Simulation

This is less learning how to fly an airplane and more about pretending to do chores like cooking or telling a dependent to go to the bathroom. A great deal of games in this category are targeted at young girls, though there has always been plenty of room for the more interesting ones to break out and find a mass audience.




1. Spore
PC
EA/Maxis
September 7
There’s no question that Will Wright’s exceptionally ambitious project will sell into the millions, but as to the question of how big a success it will be—that’s a bit trickier to answer. There’s never really been anything like Spore put on the market before, which makes it hard to gauge its overall appeal. All of the signs so far have been positive, though—EA has been doing an AAA job of marketing the game for years now, and the Spore Creature Creator resulted in a menagerie of strange creatures far larger than the company’s optimistic estimates. It certainly seems like the right game releasing at the right time to take advantage of the market’s infatuation with user-created content. All the same, to assume this isn’t a risky release for EA would be foolhardy even at this late juncture.




2. The Sims 3
PC
EA/Maxis
Q1 2009
Neighborhood exploration, better personality creation, full customization of any in-game element—EA can rattle off any number of bullet point features like these. It could also say nothing, and the end result would be the same: The Sims 3 will sell countless millions of copies and enjoy the longest shelf life of any software product in the industry. The demographic for the franchise is not going to change, but that’s fine—like World of Warcraft, The Sims is played by a huge contingent of people who don’t play anything else, and they will all be happy to see what the latest in the series has to offer regardless.




3. Animal Crossing: City Folk
Wii
Nintendo/Nintendo
Holiday 2008
Animal Crossing has already done surprisingly well on GameCube and DS, breaking out on the latter in particular. It was a perfect fit on the handheld, and remains a good fit on the console—though it still feels kind of retrofitted, a lot of old content with only a few new additions and multiplayer improvements keeping the package fresh. So the big question here is: will the expanded Wii audience mind that this is fundamentally the same game that was released on the Nintendo 64 in 2001, the same game that has already seen two popular US releases in recent years? It’s pretty likely that they won’t, and this game will move to seven digits at a fast clip.




4. Cooking Mama: World Kitchen
Wii
Majesco/Cooking Mama Limited
October
The franchise that saved Majesco is still the casual simulation game to beat on console, and a complete overhaul of the mechanics should make World Kitchen a far friendlier Wii game than the original Cook Off. As another cute turn of events, it’s also made the slogan “Don’t Worry, Mama Will Fix It” into a gameplay element as minigame success means Mama will salvage your flubs. As of January this franchise has moved 1.6 million units for Majesco, and it did one million for 505 Games in Europe just a few months after that. While the majority of that has been on handheld, it’s not unreasonable to think that World Kitchen might add 300-400K to that total.




5. Imagine: Party Babyz
Wii
Ubisoft
October
Consider this the representative sample for Ubisoft’s young girl-oriented lineup, even though this isn’t really one of the career simulators the franchise is known for. It’s actually more of a babysitting-themed minigame collection…yeah. So it’s certainly targeted at the same market (that market being undiscerning young girls who can’t bother themselves with the brand’s wildly fluctuating quality) as the rest of the Imagine line, which has been doing a very nice job of bringing in money for Ubisoft. As one of the first games to get the brand on the girl-friendly Wii, Party Babyz will probably confound critics with brisk sales.