, hour, minute, whatever… please, just one more!"
It's natural to feel like you could make things right if you just had a little more time or could do something with the departing loved one just one more time. But the reality is, no matter how many "just one more" times you get, there's always going to be more – more you want to do, more you want to say, more skills you need to raise before you can get that next job promotion.

In The Sims 3, you'll never run out of "just one more" things to do – one more trip to the mausoleum, one more Try for Baby, one more hour toward earning lifetime achievement points so you can buy the steel bladder perk. Maybe, eventually, it'll hit you that no matter what kind of deals you make inside your head, no matter how many ingredients you get for the Ambrosia recipe, sometimes it's just time to stop.

4) Depression – Bionic Commando – "I can't go on… it's just too sad."
It's okay to be bummed when a long-term relationship ends. It's even more okay if the relationship ended against your wishes.

*Spoilers* It's especially okay to be bummed if the relationship ended against your wishes and your loved one winds up embedded in your arm. *End Spoilers*

Just sit back and ride out the angst with a good, long play through of a game that truly gets it when it comes to being sad.

5) Acceptance – Street Fighter IV – "You can't fight it. Just take it."
The final stage of grief is sometimes the longest one coming – maybe even 12 years in coming. But as this game demonstrates, when this stage of grief finally arrives, it has improved graphics, flashier combos and is generally a better experience than you thought to hope for. Sure, everything feels a bit different and maybe you miss the way things were. But Street Fighter has moved on – why shouldn't you?

The bottom line is we all have different ways of coping with loss. Some are more effective than others, just like some games really are better than others. Whatever you choose to do to handle your feelings in the wake of a breakup, just make sure you're taking care of yourself.

And make sure you're playing on your own Xbox Live account because you cannot recover Gamerscore points earned on an account you shared with your ex.

As the head of EA, John Riccitiello can talk games better than most CEOs, and he can talk finances better than most gamers. Given the myriad tactics EA has been employing to sell its games and keep its games from being stolen lately, I had to talk to him last week at E3 for an update about the economics of playing.

I started with the most dramatic price-change EA may have ever made on a video game, the drop of real-time-card-battle game Battleforge from full-priced PC game when it launched in April of this year down to free in late May, supported by for-pay microtransactions. I asked him how that was working out. "Revenue's up," Riccitiello said, before gathering himself for a more thorough answer.

"I feel like you're sort of asking me how the party's going, but the party starts at nine and it's 10 to nine," he said. "I don't have enough good data to give you a great answer. I would say that, as a packaged goods product competing with high-end PC games, it's a highly-polished experience that provides really good core-gamer-satisfying experience. As an intellectual property, it has an exceptionally narrow audience of people willing to pay $49 for that. … It was a product that, if this was a model shop, it's the group that builds ships in a bottle. It's a really small audience, and we found them. Not that many of them. As a free to play game, it's got 25x the production values of anything out there that's comparable."

EA's hope is that games like Battleforge, which got solid reviews can thrive with the support of microtransactions, gamer-purchases for items and add-ons. Riccitiello said that EA's free-plus-microtransaction games, which also include the Korean version of FIFA, have shown the ability to generate more money per user than they'd get from those users had they been full-priced games. Of course, not every user buys items in those free games. But those who do, spend lots.

Free-to-play games present an economic model for games that Riccitiello said EA can't miss, despite its challenges: "There's probably no harder platform to build and deploy for than free-to-play," he said, noting that there's far less structure for that market than there is for the full-priced console gaming. "You don't know what device [gamers are] going to play on and how they're going to want to participate. If you don't refresh the community, the pricing, the assets on a daily basis, they're going to get bored. It's a complicated process, but it's good. ... I think ultimately we can't get in the way of what the consumer wants, because the consumer wants different business models."

On the other side of things, EA has shifted from the pricing experiment of offering downloadable content for the early 2008 racing game Burnout Paradise from free to for-money. The game was launched in a January and, in April, July and Septemberhad, had free DLC consisting of new multiplayer modes and the ability to race motorcycles, among other things. The game's next major update, released 13 months after the game's launch, was the first one that EA charged for: a new Party Mode re-mix of the game,. Subsequent DLC packs, including a new island which was priced just this week, have been for pay.

Riccitiello says EA learned that that roll-out plan for Burnout's DLC was not ideal. Knowing what the company knows now, he said, "that heavy-duty downloadable content would have been available shortly after launch and would have bridged the original purchase of the game to downloadable content, some free, some pay from the outset. We essentially didn't do that. We went dark on the consumer and then came back, which is probably not the smartest way of keeping the community together. Going back to that party, we sort of turned the lights off and threw them out and then we started the punch bowl. Some of them came back. And then more of them came back and then a lot of them came back. People who pirated the game came back. I think this is an area where we're all really learning."

And speaking of pirates, no matter what EA charges for a game, there will be people who want to make EA's games free-to-play on their own terms. That's the nice way of saying what happened to The Sims 3 recently. "We got pirated three weeks before the game launched," Riccitiello said. "And we were really quite nervous about it. We had a lot of telemetry about what the pirates were doing because the launcher was in the version of the disc [that got out.]… There's a lot of Chinese and Polish among those consumers. We know what they're doing. And we finally concluded that we were very happy that almost a million people downloaded the Fight Night demo in the first couple of days we put it out. And in a weird sort of way, the behavior we're starting to see based on sell-through and registration [with the Sims 3] is that we really might have just put out a really good demo."

Riccitiello laughed at his own remark, because he doesn't quite mean it seriously. I pointed out that he might not want to hold his breath waiting for all those Sims 3 pirates to convert to paying customers. "I don't think they will, based on their geography," he said. The point he was making, he said, is that EA's concern over being pirated gave way to a new, more constructive thought: "We were like, 'I think they've demoed the game.' That's probably good. We probably should have posted it on our website."

What the Sims 3 pirates got — what all consumers of The Sims 3, in fact, are getting — is a game disc that doesn't include all the game's features. Only activating the game online gives players access to the game's second town and most of the community features vital to the franchise's vibrant community of content creators and sharers. That stuff, Riccitiello said, is the kind of approach he's happier to take than to load a game up with Digital Rights Management restrictions, as EA had done with Spore. "To quote [Valve founder] Gabe Newell badly, DRM won't work unless you add value."

What this all adds up to, according to Riccitiello, is an EA that is changing its fundamental nature and the manner with which its products connect to consumers. "I often described EA as a packaged goods company," he said. "In Fiscal 10 [EA's financial year, ending March 2010], we're still a packaged goods company that connects to a lot of online services and features. But it's still a packaged good at its core. I think while we'll have big packaged goods sales in Fiscal 11 and 12 — they'll be larger in this year and continue to grow — we're going to feel more like an online services company, with a disc as an enabler of service."

That, he said, is exactly what EA executed with The Sims 3. Get the game and watch it expand. In Riccitiello's terms — well actually one he got from his daughter, he said, — the game, once launched should feel connected and "alive."

That's where all this should lead, however we all pay for it.

Tweet My Gaming is a site that provides a constant feed of video game tweets from everyone who tweets them. It tags video game names and then captures any Twitter activity containing those names, with updates appearing on the front page in real time. It's fascinating to watch it in motion, but that's only a small part of the site's functionality.

Tweet My Gaming not only feeds the tweets, it also tracks them and ranks games based on their Twitter popularity, giving us insight not only into the games themselves, but a good idea about what kinds of gamers use Twitter. For instance, The Sims 3 is currently on top of the list, with 54,069 tweets, compared to the next highest, World of Warcraft with 10,000. This leads me to speculate that the more casual player is more apt to talk about gaming on Twitter than the hardcore player, a fact mostly backed up by the next games on the list - The Beatles: Rock Band, Left 4 Dead 2 (the anomaly), and Wii Fit.

You can search for games by name, which gives you the number of tweets since the site launched on June 1st, as well as the number of players on sister site GamerDNA who list the game in their profiles.

In order to have your tweets counted, all you have to do is mention the name of a game. No tags; no special characters; just the game's name. I tweeted about The Sims 3, and within a minute I saw my tweet sliding down the front page of the website. Just be warned that watching the scroll is completely addictive.

The team behind the website actually sat down with me at E3 for a moment to show me the website, and by sitting down with me I mean sitting down in the hallway outside the press room. Unfortunately I didn't have much time to spare, so this is the first time I've actually gotten to sit down and explore the site a bit.

It really is a fascinating use of Twitter, and another fine example of alternative gaming statistics gathering from the folks who brought us GamerDNA. Go look for yourself!

According to official word from EA, The Sims 3 has already moved 1.4 million copies of the PC and Mac version since its June 2nd release. And we're talking actual sell through, not dirty, rampant pirating! Real money is being spent on The Sims 3, even on the iPhone version, which has remained the top selling paid app on iTunes since its launch.

If you'd like to be handed another official number, try this one on for size: 7 million. That's the number of player created items for The Sims 3 that have been downloaded since launch. I predict expansion packs!

The tips of the lights are sharp enough to cut skin or a small child's mouth should they attempt to gum them. According to a Flickr post from last month, it looks like I have EA Singapore to thank for the lights. They'll look great on my Hanukkah bush. Or in my cat's mouth.

Check out our review of The Sims 3 here.

There are two types of Sims player: the Second-Life types who enjoy crafting and sharing stuff online and the God-types who look for new and interesting ways to terrorize their virtual dollies. The Sims 3 has room enough for both types in its expansive gameplay and online-feature set that lets you create and share everything from couch patterns to machinima.

The once-narrow world of the Sims has been expanded to a persistent environment where Sims can freely walk from one lot to the next, the town around them progressing instead of freezing ‘til your Sim arrives on the scene. This makes the life cycle of the Sims more fluid; as your Sims grows old, so too do all the Sims around him or her. But to counter-balance the relentless flow of time, the developers have added a sixth stage of life, young adult, to the normal cycle to prolong gameplay without forcing you to buy a college-themed expansion pack.

Long six-phase life story short, The Sims 3 is packed with new and different stuff to spice up Sims gameplay we've been used to for over a decade – but here's how it stacks up as a standalone game.

Loved
The Traits System: The second-largest tweak to gameplay after the persistent world feature is the traits system. Sims can carry up to five traits in their adult life that affect their involuntary and menu-based social interactions – stuff like Couch Potato or Flirt that allow them to "Hang Out" or "Ask if Single." Different combos of traits can result in weird Sims that like to go through their neighbors gardens or have a mild psychotic episode while cooking spaghetti. Even better, baby Sims start out with two traits at birth determined by how well Mom's pregnancy went—the better it went, the more likely the user will get to pick them—and develop more based on how rough their childhood is. So if you get a sporadically ill-treated baby, you can wind up with a very strange Sim.

Young Adult Phase: It's nice to have a little extra time to climb the career ladder. Unlike the Sims 2 College Life expansion, there's no limitation to being a young adult. Being a Young Adult in Sims 3 just means more options: climb that career ladder or get married and knocked up as soon as you stopped being a teenager.

Half-tile & Diagonal Placement: Anybody whoever struggled to create perfect symmetry in the Sims or the Sims 2 will jump for joy the first time they place an item in between tiles instead of aligning them perfectly with the grid. Similarly, those obsessed with slanted things will appreciate being able to build diagonal walls that you can actually align objects with.

Who Needs Friends? In Sims past, an expanded social circle was crucial to climbing the career ladder. You needed at least 10 friends to score some promotions and that required roughly 10 phone calls a day plus 10 friend-dates every other day to build up relationships. Sims 3 cuts down on all of this tedium by not requiring a friend count for job promotions. There are, however, advantages to having tons of friends: knowing certain Sims triggers Opportunities—mini-quests where Sims might have to do some chore or stay late at work—that can score a Sim extra cash or move them up the career ladder faster. And friendships in Sims 3 are way easier to maintain; if you haven't called someone in a while, they become Distant Friends and will still show up to parties – especially if you have the Legendary Host lifetime reward.

Let There Be Shoes: The Build-a-Sim menu has been beefed up quite a lot with all kinds of color editing options and the ability to coordinate outfits, makeup and hairstyles for various events. But the best part of all is that they've finally added socks and shoes to the wardrobe menu. Fashion aficionados rejoice!

Hated
Feels Like A Real Time Strategy Game: The persistent world was cool when I was going to parks and fishing at the beach. Then I realized that you couldn't go with your Sim inside a lot of places like their workplace or the sports stadium. The user's view remained outside the building while the Sim's icon stayed in the building as they went about their business. The only impact you could have on them at all was to change their work setting to do stuff like Suck Up To Boss, Talk To Co-Workers or Slack Off; or in shops a menu would pop up, allowing you to buy and sell goods. Once I had a family full of children going to school and parents going to work, it really felt like an RTS where I would just set their orders and pull back to the Town View to watch their icons move into position and freeze for six or seven Sim hours. It was kind of boring because I always seemed to spend more time waiting for my Sims than actually playing with them; not even the fast-forward button helped balance the ratio.

Marriage Is More Complicated: A few tweaks to gameplay make the getting hitched process more complex. First, there's actually advancing a romantic relationship. There's no number value attached to Sim relationships anymore – just a bar beneath their face that grows into red or green depending on how positive or negative their interactions are with your Sim. While interacting with a specific Sim, a text bubble informs you how the other Sim feels about the interaction, like "So-and-so thinks Betty Page is being flirty." Without a number value, you can't know how close a romantic relationship is to marriage or sex or anything. You just have to watch the interaction menus and scan for "Propose Going Steady" and then later "Pop The Question" after letting your Sim and the other Sim perform enough Flirty actions to get the text bubble to say "So-and-so thinks Betty Page is irresistible" and only then can you get engaged. Now comes the wedding – like Sims 2, you either have to throw a wedding party and click on the other Sim during it to select "Get Married" (you can also do this without the party). But doing so pops up a really detailed menu where you get to pick who moves in with you and if you accidentally select the other Sim's household's "Make Active Household" button, you'll immediately exit the lot, exit the wedding and wind up in some stranger Sim's house without the married couple. The whole process felt complicated and would definitely have benefited from a tutorial section – just like every other aspect of Sim life seemed to have.

Inconsistent Standard Of Realism: Some things in the Sims 3 are more realistic – such as food going bad in the fridge – while others have become even less realistic. For example, there's no longer a changing table for infants and you can't bathe them when they get filthy; you just select Change Dirty Diaper and the babe gets spun around in the air and magically comes out clean. I could understand that certain lapses in realism just make the game more fun; nobody likes having to do laundry even in a game. However, the standard of realism doesn't always make sense and there's still plenty of tedium in the game besides baby-bathing – like having to wash dishes.

A Little Impersonal: In favor of the movie editing software, the developers have scrapped the big moment cut scenes from The Sims 2. There's no special cinematic when you finally get it on with your lover and no special ceremony when your Sims exchange rings at their wedding unless you want to capture the moment on your computer and then edit it together after the fact. For me – a God-type gamer who doesn't mess with the online stuff much – this made my Sim interactions even more impersonal than ever and I cared even less when I destroyed their lives.

The biggest flaw with the Sims 3 is that it's going to take some getting used to. Like when Sims 2 came out, not every original Sims fan was ready for all the changes and many of them were offended even at little menu tweaks. The initial changes might be tough for the first few hours. It took me about 10 hours to start appreciating the persistent world and I was still pining for pre-rendered cut scenes. But after about hour 12, I was adjusting to the changes and by hour 15, I was getting my God-type Sims fix as easily from Sims 3 as I could from Sims 2.

Other than that and the few gripes listed above, I can't say there's anything about the Sims 3 that stands out as so completely alien and wrong that it will turn off Sim fans. Even better, the menus are all intuitive enough that noobs won't be lost if they choose this installment to get hooked. Whether you're a seasoned Sims fanatic or a newcomer, though, there's got to be something in this massively massive game for you. So – get cracking, get creating and remember to update the drivers on your graphics card because that persistent city requires a lot of rendering.

The Sims 3 was developed and published by EA for PC and Mac on June 2. Retails for $49.99 USD. Played through all six phases of life and one Sim's death. Total number of babies spawned: eight, total number of marriages wrecked: two, total number of jobs held: three, total number of houses built: one and a half, total times visited the mausoleum to have my Sim mauled by a bear: three.

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While I am a little disappointed at the lack of pointy-ear options indicated by this Star Trek send-up, I was rather ticked by the red shirts dying horrible deaths, so it pretty much balances itself out. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me rush out to purchase The Sims 3 at launch, only to realize after a few minutes of tinkering that there is no way I will ever have the time or talent to create anything this good.