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Earlier this month, I wrote that Electronic Arts had made an announcement to members of its long-running but poorly received virtual world, The Sims Online, that it was re-branding the service as EA Land.

On Tuesday, however, EA announced on the official EA Land blog that it is now planning to shut the service down altogether.

"It is with mixed emotions that today we are announcing the EA Land experiment will soon draw to a close," the blog entry read. "Since 2002, EA Land/(The Sims Online) has attracted a very special group of players...and we … Read more

Executives at Electronic Arts have to be kicking themselves right about now.

It appears that Take-Two Interactive, the video game publisher EA has been trying to buy for the last couple of months, has a potentially record-breaking hit on its hands with Grand Theft Auto IV. And EA isn't pocketing the cash.

While it's too early to know exactly how many copies of GTA IV sold Tuesday, the game's launch day, anecdotal evidence suggests it will likely be one of the most successful launches in the entertainment industry's history--if not the most.

"We are saying … Read more

Attention gamers: If you're looking forward to the taking a hands-on role with the forthcoming Spore, you've got work to do starting June 17.

That's when Electronic Arts and Maxis plan to release the Spore Creature Creator, in both a free, downloadable demo version and a $9.99 retail version (or 9.99 euros, for buyers in much of Europe). The demo version will be available from Spore.com and also will be included with The SimCity, due to be released June 23.

The retail edition provides access to all the creature-making parts for Spore, while the … Read more

So it finally happened. The "Optimus Maximus"--the most-hyped keyboard of all time--is now for sale to the consuming public as promised. To which we have only one response: ThinkGeek?

We don't have anything against the gadget peddler, mind you--it was just a little surprising to see a $1,589.99 product being sold by a retailer that's better known for such products as USB rocket launchers. On its "What's New" page, for instance, the vaunted Maximus is sandwiched between a "Dueling Space Marines Copter Set" and a pair of "… Read more

The legendary Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan just got a bit more...modernized.

MoMA announced Monday that it has installed a museum-wide Wi-Fi network so that visitors can access a mobile Web site on handheld devices with HTML browsers, which basically means Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. They can then load up audio tours and commentary; content is available in eight languages as well as in specialized versions for children, teenagers, and the visually impaired.

It's not clear whether the museum Wi-Fi will also let visitors access the Web as a whole, or just the internal … Read more

DeviantArt is a service that hosts user-created art, be it a photograph, written word, or digital creations. The service has been around since 2000, and currently hosts more than 54 million pieces of user-generated art. Art creators can post their works for others to see and interact with. Users can comment on any piece of art, sharing it on their blog or Web site, and purchasing it in the integrated store. It's one-part portfolio, and one-part social network, as the more popular artists on the service garner their own fan base and income off art sales.

In addition to … Read more

Here's a cool little collectible vinyl toy we saw this weekend, in the form of a quirky anthropomorphic video game cabinet. Apparently, there's an entire subculture of fans who collect these limited edition vinyl toys (although they're not really very toy-like, with no moving parts and limited production runs).

Designer Erick Scarecrow created the $30 Soopa Coin-Up Bros. as an homage to classic arcade machines, and its blank surface (available in white, black, green, orange, and a few other colors) can be customized with paint, markers, or stickers--giving a new twist to the old games-as-art debate.

When Cover Flow for iTunes was first introduced, I was initially pretty excited. After all, who wouldn't want to browse through their music and movies by flipping through covers? It's almost like flipping through records or CDs at a music store. But once I got Cover Flow up on screen with iTunes, I was faced with something I'm sure a lot of people experienced--there were so few album covers associated with my music library, Cover Flow was almost useless. I've been able to add many covers to my library since, but I still had gaping sections … Read more

If you lined up the boxes of the 100 million units of The Sims products that have sold since Electronic Arts' monster-hit franchise first launched in 2000, they would stretch from New York to Moscow.

Forgetting for the moment that many of those boxes would become awfully soggy if lined up like that, it's worth giving a curtsy of respect and admiration to EA and The Sims franchise for reaching the 100 million units sold mark, which EA announced Wednesday.

Originally, The Sims was a not-well-loved stepchild of Will Wright's hit games, Sim City and its brethren. But … Read more