ea's spore released on 7th september 2008
Sandbox game addicts, get your wallets ready. One of the most anticipated games of the year, and perhaps even the past five, is about to hit stores on 7th September 2008. Spore's release date has been widely publicised since it slipped last winter by six months.
So, what exactly is Spore? It comes from the terrifyingly clever mind of Will Wright and his team at Maxis (the same company behind the phenomenally popular 'Sims' franchise), now a subsidiary of Electronic Arts. It is also a game which has proven difficult to explain, although the best explanation I have heard so far is “it is Sim Everything”. You start out as a small organism and, much like the real world, it's survival of the fittest. Progress through the game is rewarded with upgrades, where you can spend DNA points on upgrading your lil' fella. As the game progresses, you move from simple organism to pond life, to a land animal, and from there to founding society, then civilisations, and onto becoming the dominant species of your world. But that is not all – from there, the game folds out allowing intergalactic travel to other worlds, where the local monsters have been populated from a huge database of other people's creations.
I toyed with the 'creature creator' a few weeks ago. It's a small part of the game that EA released early, so we could get a taster of what is to come. The creator is fantastic fun – I made a crocodile with a huge head for instance, and I laughed at it for probably fifteen minutes straight. The bright and colourful models together with the very cutesy animations your creation performs (my crocodile almost shat itself in excitement when I gave it an extra set of eyes, for example) not only entertained me, but roped my non-gamer girlfriend in too. It was interesting to see what monsters she came up with. Inevitably, the first one looked very sappy and cute, some sort of hug-monster. I have a sneaking suspicion come this Friday, I may have competition trying to get on my PC!
So what is this blog about? The pitfalls, really. I don't mean to be cynical but I'm British, and it's in my genes. I really want this game to succeed, I really do. A few things worry me, however. First off, great, it's a game where you can 'level' your monster up (reminds me of E.V.O. on the Super Nintendo, if anybody remembers that game), which is great. I'm familiar with that concept, and together with the creation mode, it sounds like a game I'd have a lot of fun with. What about the other areas of gameplay? If you watch the trailer, it shifts from top-down munch-em-up to a third-person action game, then to an RTS, then to a space-faring sim. The variety looks great and I applaud it, but I hope it doesn't feel like I'm just playing a set of mini-games with a tentative link between them all (the link being your creation, as it will be constant throughout, although you can 'upgrade' it). It's that sort of detached feeling that made Wii Sports a decent game and not a great game, in my eyes.
The second is the fact that content comes from other people. If this thing gets as big as 'The Sims' did, which lets face it is likely, there will be a hell of a lot of content within Spore. Somebody has already mentioned: what happens when the Star Wars, Pokémon and Futurama creations start appearing? Are they protected from take-down notices? Will EA have to screen all the content? If you're new to the whole concept of Spore, or gaming in general, you may not be familiar with the one core concept rooted deep within our kind. If you give a gamer (especially a male one) a sandbox environment where you can build or model things, they will. make. a penis. I haven't got the statistics to hand, but apparently there have been thousands of cock-monsters uploaded already and the game isn't even out yet. Spore has an ESRB rating of E10+. Would you want your ten year old daughter and her interstellar pal 'Mr. Cuddles', the green snuggle-monster to suddenly arrive on a planet filled with huge pulsating penis-monsters, wriggling around and oozing god knows what? I'm not so sure either.
I hope it lives up to the huge weight being placed upon its digital shoulders by the Internet. I'm sure it will pull me away from reading and programming in the evenings for a while, at least. The game has to be admired, just for the sheer scale, the ingenuity (you can give a creature a billion legs and it just works out how to walk), and the love that has gone into designing something this complex. At five or so years in the making… let's see if can match the hype.
So, what exactly is Spore? It comes from the terrifyingly clever mind of Will Wright and his team at Maxis (the same company behind the phenomenally popular 'Sims' franchise), now a subsidiary of Electronic Arts. It is also a game which has proven difficult to explain, although the best explanation I have heard so far is “it is Sim Everything”. You start out as a small organism and, much like the real world, it's survival of the fittest. Progress through the game is rewarded with upgrades, where you can spend DNA points on upgrading your lil' fella. As the game progresses, you move from simple organism to pond life, to a land animal, and from there to founding society, then civilisations, and onto becoming the dominant species of your world. But that is not all – from there, the game folds out allowing intergalactic travel to other worlds, where the local monsters have been populated from a huge database of other people's creations.
I toyed with the 'creature creator' a few weeks ago. It's a small part of the game that EA released early, so we could get a taster of what is to come. The creator is fantastic fun – I made a crocodile with a huge head for instance, and I laughed at it for probably fifteen minutes straight. The bright and colourful models together with the very cutesy animations your creation performs (my crocodile almost shat itself in excitement when I gave it an extra set of eyes, for example) not only entertained me, but roped my non-gamer girlfriend in too. It was interesting to see what monsters she came up with. Inevitably, the first one looked very sappy and cute, some sort of hug-monster. I have a sneaking suspicion come this Friday, I may have competition trying to get on my PC!
So what is this blog about? The pitfalls, really. I don't mean to be cynical but I'm British, and it's in my genes. I really want this game to succeed, I really do. A few things worry me, however. First off, great, it's a game where you can 'level' your monster up (reminds me of E.V.O. on the Super Nintendo, if anybody remembers that game), which is great. I'm familiar with that concept, and together with the creation mode, it sounds like a game I'd have a lot of fun with. What about the other areas of gameplay? If you watch the trailer, it shifts from top-down munch-em-up to a third-person action game, then to an RTS, then to a space-faring sim. The variety looks great and I applaud it, but I hope it doesn't feel like I'm just playing a set of mini-games with a tentative link between them all (the link being your creation, as it will be constant throughout, although you can 'upgrade' it). It's that sort of detached feeling that made Wii Sports a decent game and not a great game, in my eyes.
The second is the fact that content comes from other people. If this thing gets as big as 'The Sims' did, which lets face it is likely, there will be a hell of a lot of content within Spore. Somebody has already mentioned: what happens when the Star Wars, Pokémon and Futurama creations start appearing? Are they protected from take-down notices? Will EA have to screen all the content? If you're new to the whole concept of Spore, or gaming in general, you may not be familiar with the one core concept rooted deep within our kind. If you give a gamer (especially a male one) a sandbox environment where you can build or model things, they will. make. a penis. I haven't got the statistics to hand, but apparently there have been thousands of cock-monsters uploaded already and the game isn't even out yet. Spore has an ESRB rating of E10+. Would you want your ten year old daughter and her interstellar pal 'Mr. Cuddles', the green snuggle-monster to suddenly arrive on a planet filled with huge pulsating penis-monsters, wriggling around and oozing god knows what? I'm not so sure either.
I hope it lives up to the huge weight being placed upon its digital shoulders by the Internet. I'm sure it will pull me away from reading and programming in the evenings for a while, at least. The game has to be admired, just for the sheer scale, the ingenuity (you can give a creature a billion legs and it just works out how to walk), and the love that has gone into designing something this complex. At five or so years in the making… let's see if can match the hype.
