Testing really is a depressing job sometimes. Half of the time you’re finding stuff that gets totally ignored, no matter how important and obvious (e.g. no main menu mouse support for a port-to-PC), and the other half you’re reading Previews that totally overstate the gameplay and Reviews that are often written by someone who has played the game for 5 minutes and are simply full of lies.

From your comments, it sounds like Sims Online was practically stillborn.

Doesn’t changing the name of your product and destroying the recognition its built up, generally just sabotage its success? CGW for instance was a hardcore gamer’s mag, yes all the games were for Windows but calling it Games for Windows pisses off the majority of us who fugging hate Microsoft.

Who the hell wants to play EA-Life? Makes you sound like a corporate bitch. :)

KG

After playing the ‘game’ for an hour, I assigned myself to checking out the installer, because every moment spent out-of-game was a precious, precious moment.

I did write up the following bugs: “TSO is not actually a game.” “No actual rewards for doing anything means that there is no point to play” and “The ability for users to interact with objects of other users inherently means that massive griefing will always be possible.”

All were closed as “as designed”. There as an absolute certitude on the testing team that the game would bomb, and bomb heavily. Only a few of us accurately predicted that it would also have pedophilia run rampant in it.

Oh, by the way, if the bug is still around (and it was when it shipped) you can install it to your LPT1 printer port. (Don’t do this: windows can’t really manage that memory.)

Interesting, I only hope that that and the behaviour of a certain group of scoundrels on the Internet won’t put an apparently very talented producer off of staying in the games industry.

That aside, there aren’t enough relatively innoffensive cute games in the online specific arena in my opinion. Things that allow children from accross the world to meet and shall we say, close the divide of understanding between different cultures…

I never played it, but surely one of the 14 (!) producers of the game will be avaliable to explain this (funny trivia: one of them is Jade Raymond).

With the recent demise of Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, where now for cutesy, inoffensive online worlds?

Hello Kitty Online when it goes live?

KG

What’s the point of closing this down?

also, they may have been checking the viability.