EA has released screenshots of SimCity Societies. They can be viewed at CVG. From the descriptions provided by EA and from the screenshots available at CVG, it appears that SCS is a fully 3D, glorified version of Simsville, the cancelled Maxis venture from 2001. Gamestop has SimCity Societies available for pre-order, with an expected ship date of November 13, 2007.

According to Computer and Video Games, the SimCity franchise as we know it is finished. Reportedly, Maxis has passed off the development of SimCity to the same team who developed Civilization IV, "Tilted Mill". The new incarnation of SimCity is said to be a far cry from the SimCity we all know an love.

R.I.P. SimCity

Gamasutra recently took note of an EA job posting seeking a "SimCity Product Manager". The position is in in the field of marketing and would seems to indicate a ramping up of SimCity 5 production. It is possible that upon finding a Product Manager, we might get some special SimCity 5 sneek peeks - as part of the manager's duties include promotion and product launch planning. Such a "sneek peek" would likely come in an exclusive story in a computer gaming magazine. I wouldn't be surprised to see such a sneek peek arriving along with Spore later this year...

A great piece in The Escapist details one writer's musings on the early year of Maxis and the early games that it released like SimCity, SimEarth and SimLife. There are some things that we completely forget about with our modern SimCity incarnation - like a full printed manual. Certainly a good read for anyone who has been with the SimCity franchise for a while.

After a long drought of SimCity-related news, EA yesterday confirmed that the fifth installment in the SimCity series is under development. No further information has yet been revealed. SimGlobal will continue to relay news as it is released.

It seems that a port of SimCity will be heading to the Nintendo DS portable game console, as reported by Joystiq.com. The game will apparently only be availibe in Japan and will model SimCity 3000.

Aspyr's latest newsletter discusses that they are currently working on several new universal binary patches to allow for improved performance on OS X games running on the recent Intel Macs. Notably, they included SimCity 4 on the list, good news for Mac SimCity players and Aspyrs dedication to the SimCity line. You can find out more about the other games to be patched in the MacNN piece.

Although there hasn't been nearly as much buzz around the mobile version of SimCity as there has for The Sims, it seems that it may finally be arriving later this year. The EA Q1 2007 earnings conference call (the EA fiscal year is offset from the regular year) notes that SimCity should be arriving in Q2 (later this year). You can read the full transcript of the call here, although you will need to Ctrl-F to find the mention of SimCity. What version of SimCity the mobile edition is to be based off of yet is as of yet unknown although we wouldn't be surprised if it was SimCity 2000 jazzed up with SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 elements.

The San Francisco Chronicle is running an interesting article detailing how more and more computer games are making their way into the classroom, including SimCity and The Sims 2. The major advantage for the students comes in the exposure that it gives them to technology, something becoming a requirement in the modern business world. Playing SimCity 4 would certainly beat the Oregon Trail!

It seems as though the SimCity tips and hints hotline referenced in the SimCity 4 Deluxe version's installation guide has nothing to do with the game at all, but instead connects callers to a sex hotline. The full story at The Herald News describes how the number was discovered to be an explicit one. Electronic Arts said that they were unaware of the situation but are looking into it. As this is the first complaint of this nature it is likely that at some point the hotline worked for SimCity, although EA has not commented on whether or not they still maintain a SimCity 4 hotline.