The Next Simcity5! Simcity Societies

Simcity Societies will now be the fifth installment of the popular Simcity games. We last left off with Simcity 4 Rush Hour which focused on traffic, highways, and commute time management. Simcity Societies hints towards being that SimsVille hybrid I’ve been waiting for. Will it steer towards City Life and its focus on keeping poor and rich communities happy together? Or will it focus on Families and their immediate neighborhoods. 1up states EA will take this game and gear it for a much larger audience. This may deter the fans of the series if this game turns out to be too childish and easy. Any new information on Simcity Societies will be added to this blog and this post.

For Now we have a new screenshot, which doesn’t impress me.

Bumped.org Is now keeping track of any breaking devolopments of Simcity Societies.

Sega Unveils the Blue Orb Texter. Text Messaging in your Games.

Sega has recently started pre-orders for the Blue Orb Texter. This device enables you to type words on the screen using just the gamepad itself. The Blue Orb texter replaces the on screen keyboard seen in some online games for consoles. With a few clicks and directional button presses you’ll be able to form sentences. Well as much as it sounds cool on paper, the actual video on how to use it is very cryptic. It seems to be some sort of a T9 input method for words but the question is, how exactly do you create a word? Do you press left for L? How do you write the other letters? How does this thing work?!?!  There isn’t a 1-9 dialpad on Playstation or Xbox 360 controllers that would make sense of all this, but Sega believes this Blue Orb Texter is the future of all communications through a controller. I’m sure there is going to be a steep learning curve with this thing. If your game enough to buy it, the price is $34.95 for the Playstation Version and $39.95 for the Xbox 360 version. Inside the box you’ll recieve a goody bag with stickers and other fun assortments you may never use but will instead sell them on eBay.

Playstation Home

Sony unveiled screenshots and a press video of its new online multiplayer environment. Playstation Home is coined to be an expandable online world with the ability to talk, play games, and build your dream home. Its currently not known how customizable the environment shall be. Though, the video does show the purchasing of furniture, it is unknown whether the house can be built from the ground up a la "the sims." Home features customizable personal avatars mimicking dangerously close to Tony Hawks style of clothing. Even though many are deeming this to be a Second Life killer, or its more fashionable cousin, Home should allow Playstation to play catch up with the other consoles. Sony also introduced its first game for Home, "LittleBigPlanet" a very stylish and rich 2-D platformer with 3-D elements.

The Sims 2 Pets Mobile, would it run on your phone?

I took a quick look at this game and saw something shocking. First, its 3D and no, not that pseudo 2.5D, but completely 3D. Secondly, the preview video is running on a Motorola Razr. How in the world could that ever run on a Razr. That must be some souped up razr they got there. I believe its a BREW enabled Razr which brings me up to a point. Game Developers do little to address the differences in mobile phones. When your on their site searching for games for your phone, you really have no way of knowing how it would run and how it would look like. Take for instance, The Sims 2 Mobile. On some phones they are able to get better graphics, faster speeds, and wonderfull quality. Other phones we get the run down, boring, can’t do much of anything version. The gap between the high and low end versions were so great that people felt they were ripped off. I remember some angry rants we had in the forums where people wondered why they got the sucky version. There isn’t any guideline or system on any of the major gaming networks to tell you which version of the game you’ll get. Mobile phones don’t have the easy to read specifications compared to PCs. You can probably tell which game won’t run on your computer just by looking at the graphics, yet for mobile phones I have no freakin idea what would run and what can’t. The mobile gaming market is sparse leaving us with no direction to turn to when we want a particular game only to read that its not supported for our phone. Otherwise its still a awesome 3-D game for the phone and hopefully we’ll see standards when it comes to gaming platforms. So far we only have BREW and Java. Brew always gets the upper hand. Sun Sur!

[The Sims 2 Pets Mobile] 

Review: Phantasy Star Universe

Phantasy Star Universe came out about a month ago, I was one of the early adopters to get it the next day, fortunately for me I got a good chance to play it and share my uphills and downfalls. Phantasy Star Universe is the anticipated sequel of Phantasy Star Online. Many new features were added and many were dropped but the main deal of the game is to run through dungeons with your team mates and fight monsters. It stars Ethan Waber and during his trip around the Gurhal Star System, he meets up with a cast of friends and enemies all fighting the one major enemy, SEED! You can view more images in the Bumped.org Image Gallery.

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