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Posts with tag Maxis

Filed under: Fun, Games, Windows, Macintosh

Can't wait 'til September for Spore? Creature Creator is out now!

Geeks everywhere are anxiously awaiting the September release of Spore, the species-creation game from SimCity genius Will Wright. Today, everyone is drooling just a little bit more over the release of Spore Creature Creator, the part of the game where you generate the prototype for your new species. Even without the rest of the game, messing around with the creature options is a lot of fun -- it's like the coolest game of dress-up for nerds that we could ever imagine.

Creature Creator is available for PC and Mac as a free demo or a $9.99 full version (with all the creature parts). It hooks up with the Spore website so you can show off your critters to others on SporePedia. You can also take pictures of your creations and e-mail them with friends, and take videos to upload to YouTube -- all from within the game.

It's not just building and coloring, though: test-drive your Spore, making it dance, sit, attack and more. This is just about the smartest marketing decision we could imagine, because we're already sort of attached to our Spores. Now we can't wait until September to see what they can do!

Filed under: Fun, Games, Internet, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware, Time-Wasters

SimCity Classic online - serious Time Waster

Sim City Classic
Watching our friends play SimCity on their Nintendo DSes got so frustrating that we finally went out looking to see if there's a free version that can be downloaded. We didn't get that far, however, because a quick trip to Wikipedia informed us that Maxis - the original publisher of SimCity - offers a version of SimCity Classic that you can play online.

Unfortunately, it looks like this has been up for a really long time, as evidenced by the following error you are greeted with if you visit the site with a Firefox browser:

SimCity Classic Live requires Windows 95/98 or Windows NT with either
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher
or
Netscape Communcator/Navigator 4.0 or higher.


So your choices for popular modern browsers boil down to IE, and well, that's it. Oh, and the other big downside is that to play the game, you have to register giving a username, your first and last name, and a valid email address. And you have to consent to some legal mumbo-jumbo that we didn't read... you should probably read it and let us know if we owe Maxis our first born.

Game play is just as you remembered it - classic and bare-bones, but in full color glory. And it's still really hard.

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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