Bad Intentions

So, the Maxis Store, which is already a sore point with many in the Sim community, recently included two 'exclusive' items among its latest releases. One is the baby floor mat seen above, and the other is the Baby Bouncer, seen below. For those paying attention, both of these items were initially sneak previewed with Apartment Life sneak peeks, but disappeared from play testing almost immediately.



When that happened, there was quite a bit of grumbling about how mean EA/Maxis was to tease us with something like that. How evil of them! As I usually do with those type of arguments, I rolled my eyes and pointed out that it was more likely that the developers decided the items weren't ready or they were having some sort of problem with the items. I highly doubted that anyone employed by EA/Maxis was cackling evilly in their lair, rubbing their hands together because they were screwing the players over yet again.

At the time, someone on one of the boards I follow threw out the conspiracy theory that they were pulling them so they could sell them in the store and make even more money off of them! Because that would be truly evil.

Well, now they've appeared in the store, and I still don't think EA/Maxis is evil. Incompetent maybe. Short sighted, probably. Hardly evil.

As with all store items, I snagged them from MATY. (Just because I don't think EA/Maxis is evil doesn't mean I'm going to give them more of my money for items they should be handling differently. I've paid for every stuff pack and every expansion pack. The store goes beyond my limits.) After seeing them in my game, I can see why they were pulled from AL. They're not done. They're cute, but they feel unfinished. The meshes look kind of blocky and the textures are half assed. They have some unique animations which are very cute (and why these items still require FT,AL or MGS), but they're limited.

My hunch is that the developers pulled these to work on other aspects of AL that were more integral to the EP. Because of the sneak peeks, though, people kept demanding them, so someone pulled them out and dusted them off for the store without really polishing them up like the original developers probably wanted.

Short sighted? Yeah. Evil? Not really.

I get really tired of all the grousing about how evil EA/Maxis is. There's definitely things they could and should be doing to better improve their relations with their customer base (getting rid of SecuRom, porting things to Mac faster, doing more thorough bug testing), but I just can't assume there is malicious intent behind stupid moves like this one. The mob starts carrying their torches and pitchforks and I just start rolling my eyes. If the company was as bad as some people make it out to be, the game wouldn't be worth anything and I'd have left it behind a long time ago.

Anyway, that's my mini-rant. The items are cute for what they are, so download them if you want. Just don't expect something as polished as what would come with an EP.