There's more news from The Sims Creation besides the artworks. They've attended a press conference, from which they were able to get the following info:

• You won't be able to see the houses next door when playing, but instead you will be looking at a lot of grass and sky.
• There will be between 6 and 9 tools for each part of your sim’s face in Create-a-Sim (CAS)
• There will be a lot of clothes in CAS, more than 50 for the normal clothes and more than 20 for the formal clothes.
• Night starts at 7pm (19.00 in military time)
• There will be an unlimited number of neighborhoods (each identified by a name instead of number)
• Sims can follow more that one aspiration track because of the genetics. Babies will have the same aspirations as their parents.
• When you choose a sim character traits in CAS they will act like that. For example, if your Sim has many personality points on 'clean', he will actually try to keep the house clean. On the contrary, if your Sim doesn't have those points, he will stick his finger in his ear and look what has come out of it! There are also many more animations for the other traits.

There is also some new information from an interview held recently with Nancy Philippine and Tim LeTourneau. They revealed that the (monster) PC used to capture the videos we see is equipped with a Pentium 4 2GHz processor, 1 Gb of RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9800 graphics card. Nevertheless the game will run on a much lower system (600 Mhz, 256 Mb RAM and a GeForce 2/3 is the minimum). It's also said that the DVD edition will probably out later than the 4 CD version. Since this interview was taken in France, this goes for Europe only. Maxis also tells us again that more tools for creating objects etc. will be released after the game itself. The well-known Rosebud cheat is also mentioned, but the real code won't be revealed until after the game's out. Concerning time, it will be about the same speed as in The Sims 1. However, actions take less time, e.g. a shower doesn't take an hour anymore. More about the gameplay is also said, for instance that when you marry an NPC, which is possible, the NPC will lose their job. Finally, they explain the possibility of having more than one family in the same lot a bit more: "It will not be possible to let several families live on the same lot, in the same house. It will be on the other hand possible for you to simulate two families in one.".

For the complete interview in French, check the articles section at The Sims 2 Creation. For those who aren't so great at French (like me), read the interview at SnootySims, who translated the interview with permission from The Sims 2 Creation. Thanks to both sites for the info.