UK magazine NGamer has revealed the first details of an ultra secret project from Electronic Arts. Following the massive success of The Sims 2: Pets and the MySims titles, the company is set to bring Sim Animals to both the Nintendo DS and Wii systems sometime during 2009.

At the moment no screenshots can be revealed, but NGamer was given the chance to see the early project in action. Sim Animals is set for a 2009 release on both Wii and Nintendo DS and is much more than the standard virtual pet game with some sort of Sims touch” formula the team was obviously expecting. As they continue with, …”it’s a woodland ecosystem ‘god game’ where Disney-style characterisation meets the teeth and claws of the Discovery Channel.”

Players are represented in the world by a disembodied hand that they can use to move the landscape around with, pick up plants and animals, as well as interact with everything around them whilst the creatures of the forest continue to go about their daily rituals. EA’s is aiming to task gamers with the challenge of building a certain level of happiness by cleaning up polluted areas and helping all of the animals prosper. There are also several other factors that need to be considered, such as food chains. Therefore, if you are egging on the rabbits then you would have to ensure the plants they especially like are tended to in the best possible way, watering them regularly and scattering seeds to help grow more plants. Whilst doing all of this, though, it should be remembered that rabbits are also quite tasty treats for the likes of foxes and bears, meaning players will need to make some direct intervention at times. In these cases the fighting animals will become cartoon-esque dust clouds (similar to the fighting in Freshly Picked Tingle’s Rosey Rupeeland) until players part them and drop each animal off far away from each other.

In the demo version shown off, NGamer was given the chance to see how to interact with bears by bringing the floating hand close to the bear itself and watching as it either runs off extremely petrified or, if it has much more bravado, decides to try and maul to on-screen hand icon! After a little patient probing, leaving trails of berries for the bear, the animal began to trust them and eventually started to accept being hand-fed or even tickled on its under-belly. If scared, though, since it was indeed a wild animal, it would revert to its natural instincts, with the same being true for if it saw a yummy rabbit!

Each living creature’s needs and requirements must be fulfilled if the gamer is to drive the ecosystem in a positive direction and total happiness. Moving things to better locations or helping animals find food o even encouraging them to set up family groups will all be beneficial in the long-run, and there is even the option to name animals’s offspring at times, as well as watch as favourite animals may well come visit you as you progress deeper into the forest.

With twenty-five animal species and fifty plant types being made available in the final build of the game, as well as rare seeds that can be planted to cause a variety of mysterious effects to happen, there is something for everyone and it looks like EA is definitely putting a lot of effort into this new Nintendo exclusive. Finally, up to four players can work in the forest on the same screen, with animals recalling how they have been treated by specific gamers, even if they bring their own Wii Remotes from home to play on someone else’s game.

Stick around for more details on this potentially very exciting game…