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!

NerdNirvana have a post apparently showing the current number of sold units on all three of the supposed ‘next generation’ consoles – the Xbox 360, the PS3 and the Wii.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 wins at the moment, having been out for the longest time period, and the PS3 lags somewhat, presumably because of the delays in shipping and the low availability of the console.

Nintendo, apparently, seem to be doing a lot better and have shipped over 1,000,000 Wii consoles already. It’s only one seventh of Xbox 360 sales, but considering we’ve barely had a few weeks with the Wii, it’s looking very promising.

Nintendo’s strategy as far as battling the titans of Sony and Microsoft is to aim at the market with a different angle. The Wii is clearly not trying to be the absolute best graphics, and they’re focusing on innovating on the way we play video games (the Wiimote) and going for the pure ‘fun’ factor over seriously big-budget titles.

Whether this will propel Nintendo into a higher market and mind share than they had in the last round with the GameCube, we won’t know yet. And until Sony gain momentum with the PS3 shipping lots of units, we won’t know whether Microsoft will get another industry tightly in its grip or not.

[NerdNirvana via CrunchGear]

Hot on the heels of all the other gadget and console releases we’ve seen recently, Nintendo have now launched their next-generation console, the Wii, in the US.

Like the PS3, it’s already sold out, so if you’re one of the people who has got one, consider yourself lucky. Unlike the PS3, however, we haven’t seen the crazy reports of violence, but the waiting lines have still been long.

Let the console wars begin!

It is the season to launch gadgets, apparently, and just after the Zune announcement a few days ago, Ars Technica is reporting that Sony have debuted their PlayStation 3 console in the US.

At the moment, it’s still very difficult to get hold of the console, and only the early adopters (read: hardcore gamers) that have pre-ordered are easily able to get themselves a console.

But what this means is that the next-gen console fight is now truly on, with Microsoft and Sony battling it out and Nintendo to be joining soon.

According to the article, the spyware installed by the game will monitor browsing habits and other online activities and the data will be used to target advertisements that will appear in-game (presumably delivered courtesy of EA’s deal).
Now I’m not a big gamer by any standards – I suppose you could call me a ‘very casual’ gamer. But I definitely would not buy a game with this; it takes in-game advertising far too far in my opinion. From Kotaku, who originally covered the story:

When you open the box, a big slip of paper falls out first, preceeding any discs or manuals. The slip of paper says, essentially, that 2142 includes monitoring software which runs while your computer is online, and records “anonymous” information like your IP address, surfing habits (probably via cookie scans), and other “computing habits” in order to report this information back to ad companies and ad servers, which generates in-game ads.

I think this is a very dangerous move and could potentially put people off gaming on their computers entirely and make them consider consoles instead (where they obviously don’t have as much personal data stored).

From what I understand, the Battlefield series has a fairly substantial community around it, and it certainly will be telling to see what the gamers who might actually play the game think of this move by EA.

Engadget are reporting that Sony have announced more delays to the launch of the PlayStation 3 console.

Now they are reckoning the PS3 will be launched in March 2007, not this November as they had previously claimed. Apparently, the reason for the delay is production issues with making the blue lasers needed for the PS3′s Blu-ray disc drive.

This can’t be good for Sony, as it only leaves more time for its competitors Nintendo and Microsoft to soak up the next-generation console market. Sony have a big PlayStation following at the moment – but that could easily change if they don’t get the PS3 out fairly soon. If they want to retain the PlayStation’s dominant market share, Sony really cannot afford any more delays.

Will they come in March 2007? We’ll see.

Gaming giant EA have reportedly signed exclusive advertising deals with IGA and Massive to deliver dynamic advertisements directly into gamers’ virtual environments.

EA are stating that the move is to keep advertisements within games “fresh and relevant for gamers”, although obviously this is about EA getting more money from their games, with game production costs very high. With games for ‘next generation’ consoles costing a lot more than their current-gen peers, with Microsoft particularly needing to reclaim the losses they make on selling the Xbox 360 hardware, EA are obviously looking for some way to get more money into the game development without further pushing up retail prices.

Another issue here is piracy. EA (and its rivals) lose a lot of money to game piracy, but EA will presumably still have in-game advertising revenue as a sort of ‘damage limitation’ with this new deal.

Advertising in video games isn’t new. Product placement occurs already in many popular series. Take Splinter Cell, for example, which is published by Ubisoft (EA aren’t alone in picking up on in-game advertising). The second game in the series Pandora Tomorrow and its sequel Chaos Theory featured obvious product placement – from the Sony Ericcson mobile phones to Airwaves chewing gum appearing in-game and in movie sequences.

What’s different with this move by EA is that the advertising is dynamic – your new EA game will contact IGA and/or Massive via the internet and download new ads and then place them in game. Presumably the ad agencies will get data back from gamers showing which ads have been seen, for how long, and will help advertisers target the market.

Dynamic in-game advertising hasn’t seen a wide take-up until now. One notable exception is SWAT 4, published by Vivendi. A patch for the game introduced ‘dynamic’ advertising from Massive, and there’s an interesting deconstruction of what data passed between the game and the advertisers at this site. Interestingly, the patch only displayed ads for US gamers; the UK version of the game still fed data back to the advertising company, but didn’t display any ads.

There is an enormous untapped advertising market for video games. Games are big business and from SWAT 4‘s example, it would be possible to target people in a particular market with different products. It might even happen that gamers become ‘profiled’ and the advertisers then target gamers according to what times they are online, for example.

This is certainly going to be important for the video game market in the future, and with heavyweight EA taking up the offer – it won’t be long before most, if not all, video games feature ‘dynamic’ advertising.

A senior Nintendo executive has revealed that the upcoming Nintendo Wii console will cost under €250 in Europe (that’s about £170 over here, provided they don’t make the UK pay more). Our US readers will be able to purchase the Wii for $250 (equivalent of £133 and €195) or less, according to the information Nintendo released in May.

Note this isn’t a confirmed price for Europe, merely a recognition that the Wii won’t cost more than those figures. Also, the European price might not strech to the UK and we may end up paying more, judging by what previous console pricing schemes have been like.

However, this still makes the Wii the cheapest next-generation console of the three, and will even rival the last generation machines like the original Xbox and PS2. At the moment in the UK, you can get a brand new original Xbox for about £89 and a brand new silver PS2 for around £99. The Wii is significantly more expensive than the last generation consoles, but crucially, using these figures, it’s cheaper than the Core Xbox 360 system at £199, which should help it.

Another thing we don’t know about is the price of the games. Xbox 360 games range from between £40-50, which is quite a premium (Microsoft make a loss on the hardware and have to make it up through game sales). The Wii console is cheaper to produce, and if the games can beat these prices even by a £5 or so, the Wii will have another advantage.

So it seems, that in Japan at least, Nintendo are winning the next-generation console war, where both Sony and Nintendo have been battling for supremacy.

It’s interesting that in the Ars Technica story which shows the top ten waited-for games according to the survey, there is only one Xbox 360 title. It is, admittedly, Halo 3, but it is also at the bottom of the list. The original Xbox didn’t do too well in Japan either, with the domination of the PS2.

Engadget have revealed that Europe are set to get the black version of the upcoming remix of Nintendo’s DS console, the DS Lite, long before the US.

Europe in general has a bit of a reputation for not getting products before North America (and at higher prices than the US), but in a strange change of roles, the Europeans will get the black version before the rest of the world. The “Polar White” version of the console is slated to be released in the USA on June 11th, and the Black version will be released in Europe on June 23rd.

The updated version of the DS console will cost around £99 or €149 (about $185).

So, for once, Europe get something before the US. It really is frustrating living in the UK knowing that every new product (films or the latest gadget) could take up to a month (or more) to arrive here. Keep it coming, Nintendo. And if you do live in the US, consider yourself lucky that you get a lot of things first.