Spore Hands-On Preview 192
cardjoe writes "The release date for Spore has just been announced and what better way to celebrate than to check out the latest build of the game? That's just what bit-tech.net did, spending hours with the full version of the game. The article covers all the different editors and stages in the game as well as providing a brief on the pollinated content and how it may well introduce an entire new genre to PC gaming — that of the Massively Online Singleplayer. The article is in-depth and has a whole load of brand new screenshots too, showing the various stages that the player will go through as they play the game and move their creature from single cells to galaxy-hopping space freaks."
Text of the article (Score:5, Informative)
Author: Joe Martin
Platforms: PC, Nintendo DS, Mobile, Mac
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Spore. Games don't come any more ambitious than Spore and although the premise of the now in-famously delayed game and magnum opus of Will Wright is fairly simple, the actual realisation of that concept has proven incredibly difficult.
The idea behind Spore is this; you are God, the Alpha, Omega and Almighty. You are omniscient, omnipresent and capable of creating a rock so big you can't possibly lift it. Then you can lift it. You're God and that type of feat is your bread and butter.
Specifically, you are the God of a particular species that you will design, craft, sculpt and guide through from primordial ooze to inevitable extinction.
You start off small, designing a single cell and guiding it through the cesspool in which all life must begin. As time passes you use evolution as the tool by which you will shape the destiny of your creature for better or worse. A mouth here, a leg there, and a twist to the torso - you slowly create the creature you want. You can do that. You are God.
From there, the game expands ever outwards and you will move from guiding a single cell or creature to encouraging a small tribe, then a city. In the climax to this universe in a box you'll be aiding your civilisation in spreading to other stars and planets.
Such game concepts are truly the things of dreams - open, sandbox worlds with almost limitless possibilities and completely open setting. The game says to you; "Here are the tools, now do as you wish."
Unfortunately, with such an impossibly complex design even getting the basics of the gameplay right can be a daunting task in and of itself and, even with the full might of Electronic Arts behind him, Will Wright has struggled to get Spore working. The game, which he has reportedly been planning for the last decade at least, has suffered numerous delays. At the start of this year we gave it an honourable mention as a game which we thought would definitely turn out to be vapourware.
Now though, it looks like we may have to admit that we were wrong. Not only has EA confirmed that Spore will be out in time for the holidays, but the game is now in a fully playable state. All that is left to do is polish up a few glitches, test it and load it with content before release.
How do we know that, I hear you ask. Simple; we've played it--nearly all of it.
There are five stages or levels to Spore and we've played them all on the PC, as well as playing on the DS and Mobile versions of the game - though the latter failed to make as much of an impression, to be frank.
The first level is a basic arcade type game where players guide their single cell about its existence, helping it eat other creatures and grow. When it has grown enough it jumps into the Creature Stage, where players zoom their view out and manage the more complex needs of their creation. Survival skills must be complemented by socialisation skills as players enable their creature to build a tribe.
In Tribe stage the game zooms out once more and players are no longer controlling a single alien. In this stage it's more like The Sims as you monitor the needs of a small tribe as they carve out a niche in the alien landscape. The penultimate stage of the game is the Civilisation Stage where it transitions from The Sims into Sim City and you'll be controlling whole cities in cultures.
The last stage is the Space Stage where you hop off your polluted little rock and find new playgrounds to party in.
Share and share alike
Before we delve deeply into the well of never-ending gameplay that Spore claims to offer, we should talk about the Pollination System that Spore uses to keep the game full of brand new content at all times. Pollinated content is something that Electronic Arts and
Re:Or... (Score:5, Informative)
FULL TEXT OF ARTICLE WITH IMAGES; Not on 5 pages (Score:2, Informative)
Platforms: PC, Nintendo DS, Mobile, Mac
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Spore. Games don't come any more ambitious than Spore and although the premise of the now in-famously delayed game and magnum opus of Will Wright is fairly simple, the actual realisation of that concept has proven incredibly difficult.
The idea behind Spore is this; you are God, the Alpha, Omega and Almighty. You are omniscient, omnipresent and capable of creating a rock so big you can't possibly lift it. Then you can lift it. You're God and that type of feat is your bread and butter.
Specifically, you are the God of a particular species that you will design, craft, sculpt and guide through from primordial ooze to inevitable extinction.
You start off small, designing a single cell and guiding it through the cesspool in which all life must begin. As time passes you use evolution as the tool by which you will shape the destiny of your creature for better or worse. A mouth here, a leg there, and a twist to the torso - you slowly create the creature you want. You can do that. You are God.
Image: Spore is perhaps the most ambitious game ever [bit-tech.net]
From there, the game expands ever outwards and you will move from guiding a single cell or creature to encouraging a small tribe, then a city. In the climax to this universe in a box you'll be aiding your civilisation in spreading to other stars and planets.
Such game concepts are truly the things of dreams - open, sandbox worlds with almost limitless possibilities and completely open setting. The game says to you; "Here are the tools, now do as you wish."
Unfortunately, with such an impossibly complex design even getting the basics of the gameplay right can be a daunting task in and of itself and, even with the full might of Electronic Arts behind him, Will Wright has struggled to get Spore working. The game, which he has reportedly been planning for the last decade at least, has suffered numerous delays. At the start of this year we gave it an honourable mention as a game which we thought would definitely turn out to be vapourware.
Now though, it looks like we may have to admit that we were wrong. Not only has EA confirmed that Spore will be out in time for the holidays, but the game is now in a fully playable state. All that is left to do is polish up a few glitches, test it and load it with content before release.
Image: The Cell Stage is where the full game begins [bit-tech.net]
How do we know that, I hear you ask. Simple; we've played it--nearly all of it.
There are five stages or levels to Spore and we've played them all on the PC, as well as playing on the DS and Mobile versions of the game - though the latter failed to make as much of an impression, to be frank.
The first level is a basic arcade type game where players guide their single cell about its existence, helping it eat other creatures and grow. When it has grown enough it jumps into the Creature Stage, where players zoom their view out and manage the more complex needs of their creation. Survival skills must be complemented by socialisation skills as players enable their creature to build a tribe.
In Tribe stage the game zooms out once more and players are no longer controlling a single alien. In this stage it's more like The Sims as you monitor the needs of a small tribe as they carve out a niche in the alien landscape. The penultimate stage of the game is the Civilisation Stage where it transitions from The Sims into Sim City and you'll be controlling whole cities in cultures.
The last stage is the Space Stage where you hop off your polluted little rock and find new playgrounds to party in.
Share and share alike
Before we delve deeply into the well of never-ending gameplay that Spore claims to offer, we should talk about the Pollination System th
Re:OSS (Score:1, Informative)
http://slashcode.com/ [slashcode.com]
Re:It's fine that the source is closed, for them.. (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I worked for Maxis and EA, with Will Wright on The Sims, and also on porting SimCity to various platforms.
I developed a commercial game (SimCity) for Unix, and promoted and distributed it over the internet 16 years ago [google.com], and there is still no viable market for games on Linux. Look what happened to Loki. And look at the sad shape of the modern Linux desktop: Lots of easy eye candy and useless transparency, but absolutely no crucial usability nor simple consistency.
I have done a lot of cross platform development and porting (I also ported The Sims Online server to Linux, and I'm currently developing TomTom Home on Mac and Windows using xulrunner and XPCOM), so I'm painfully aware of how much harder it is and longer it takes than developing for one or a few platforms. It's not easy, it's not fast, and it doesn't come for free.
I've also put a lot of time and effort into writing code, proposals, and working with people at EA and other companies, to convince them to make some of their existing products open source, many years after their release, like Micropolis (SimCity) [google.com]. But I never made the argument that it was worth their development effort for an initial release of a game to support the Linux desktop.
Developing cross platform code and porting games to Linux is not nearly as easy as you make it out to be. It took me many years of work to port SimCity to all the different flavors of Unix, Linux, OLPC, and other X-Windows platforms like Quarterdeck DESQview/X, NCD X terminals, Windows, Mac, etc.
Don't act like nobody at EA ever heard of Linux, and it's up to you to evangelize to them about it and make them see the light, and support it as if it were a mainstream desktop platform. They run it on their servers, and many people at EA use Linux all the time, are experts at it, and understand its problems and limitations.
Trying to argue that EA should release mainstream games on Linux will get you absolutely nowhere. It wastes their time, makes you look like an idiot, and they will never take you seriously again. And representing the Linux community as a bunch of greedy crybabies who just want everything right now and for free, reduces the chances that they will eventually release other games as open source or port them to Linux later.
-Don
Re:It's fine that the source is closed, for them.. (Score:4, Informative)
But you obviously still don't understand what I wrote.
Plain as day, I wrote that I WILL PAY RETAIL, and DON'T NEED THE SOURCE, and that I think that you and your fellow EA devs *deserve* to earn whatever money your product of work can produce.
From my OP: "I wouldn't mind paying retail for a copy of this game, based on what I've seen of it. I give money to developers for their work on other apps I use, why wouldn't I do the same for a game? I understand that it took years for them to develop, and they need to make money for what they've done. I don't need the source to play it."
I'm all good with that! Not a problem at all. I hope you are getting rich, actually - because I understand that good coding isn't something that just anyone can do.
That makes me neither a "crybaby" nor "greedy". Quite the opposite, I'd think.
Despite your insinuation, neither did I attempt to "evangelize" anyone to use Linux. I just stated that that is what I use (yep, my own choice, made in the full knowledge of what that entails), and have, for 9 years, closing in on 10, on a daily basis as my own source of income. And that I personally would like it (WILL like it, the day is coming) when companies such as yours begin releasing games for the Linux platform.
That, my friend, is just an expressed personal desire, nothing more, and certainly nothing to ream me out over, or to get so upset about. IMO, of course.
Best of luck to you.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is in that custom content IS the content of the game for the most part. Not an external entity you go out of your way to get, but something that you seamlessly create and acquire.
I do hope they let you put some kind of restrictions in there, just because I think it would be more fun to be able to join a pre-made group (say, your friends or wow guild or cs clan or what have you) and have their creations pulled more often and with preference to others, so that you get more of the social feel in. And some way to see who authored something, so you can rub it in their face when you wreck it.
Re:I've got mixed feelings (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hang on- I think I played this before! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:It's fine that the source is closed, for them.. (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sorry, I didn't mean that you yourself were a greedy crybaby. I appreciate your attitude, and that you're willing to pay for products that take time and money to produce. It's the grandparent article that you were indirectly replying to that I was insinuating about:
Now that's a whiny crybaby, who bitches about how hard it is for poor old him, because of the decision he chose to made of his own free will, then he throws out a bunch of ridiculous claims about how superior Spore would be if only it had been developed on Linux. More secure, elegant, and efficient, ehe? It's people who bull shit like that out of their ass who give Linux and Open Source Software a bad name.
-Don
Re:I've got mixed feelings (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's fine that the source is closed, for them.. (Score:3, Informative)
No, I'm sorry to inform you, but that was a troll.