Nintendo Wii Fanboy

If you're already a Sims fan and interested in the unique look of the new Wii iteration, you will be pleased. We finally have some detailed video of the My Sims gameplay, and it looks quite similar to its predecessors, with some significant tweaks made in the "community" and "general cuteness" categories.

The first video shows the main gameplay-- setting up furniture, wandering about the little town, listening to music, and being a huge jerk to neighboring Sims. The second video details the character creation process, wherein your Sim waits very patiently for you to finish deciding what skin color to paint him or her. You can change your Sims' voices in this mode as well, and they provide voice samples by chatting in Simlish on their little cell phones while you adjust the voice with sliders. How novel! Of course, along with the return of Simlish comes another only-in-Sims kind of event: Simlish music, or the even darker side of EA Trax.

Unlike Sims, we can't turn your free will off, so we can only ask you to check out the two videos. We think they're worth your time anyway.

One of our astute readers was just speculating in the My Sims DS comments thread about why EA didn't use Miis in My Sims, especially given that the Sims as they appear are very similar to Miis, and now we have an answer: Nintendo is being stingy! According to a quote in Next Generation from a producer at EA named Eric Chartrand, Nintendo hasn't let any of its third-party friends have development tools for integrating Miis into their software. Whether this means they haven't yet or they won't is still unknown.

Nintendo not cooperating with third parties... this sounds familiar somehow. We hope this isn't an ominous portent for the future of non-Nintendo games.

The Next-Gen article is not just about Miis, although they do figure into the whole idea about user-created avatars and content as a step into, and reaction to, the Web 2.0 participatory culture. It's a pretty good read.

[Via NeoGAF]