"This month Maxis is preparing to announce the creation of the 100,000th album. According to Wright, The Sims had been on the market for about six months before the first story-oriented albums began unexpectedly appearing. Initially, it was all superheroes all the time. But users quickly began making the albums richer, with multilayered characters and multiple episodes. 'It went way beyond my expectations,' Wright said. 'They were sort of like small novels.'"

The article talks a lot about this 'tool' being used for self-expression. You can read the entire 2-page article right here. Then there's a hidden thing that Maxis already deleted from the front page (for some unknown reason). At the time of writing it's still available however: it's a survey for The Sims 2. If you have Internet Explorer, you can submit some computer specific information (computer speed, memory, video card, etc), which Maxis will use to fine-tune Maxis (probably). It's all automatic (done by FutureMark), if you want to participate click here.

Last but not least there's something new: Superstar music. For the next few weeks you can download 4 songs per week, all from Superstar. These are MP3s that you can burn to a cd if you want. Cover pictures etc. are all included, so you can print that and make it all look very slick. There are now four songs (Superstar Theme, Thonsivee, Stambadoo and Casting Call) and the cover and label images. You can get those right here. That's all for this pretty nice SimDay. More music and other things next week, probably.

Written at 22:38 on Thursday, 3 July 2003 by ChEeTaH.