Sims publisher EA worked on the series with Turner’s esports arm Eleague and BuzzFeed’s gaming division. The four-part first season of The Sims Spark’d premieres on Friday, July 17th on TBS at 11 PM ET/PT. Episodes will air weekly, and the following Monday, you’ll be able to stream them on the BuzzFeed Multiplayer YouTube channel.

Starting the same day as the show debuts, The Sims 4 players can tackle in-game tasks as part of the Spark’d Challenge Program. The top creators could win themselves an invitation to a future season of The Sims Spark’d.

However The Sims Spark’d pans out, it’s neat to see games beyond those people typically think of as competitive-focused titles effectively becoming esports and getting some TV time. We’ll have to wait and see whether any of the challenges involve the old, morbid trick of placing a Sim in a swimming pool and removing the ladder (probably not).

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The dread and helplessness many of us feel is a painful, yet perfectly reasonable, response to the mad times we are living through. But rather than giving in to your anger and doing something you’ll regret in real life take out that pent up aggression on invading demonspawn from hell. If you’ve got a Chromebook, you can pick up and play the OG Doom and Doom II games for free, at least for a limited time. Conversely, if you prefer a more cultured method of response, the Criterion Collection has released an archive of movies from black filmmakers for your free perusal.

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I for one take exception to the entire premise of the Pokemon series. But, if you’re the sort of gamer who enjoys pitting enslaved animals against one another in violent combat for your personal prestige and amusement, the first expansion packs for Sword and Shield drop in just 10 days.

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If you’re looking for a distraction while being detained and zip-tied in a police van for 9 hours because you committed the “crime” of being the streets 10 minutes before curfew, the Sega Game Gear Micro ain’t it unfortunately. Once October rolls around, however, these brightly colored, miniscule throwback systems can help you make it through the coming second wave of COVID-19 outbreaks, each with its own unique set of classic 16-bit titles.

Ars Technica reporter Sam Machkovech wrote about Salvador’s work. By chance, one reader chimed in the comments to say they had shared the article with a retired chemical engineer who had worked for Chevron in the 90s. That person found a single 3.5-inch floppy disk with a copy of the game on it. After disappearing for a couple of weeks, the reader reappeared earlier this week to report that they had successfully uploaded SimRefinery to the Internet Archive, where you can play it now. You can also download the game and play in a PC using DOSBox. 

The SimRefinery that’s available to play today is a prototype, so many parts aren’t complete. It’s also very much designed for those with a chemical engineering background; many of the gameplay elements attempt to recreate the more technical aspects of running an oil refinery.    

However, like most other Sim games, you can simply try to cause chaos. In fact, causing havoc seems like it may have been the point SimRefinery since it gives the player a sense of all the systems that need to work in order for a refinery to function. “If you start breaking the refinery, you can see how ruining one part of the plant will affect the other parts of the plant,” wrote Salvador. So if you just feel like watching a refinery burn in all its pixelated glory, go right ahead.

The game will still be playable, but you’ll have to make a number of sacrifices. Existing players will have to download The Sims 4: Legacy Edition, a frozen-in-time version that uses the old standards. It’ll only work with add-on packs released in February 2019 or earlier, and online features like the Gallery, game banners and social tie-ins will stop functioning. You also won’t receive bug fixes. This is a not-so-subtle nudge to update your PC — EA is just making sure that you’re not completely left out if you can’t justify upgrading right away.