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With The Sims series being the best selling PC game ever, it’s not surprising Electronic Arts keeps trying to milk their profitable product with expansions and spin-offs. Simcity Societies is the latest game based on The Sims, offering you the possibility to “run” an entire city. A mix of The Sims and Simcity is a pretty good description. If you are looking for an in-depth complex city builder then perhaps you should ignore this game. It’s quite simple in structure, and will only offer casual city building options. Disappointingly it’s so easy to win in this game that it offers almost no challenge. The game does look pretty good and there are a lot of buildings you can build, though the engine could have been optimized more for smoother gameplay.

The idea sounds good in theory: Each building you place has a positive or negative effect on a particular social energy. There are six of these energies, from creativity to spirituality, and each building uses or provides them in different amounts. As your city grows, you unlock newer buildings and décor, each of which is separated into various themes, such as “romantic” or “cyberpunk.” You don’t have to theme your city, so feel free to mix and match. The categorizations are actually rather helpful because you can create themed neighborhoods without having to scroll through full lists of buildings.

Your Sims need to have places to work, hang out, and live, but you’ll rarely need to worry about it. To succeed in SimCity Societies, all you have to do is treat your social energies as currency and keep them relatively evened out. Doing that makes everything from Sim happiness to your coffers fall nicely into place. Need authority? Build a town hall. Have too much? Build a police station. Just don’t ask why it is a police station spends authority–like many of the categorizations, the connection between a building and its social energies is mighty unclear. Why would a service station spend productivity, while a butcher shop creates it? All you can do is look beyond it and realize that it’s not a connection at all–just a random abstraction created to balance out what is in effect six different currencies running simultaneously.

Click here for the full review at GameSpot.

I’ve been going through the list of mmorpgs at MMORPG.com and was annoyed by the amount of very similar games. Unique concepts? Revolutionary gameplay? Nope. 90% are pretty much copies of other games with different packaging. It probably explains why I haven’t played a mmorpg for a few years. Tabula Rasa caught my eye a few months ago as a game that could be interesting and worthwhile to play, so here is some information about it:

A nice little feature of Tabula Rasa is a human-controlled main character that you can interact with. NPCs are boring and linear. We don’t have the technology yet to create intelligent AI characters. So it will be interesting to see how this Tabula Rasa concept will work out.

In the future an evil race called the Bane are on tour around the galaxy destroying planets, and killing organisms, including humans. You will be one of the few surviving humans who must halt the Bane’s destructive actions and save humanity. Okay not terribly original, but let’s not forget that this is mainly an FPS game full of fact-paced action. From what information is out there we can conclude that roleplaying will not be a significant part of the game. This could change later on when they add new content to the game.

Tabula Rasa launched a short while ago so check it out. There are several similar games planned for release in 2007/2008, so there will be plenty of choice for people who love mmofps games.

We’ve already seen and played enough of Tabula Rasa to have a pretty good idea of the game’s basics, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be surprised by some interesting decisions the developers are making. Today at GDC we had the chance to chat with Starr Long and see another demo of the game. It didn’t contain much information that we hadn’t seen or heard before, but we did learn a bit about the Spy class’s impressive new Polymorph ability.

This late game ability requires the use of a number of specific Logos symbols to transmute the Spy’s appearance to that of one of his or her many enemies. Once the power is unlocked, the Spy has the ability to turn into a general rank and file unit but as the power is upgraded, the Spy can take on the form of more and more powerful units.

For several articles about Tabula Rasa, go to IGN.

In case you don’t know what the Orange Box is… it’s 5 games for the price of one ( or so they say) by Valve, the people who brought us games like Half-Life. The box includes Half-Life 2, HL2 part one and part two, Team Fortress 2 (I’ve been hearing very positive stories about this one!), and Portal. The latter game is hard to describe, it’s quite innovative and will add a whole new twist to gaming. It would be best to read the preview below to get a good idea of what Portal is about.

As I stepped out of the elevator onto the eight floor of the Aperture Science Laboratories’ portal testing division, the public announce system issued the following cheerful warning:

“Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an unsatisfactory mark on your official testing record–followed by death.”

Well. Far be it for the nameless test subject in Portal to disappoint the narrator by receiving unsatisfactory marks and possibly dying, thereby skewing Aperture’s test results. Of course, I have to admit that the first time I heard this witty line–along with many others–I couldn’t help smiling. In Portal, Valve has crafted a First Person Puzzler filled with tons of spatial puzzles and clever writing, along with the promise of cake at the end of the tests. It stands to reason that Portal could very well be the “sweetest” game in The Orange Box package.

If you want to read the entire preview click HERE.

The real world is always in conflict, but the game World In Conflict takes it a step further. Developer Massive has created one of the most graphically appealing RTS games to date. This action-packed title comes with numerous tools of destruction to ensure the complete annihilation of your opponents. World In Conflict is not a resource gathering RTS game such as Age of Empires or Empire Earth. It’s designed to instantly provide aggressive game action without having to worry too much about economic and cultural aspects. Team work is of great importance in the multiplayer games, as you will soon notice that not working together will cause you to lose the battle pretty quickly.

To run this graphic intensive piece of software you will need a high performance system if you want to enjoy the game in high resolutions. Thankfully according to IGN the game looks pretty with medium settings as well, even on medium-range computers. The demo can be found here and is 1.2 GIGS large.

Epic destruction is everywhere in Massive’s latest. It’s a game that’s among the prettiest RTSs we’ve seen offering up detailed units, large well-rendered environments, and some truly spectacular special effects. The visuals in World in Conflict are brilliant on all fronts and provide an easy entry point for all comers to immediately sink in and enjoy some fast-action strategy though the price of entry may be expensive if you’re only in it for the big effects. Running everything on very-high at 1900×1200 can cause some serious frame rate dips on even a computer with an 8800GTX, 2GB of RAM and a Quad Core processor when the effects really start flying. Thankfully, the game still looks pretty at medium detail, which most medium range PCs should have no problem with.

Massive has also made entry easier for the average Joe by keeping the army size down to a minimum, keeping base and economy management out of the picture, keeping game times shorter, and the gameplay more immediately aggressive. It’s something Massive originally tried in their Ground Control series that they’ve updated and improved mightily here.

Read the entire review of World In Conflict by clicking HERE.

If you enjoy running through huge virtual worlds, and love RPG – then perhaps you need to take a look at Two Worlds. Two Worlds is a new RPG game that pretty much stays loyal to the genre but introduces a huge game world for you to wander in. Gamespot calls it “A poor man’s Oblivion”, which obviously doesn’t sound very promising and positive. BUT, let’s not forget that Oblivion is one of the best, if not the best, RPG ever to be released. A poor man’s version of Oblivion is still a pretty good game. There are some annoyances, such as tiny interface buttons and text that is meant for close-up reading. The map is hard to read as well which is a big negative since you need it with such a huge game world to explore. Gamespot gives it a 7.5, which is about the rating other PC game sites have given it.

A poor man’s Oblivion. This description may seem a bit damning, but it puts the game in awfully fine company when you consider the sheer greatness of Bethesda’s role-playing game opus. Reality Pump’s RPG certainly has it where it counts in the aspiration department, even if, largely due to some design quirks, the first-time RPG developer can’t quite match the gold standard established by Oblivion last year. With that said, the epic scale of the game, along with outstanding character development, free-flowing action, and good quest variety, make it a worthwhile play for any RPG aficionado.

Read the entire review of Two Worlds by clicking HERE.