Talk about this in our newly opened Cities XL forum.

SimCity Societies Destinations: SimCity Societies Destinations enhances the SimCity Societies experience by providing all the tools players need to create an entire city or town based on attractions and amenities that visitors enjoy. With an enhanced map generator, players can identify each city’s opportunity for diversion and the city can capitalize on that draw. From sprawling theme parks and tropical beach resorts to country hiking trails, players can control more than 100 new buildings to create their customized destination.

The Sims Carnival SnapCity: The Sims Carnival SnapCity is a unique city-building simulation game with a puzzle twist that is both strategic and accessible. In a fun, open-ended gameplay environment, players are challenged to position falling, colored blocks in just the right places to build the best possible cities. Featuring an array of industrial, commercial and residential neighborhoods, it’s never the same city twice! The fun never stops as you save your city from natural disasters, man-made catastrophes, even out-of-this-world alien attacks!Players can also

The price will be $39.99. The press release mentions North America specifically, so we’re a bit unsure whether or when this will be released worldwide. Box art below.

Preorder

New features:
- Added the Burgazoid 6000 disaster. The Burgazoid 6000 shoots laser beams. His footfalls cause mini-earthquakes.
- Added the Ornithosaurus Wrecks disaster. A gigantic horned bird-like monster who hurls fire from his beak; his footfalls cause mini-earthquakes.
- Six new events: epidemic, investment bubble, riot, strike, scientific breakthrough, pilgrimage,
- Two new crises: religious holiday, counter-cultural revolution.
- New building abilities for Eyesore, Minor Eyesore, Contagious, and Inspiration.
- Mod management tool, accessible from the main menu. Enables you to enable/disable or delete mods. Provides link to the mod exchange online.

New Buildings:
- Additional variants of 15 home types.
- Two new venues - Supermarket and Carousel.
- Two new workplaces - Warehouse, Low-rise Office Building.

Fixes and improvements:
- Fix for Having a very large city with a very high worker population while the Happiness Icon indicator is turned on causes the game to crash.
- Fix for - GREEK - The HotKeys “V” and “Shift+V” are not functional.
- Fix for crash that could occur on exit with a fire in the city.
- Fix for: Hitting return to the main menu skipping prompts for save/load when it comes after an achievement.
- Fix for goto nearest firestation button not working with district fire stations.
- Fix for camera not focusing on UFO attack after focusing on Fire (However, it is still possible for the camera to be below the UFO if the UFO is very high when the “!” button is clicked.)
- Fix for Creepy smoke and ghost effects don’t activate when entering haunted profiles.
- Fix for building costs not updating in gallery when cost modifier is in effect.
- Fix for crash for unaligned particle memory with new ATI Catalyst 8.3 drivers.
- Fix for Building Ghosts not displaying Custom Textures as they are being placed.
- Fix for Culture Car Sets not being expandable.
- Fix for ambients being unable to be overwritten by mods.
- Fix for custom bump maps not showing up in game.
- Fix for: high-resolutions textures are not swapping out. even when camera is too high to benefit from their detail. Reduces memory usage.
- Fix for: error in shadow and batch rendering that may have been causing some DirectX errors / slowdowns.
- Changes in materials handling and in UI texture pinning reduce memory usage.

Download locations: GameSpot | FileShack | GamersHell

• A new road placement method has been added that simplifies roaddrawing. Use it by building a “Rigid” road. The existing road placement method is still available as an “Adaptive” road.
• A UFO Attack disaster has been added. (UFOs show up in your city and destroy buildings. Your citizens flee in terror.)
• Memory footprint reduced.
• Fix for a problem with terrain level-of-detail on low settings that could lead
  to a crash.
• Fix for an overwrite in memory pool allocation which could lead to a crash.

For a full list check the corresponding download page for your language.

…one of the overarching themes he returned to repeatedly was that EA is not in the serious games business.

Furthermore there’s talk about how they worked with BP on the game and pollution was changed in the process of doing so.

allinjure 0 - Heal everyone
allinjure 1 - Hurt everyone
allsick 0 - Heal everyone
allsick 1 - Hurt everyone
eureka - All buildings available to build
moneytree X - Gives you money (where X = amount of money)
orbo - Gives energy
partridge - Makes everyone happy
reward all - All reward buildings available to build

Press enter on your keyboard to bring up the console and type in the desired cheat.

Tell us about SimCity Societies?
Humble: We wanted to follow a similar strategy that we did with The Sims 2, which is, “Hey how can we broaden this? How can we make it less challenging, easier to use, and make it more into a creativity tool?” We’ve just launched, and we’ve had a series of really mixed reviews…

Since SimCity and The Sims, there’s been lot of competing games in the genre. How do you keep The Sims on top?
Humble: No. 1 is listening to our community. Number two is learning from our mistakes….

If you’d like to know what Will Wright is up to, click here.

• Greed Is Good Fun in SimCity Societies (Wired)
• The City is under major renovations (Games Radar)
• It’s SimCity, Jim, but not as we know it… (TVG)
• Tear it down and start again (CVG)

Check out the forum topics Why did they do it? for some interesting thoughts and Rate SimCity Societies to place your score.

Watching your Sims walk around is also fun because of their cute exaggerated walks. But be prepared: Though the frame rate isn’t that stable to begin with, building a large city can slow it to a crawl, so prepare to turn down your settings, even on a higher-end machine.

Don’t miss the patch that was released in conjuction with the game which is said to fix some of the stability issues.