While everyone was distracted by EA's ongoing press conference, EA went and uploaded a bunch or screenshots and some basic information about a bunch of games, including a new one called SimAnimals for the DS. According to EA's Web page, the game lets players "control more than 60 animals" with an "on-screen animated hand that allows you to reach out and touch, pick up and move everything in the game from foxes and bears to trees and flowers." Animals will grow to like or dislike this disembodied, manual overlord based on how it treats them. Remind you of any other popular simulation game? Look for SimAnimals in January of 2009, and more about the project as we hear it.

Update: An official press release includes a few more details and some enthusiastic quotes from EA execs. Fun!

PC sports gamers are somewhat justifiably unhappy with Peter Moore right now. Earlier this year, the EA Sports executive announced that Madden and many other EA Sports games won't be coming to the PC market this year. But wait, you didn't give him a chance to explain! Well, actually, you did, and he did, but today Moore went into more detail about his division's scaled back PC support. A summary of the reasoning behind the decision:

• PC sports gamers are gravitating to consoles.
• The PC sports gaming market is gravitating to a downloadable model rather than a "packaged" model.
• The PC versions of EA Sports games aren't getting a good enough return on investment.
• You PC gamers just pirate everything anyway and we're not going to make a PC version just so millions of you can just steal it! (We may have exaggerated the tone a little bit on this one, but you get the idea).
  

PC Sports fans can still hold out hope that EA Sports will change its mind, though. Moore hinted that the company might be coming back into the PC space next year with "new, innovative, maybe even less-expensive ways to play all of our franchises on the PC." If there's one thing sports fans should be familiar with, it's squeezing that one, slim ray of hope for all it's worth.

We can expect ads to continue to be shoved down our throats in games from Electronics Arts as the company has extended its deal with Microsoft's in-game ad firm Massive to offer dynamic ads in games for the next two years.

While Massive will continue to offer in-game ads in existing titles from EA, such as the recently released Burnout Paradise, the new deal will allow more advertisers to continue to hawk wares in existing titles, as well as in upcoming games -- including the next two Madden, NBA Live, Nascar, and NHL releases. According to EA, ads will focus on appealing to guys between the ages of 18 and 34, but interestingly will just be served to versions released for the Xbox 360 and PC. For players on other platforms looking for a similar experience, might we suggest taping up ads from your Sunday circular to the television while playing -- at least that way you have the option to take the nuisances down.

Take this one with some mountainous mounds of salt, but a suspicious web site registration has some buzzing that EA might be considering a Take Two-style takeover bid for Ubisoft as its next potential expansion move. A poster over at Gamecyte noticed that a proxy registration for eaubisoft.com was set up by the same company on the same day as the registration for eatake2.com, the lobbying site created to convince Take Two shareholders to accept the company's unsolicited takeover bid (it did not succeed).

Of course, with proxy registration, it's impossible to know whether it was EA that actually registered the second site or if it's just the act of an overzealous domain camper. Still, given the close proximity of the registrations and the fact that EA already owns close to 25 percent of the voting shares in Ubisoft , the circumstantial evidence that EA was at least considering a move is significant (it wouldn't be the first such takeover attempt, either).

Ubisoft for its part, is focusing on license acquisition to spur its own growth in light of the Take Two offer. You know what they say ... when a bear like EA is chasing you, you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the guy you're running with.

Electronic Arts has put a new casual – well more casual – spin on its popular The Sims franchise by announcing a new collection of downloadable Sims titles over EA's casual games service, Pogo.com. The line, titled The Sims Carnival, currently includes two different titles, neither of which come across as particularly compelling nor innovative, a line of thinking with which we think EA should be intimately familiar.

The first of these new titles, The Sims Carnival Bumper Blast, asks players to shoot at Sims-styled bumpers before their ammo supply runs dry, while the other, a rather tepid-sounding Tetris clone called The Sims Carnival SnapCity, has players construct a city out of falling blocks. Both games are bundled together for download for $19.99. The announcement is the latest in EA's not so secretive move to establish a significant foothold in the casual games space, and while we appreciate the effort, it will be interesting to see if The Sims branding alone is enough to convince gamers to hop on board ... or simply break Will Wright's heart in twain.

When EA Mythic announced plans to delay its upcoming MMO Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning until 2008, we'd be lying if we said the news was met with anything but a sigh of relief. After all, retail shelves are already home to more than enough half-baked massively multiplayer escapades for our liking, and anything to keep from being tempted to fork over hard earned rupees for the honor of being glorified beta testers is just fine by us. We'd much rather that pleasure fall to real beta testers, which according EA now number more than 500,000 strong in both North America and Europe, an impressive jump from the some 200,000 announced just six months ago.

Warhammer Online, which promises "revolutionary" realm vs. realm combat and just might be console bound, is currently poised to launch for real sometime during 2008's second quarter, though those players itching for an early taste of what the tabletop-inspired MMO will offer can still sign up for the beta on EA Mythic's website. As for the rest of us, we'll continue to play the ever-popular waiting game, which may or may not be just as fun. For those of you who are in the beta, feel free to let us know.

Right on time, agents from EA have stepped from the shadows to confirm details surrounding the previously revealed Ninja Reflex, a "ninja party game" for the Wii and DS. The game, which will ship in March 2008, will be co-published by both EA and the appropriately named Nunchuck Games, and is being developed by Sanzaru Games, a new California studio founded earlier this year by seven former Activision devs with an obvious ninja obsession. And who can blame them?

While we presume that a Wii-based ninja party game will have us lurking from the rafters and terrorizing the family cat, EA notes that Ninja Reflex's gameplay will center on performing challenges and testing reaction time " with millisecond precision" as players try to earn the right to wear the coveted black belt. There is also promise of four player multiplayer matches, and while we've grown weary of traditional party games, we imagine there's nothing quite as satisfying as the crunch that comes from leaving your best mates blackened and bloodied as they beg for mercy after being beaten senseless at the business end of your Wii remote.

SimCity is EA's gift to the world, the publisher announced today as plans to include the seminal sim game on each computer in the One Laptop per Child initiative have been finalized. EA might describe this event as "the first time a major video game publisher has gifted a game to the world" (reality check: gifted a game to an estimated 10 million laptops by the end of '08), but we doubt the company is gonna take home many 'Philanthropist of the Year' awards for donating a game that was first booted up on Mac OS 6 (it's that old). While a proposed open source version appears to have been nixed from the agenda, we're confident that the generation of dormant hackers sure to be sprung by the OLPC program will make short work of any imposed limitations -- that is, if they ever tire of the free porn.

With the gaming world still reeling over this afternoon's purchase of BioWare and Pandemic by EA, the major publisher/developer held a conference call discussing its plans for the studios, calling the acquisition "mutually beneficial" for all parties.

Says EA CEO John Riccitiello, "We bring a lot to the table ... we simplify the process of courting publishers, basically taking it to zero." He adds that EA, being the publishing giant that it is, can "reach places where [BioWare and Pandemic] don't get to so we can build their properties bigger." As for what EA itself gets out of the deal, the exec noted matter of factly that EA is "not in the open world action-adventure business. These guys are the leaders ... this strengthens us where we need to be stronger."

Industry stalwart Electronic Arts is looking to land a partner in Japan, and who can blame them, what with the region's love of natural beauty and delicious cannibalism. According to a new Financial Times report, the company is entertaining the prospect of partnering with or even acquiring an existing Japanese company, no doubt in order to further EA's well known plans for world domination.

The report quoted EA Asia president Jon Niermann, who during an interview at this week's Tokyo Game Show referred to Japan as a "strategic priority" for the company, which already owns a 15 percent stake in Chinese MMO firm The9. Earlier this year the company also invested in South Korean developer Neowiz, establishing the publishing powerhouse as the studio's second largest shareholder.

Says the report, the region will still likely play only a minor role in EA's global plans, though Niermann was quick to point out the potential benefit of tapping into established talent in the area, noting that "EA offers a great global distribution opportunity in terms of taking Japanese products to other parts of the world and in turn there are certainly companies that are much better at local development than we've ramped up to be."

[Via Gamasutra]

To anyone who might still doubt that Rock Band can instantly create a party, any time, anywhere, check out the above video of an impromptu gathering at the E3 2007's Fairmont hotel. Remember, these are highly jaded journalists and developers, coming to hang out and play a game after the formal show has ended for the day. If they're singing along, just imagine how much your friends will get into it.

You've seen the pictures. You've read the psuedo sort-of liveblog. Now, check out Joystiq's exclusive video of EA/MTV/Harmonix's Rock Band Party at LA's historic Troubadour bar. Apologies for the sound and picture quality at parts -- the lighting and speakers weren't exactly specifically tuned for our pocket shaky-cam. Be prepared to turn the volume down ... to 11!

When we asked the super-helpful PR representative at EA's E3 booth what game she was most excited about showing off, she cheerfully replied "SimCity Societies." It's easy to see why. The game is a major departure for the series, letting players truly build whatever kind of city they want.

While the previous games in the SimCity franchise have generally avoided restrictions on your city-building options, the general visual style and implied goal of the cities was always that of a modern, metropolitan area. Societies throws that idea out the window, with all sorts of different types of city types available, from "industrial" to "fun."

What type of city you build is your call, and is determined by which of the hundreds of buildings you decide to build. Each building affects your city's "societal values" -- knowledge, spirituality, productivity, creativity, and prosperity -- and these in turn determine what your citizens want and what type of city you will get.

The city's look will change as you slide from one type to another, with a dingy, dirty look for "industrial" cities and bright, blue skies in the "fun" cities, for example. In another departure for the series, each type of city has specific victory goals such as population and financial production which earn the players trophies. Players can feel free to ignore the goals and just do whatever they want, but those who want something concrete to work towards now have it.

The developers have focused on making Societies accessible to players who don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of city building. Societies does away with previous titles' focus on micromanaging systems like power grids and sewer pipes. You only really have to pay attention to four basic building types: power generators, homes, money generators and venues such as stadiums and libraries.

If you do want to get micro, though, you can zoom in on the status of individual buildings. The location of your buildings in relation to one another will affect their individual stats -- for example, building a tight cluster of retail shops together will make each one produce more money (and more tax revenue).

SimCity Societies will be available for the PC this holiday season.

Though originally though to be released August 28 across all three platforms -- Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 -- Medal of Honor: Airborne won't be landing on Sony's console until months later.

Gamespot noticed a brief addendum on the bottom of yesterday's press release announcing Michael Giacchino as the game's composer that stated the PS3 version would arrive in November. A previous trailer for the game, embedded after the break, gave the release date August 28 and implied that it was identical across all three platforms.

No reason was cited for the delay. The game appears to still be on track for an August 28 release in North America (August 24 in Europe) for Xbox 360 and PC owners.

The Electronic Arts sports titles on Nintendo Wii are making every effort to appeal to every Wii owner possible. In addition to throwing on minigames like they were free gifts in an informercial offer, the publisher is also introducing Family Play controls to their upcoming Madden, NBA Live and FIFA Soccer releases.

According to the press release, those who opt for the Family Play controls play without the nunchuk adapter and handle the key actions (e.g., shooting, passing, snapping, and throwing) while the game handles everything else. It sounds a lot like how Wii Sports handled tennis and baseball.

More fleshed-out and advanced controls are still available and can be used alongside a Family-style player. Let's hope the Family Play-assisted AI isn't too helpful and gives them an unfair advantage in multiplayer.