Note from Huw - This is a guest post by my brother, Jack Leslie, edited by me.
Spore is a revolutionary new game, from the designer and creator of Sims, Will Wright, in which you essentially create your own character, evelove it and attempt to make it successful in the universe. It recieved much attention at the (now discontinued) E3 gaming conference last year, and its launch in the second half of 2007 is expected to be an enormous success. The game is built upon a series of stages in which you advance your creature. You start out as a single celled life form in the tide pool phase, in which you control your creature and eat things to evolve. This stage is quite similar to Pac-man, as it is in 2D. Some creatures can hurt you and others can be consumed. The evolution is the amazing thing about Spore; you can even change the bone and muscle structure. You can add parts like spikes and different forms of feeding e.g. filter feeding.
More after the jump.
The next phase (the creature phase) is the one I personally find the most exciting. It is basically a hugely expanded version of the first phase now in 3d. You start in the sea but you can advance to the land or stay where you are. There is now an entire world populated by other creatures created by other gamers and there are a number of animals in your species. To increase this number you can mate. Your creature can be carnivore, omnivore or herbivore. Eating increases a DNA bar which are the points available to evolve with.
The next phase (the tribal phase) is where your species gets together and this is where technology starts with a hut. You can buy weapons, fires, drums and many other things. There are other tribes around that your tribe can interact with either with peace or war. An important difference in this phase is that it is no longer one creature you control but an entire tribe. The next phase is the city phase this phase looks to me the worst. You build up your cities technologies and buildings, Will Wright described this stage as “a simplified version of SimCity”. Players can use a building editor to change the appearance of the buildings in their city. The game will attempt to detect what style of content the player prefers, download similar content created by other players and add it to the buy menu - sounds quite Web 2.0.
This is followed by the word phase. It is similar to the tribal phase but expanded. Now you can interact with other cities that are under the control of other members of your species. By this point the technology has dramatically increased so instead of spears you have tanks and aircraft. Again you may edit the vehicles and the game will download other vehicles of that style.
The last phase (the space phase) is one with almost unlimited scope. First you get an UFO; with this you can fly out into space and colonize other worlds. If you’re chosen world has no atmosphere, you must create one or provide a bubble for your creatues to inhabit. This phase obviously doesn’t finish at the solar system; you can pull out and see more solar systems. Then pull out further and further you can see the galaxy, pull out further and see lots of galaxies. In many solar systems there will be a world with other creatures living on it and again you can either befriend them or destroy them.
This game has extraordinary abilities it will create entire ecosystems. It will procedurally base walking, dancing, mating and lots of other things just on how your creature is structurally built. Spore, a remarkable combination of many different types of game, will revolutionize the gaming world, and I’ll be first in the queue later this year!
