The Sims 3 Ambitions (Dutch) Box Art has been uncovered by Sims 3 Nieuws - check below:

One of the things I enjoy most, is watching solo peformances on YouTube - and this video is no exception.
This person has recorded The Sims 3 Theme Song on an Electric guitar, must say its very good!
Source: SimPrograms

TheSims3.com forums are currently experiencing a few problems, and have been taken offline.
It is currently unknown when they will be back online - the following message was posted on Twitter a little while ago:

Forums are still down for maintenance. We have many individuals currently working on it. Thank you for your patience.

In addition the following message was received 4 days ago from the web team:

Hi everyone,

As you may have noticed, we are experiencing issues with accessing the forums. We are working on a fix to get them back up as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience.

So it appears as though this is quite a serious problem, and may last quite a while.
However, in the mean time - if your having forum withdrawals, why not try SimsForum.net or UOEM!

Just picked up an article with some interesting info on The Sims 3 Ambitions from Neoseeker.
They also mentioned, that like The Sims 3 World Adventures, Ambitions will be making its way to mobile later this year - although considered a rumor now, its 99% likely!

Of course, you don't have to do good.  There are positions such as weapons inventor or crazy pharm scientist using human subjects.  Either way, EA has promised "some of the most exciting and varied jobs" in Ambitions, and each job brings additional hours of play.

Additionally, the architect occupation will let players change their town to suit their tastes, altering the Build and Buy modes.  And regardless of your career choice, you can always choose to do good or evil, among other added freedoms.

Scott Evans, General Manager of The Sims Studio, is happy to reiterate the awesomness:

“The variety of careers to choose from is unmatched and we’ve never given players the opportunity to follow their Sims to work and affect their actions on the job.  The Sims 3 Ambitions changes that. Players’ actions at work now directly affect their lives, community and neighbors and become an extremely important part of how the game is played.”

Simillion discovered a short snippet of some Sims 3 music in the next-week preview of Grey's Anatomy.
The music is very hard to hear, so listen closely!!

Amazon has now posted The Sims 3 Ambitions for Pre-Order.
So if you haven't yet placed your order, be sure to do so!!

Pint Shot Riot posted a short video, showing simmers how to get their music in The Sims 3.
Thoght this video was quite amusing!

Who can remember The Urbz? Well to be honest, the only reason I know it, was because I created game pages for all the past Sims Games [ View The Urbz ].
Well to get around to the point I'm trying to make, The Urbz 2 has been spotted on MSxBox-World.com - the site lists no information about the game, except that it will be for xBox 360. I wonder if this is possibly the top-secret Sims project which was mentioned in EA's fiscal announcement recently! Only time will tell!

Please note, as with any unconfirmed game, this is merely a rumor, until (if) more information becomes available.
Thanks to Zac for the heads up!

Some of you may have noticed a sudden decline in the news, this was due to me being unable to update.
Just to give an explanation as to why, there was an explosion at the local sub-station, resulting in a big surge which blew my surge protector, UPS, CPU and motherboard.

Everything should be back to normal now.
Sorry about the down time, and just a special thanks to Josué who kept the site going for me!

Ocean Quigley, a past designer on The Sims team, occasionally posts really awesome stuff from his time at EA (Think he has left now, maybe I'm wrong?!)
Here is some new content that has been posted on the site, and quite interesting to watch!! ::

SimCity 4 - Movie Feature Cam
SimCity 4 had this neat feature (put in by Paul Pedriana) where you could have the game advance a single frame and save a screencapture, advance another frame and save a screencapture and so on.
It let me make little movies of the game as I was working on it, without skipping any frames, which was impressive for the time.

Here's one movie that I captured while authoring an aerobatic flying team for the game:

The Sims 2 - Stairs
Here's a design visualization I did for the Sims2 while trying to figure out how stairs should work.

It's done in my favorite design tool, Maya.
Doing visualizations like this is a great design practice for a few reasons.

First, it forces me to think through exactly how a system is supposed to work, step by step. So when eventually I ask an engineer to implement it in code, I've got a clear idea of what I'm asking for.

Second it's way of expressing the problem to the other people who might care about it (designers, producers, engineers). And if it's a good visualization, it makes the problem (and hopefully the solution) clear to everybody.