Thanks to the App Store Apple’s iOS powering devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch has become a premiere gaming platform. Sure many of the titles aren’t as full fledged as something you’d find on a dedicated portable console like the Nintendo 3DS but many big studios have gotten down on the fun releasing many top notch titles.

EA, for example, is one of the biggest game studios getting down on iOS with several of their hardest hitting franchises already available. In fact, just today it was announced that EA will be holding a sale on their iOS games bringing many of the hottest titles to a more palatable price tag. For example, Dead Space, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12, SimCity Deluxe, The Sims 3, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and The Simpsons Arcade.

All of these titles have been dropped to $5 or less with several of them dropped to just $1.

While The Sims 3 has been out for the PC since June 2nd of last year, it has yet to make its jump to the consoles. Well, it’s just been announcd that the game will be coming to the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and even the Nintendo DS.

The game will play generally the same as the PC version but with a few added bonuses throughout the various consoles. We’ll keep you updated as more information is made known.

Considering the original Sims and The Sims 2 had a crapload of expansions it’s no surprise that The Sims 3 is following suit. The latest of such expansions is The Sims3 : Ambitions.

Ambitions lets you follow your Sim through a variety of jobs such as a detective, ghost hunter and many, many more. Additionally, Ambitions will include a “leveraging Build and Buy mode” as an architect and the ability to give your Sims tattoos.

Expect The Sims 3: Ambitions to his store shelves this June.

via joystiq

Via a press release, EA proclaimed that The Sims 3 was the best selling PC game in the world in 2009. However, while it’s not hard to understand The Sims 3 being a massive seller, EA didn’t provide any sales numbers, and there’s no official word from any third part sales tracker either. But considering that The Sims 3 sold an estimated 1.4 million units during its first week, and considering how slow PC game sales have been in 2009, they may very well be right in proclaiming the game as the best selling title in 2009.

While the iPhone began as just a phone (among other things) the launch of the App Store really turned it into a premiere handheld gaming platform. The Palm Pre, on the other hand, hasn’t seen much love in the game department despite the fact that it too has an app store of sorts.

However, at this year’s CES, Palm has let us know that they will be commited to bringing 3D games to the platform signing on EA to develop said games. Games currently in the pipeline include The Sims 3, Need for Speed Undercover and more.

via joystiq

Ever since the first Sims title hit the market it’s been generally accepted that every game then after would be a huge success and The Sims 3 is no different.’

According to recent reports, in the US The Sims 3 sold a full 820,000 copies in June alone. Added to that, Gamasutra strongly believes the game has sold over 2.5million copies globally.

Just to put that into perspective, the entire Sims franchise had sold over 100 million copies worldwide as of April 16th, 2008.

I think it’s safe to say that The Sims is definitely here to stay.

It seems that EA and Dr. Pepper have signed a multimillion dollar advertising deal that will have the two companies cross advertising eachothers products.

The first project announced involves EA advertising Dr Pepper products in The Sims 3 early next year while Dr Pepper will include codes for unlockable Sims 3 content in their products.

This sounds great considering Dr Pepper is one of my favorite sodas, but I still think I like Mountain Dew’s introduction of Game Fuel as an advertisement for Halo 3 and reintrduced it for World of Warcraft. Anyone agree?

Read (IndustryGamers)

Before the era of P2P file sharing if you wanted to get a game for free you had a few options. First if you had a buddy with the right knowhow he could send a disc your way with the game and a crack program on it. If none of your friends were quite that delinquently minded you only had one choice: to hunt through ‘warez’ sites which were generally just spawning grounds for popups, viruses and porn advertisements.

Peer to peer downloading programs changed that and Bittorrent has been one of the most popular downloading programs in years. Though the first protests came from the music industry thanks to Napster, the video games industry has gotten in on the act, with many companies complaining that developing for PCs has become nearly impossible due to rampant piracy. Those who do often institute draconian DRM measures, frustrating players and anarchists everywhere.

The Sims 3 was leaked and downloaded over 180,000 times from May 18th to May 21st, yet the DRM-free game has sold over 1.4 million copies in its first week, making it one of the most successful launches in EA’s history. EA has been one of the main proponents of the argument that piracy is killing the PC gaming industry, but their arguments seem to have been invalidated by this.

My guess is that the theory behind piracy goes like this: you’ve got a small subsection of the market who will pirate a game no matter what. Then you’ve got people who are willing to pay full price for a robust, well-crafted experience, but don’t want to pay full price for something that they think might be cool yet is only netting five or six out of ten on the reviews. In the end even if the panic-mongers at EA are right and piracy is a huge problem, the industry will simply evolve into an online focus where verification is built into games and money will be made by subscription fees or optional VIP packages in free games.

EA reports that The Sims 3 has sold over 1.4 million copies during its first week on the market, making it the fastest selling Sims game ever. The original Sims game sold more than 16 million copies, while the sequel, The Sims 2 sold over 14 million units worldwide, excluding all the expansion packs.

The Ten Commandments, basis of moral law for both the Jewish and Christian faiths alike have often come under fire by comedians. I can recall one bit in particular where George Carlin whittles down/condenses the list into a mere two or three general guidelines. Even some Christians will acknowledge that while certain commandments still make a lot of sense (murder, theft, etc.) others might be a little out of date.

It seems that despite the country’s long history of Christianity the British aren’t very well informed regarding the ten commandments. In celebration of the the release of god simulator The Sims 3 EA did some polling and found that more than a quarter of British youths 11-16 can’t recall even a single one of the commandments and only six percent of British children and adults can recall all ten.

The revised and updated list of commandments has been assembled and will be carved into two limestone tablets (the same type of stones Moses had been given) and presented to the Houses of Parliament this week as a benchmark of where public opinion stands regarding common moral standards in modern Britain.

Here’s what the 1,000 British citizens polled came to an agreement on regarding the commandments:

Modernised Traditional Commandments (ranked in order of importance to the British public)
1. Do not kill
2. Do not steal
3. Do not cheat on your partner with another person
4. Do not envy others
5. Respect your parents
6. Do not accuse a person of something they did not do

New Commandments
7. Respect all people regardless of race, religion or sexuality
8. Do not commit acts of terrorism
9. Respect and protect the planet
10. Do not be motivated by greed