Spore! Yowza
May 12, 2006
So I finally got a chance to see "Spore," Will Wright's newest project for Electronic Arts (presented by Will himself, gotta love E3) and... wow.
Regardless of its success, it's the most ambitious merging of sim and massively multiplayer game I've ever seen. But then what do you expect from the surprisingly... or not so surprisingly, now that I think about it... creator of games like "SimCity" and "The Sims"?
Picture a gigantic galaxy, full of stars surrounded by worlds and worlds surrounded by moons, all terraformed and populated by players. Zip down to one single planet, a small rock in space. This is where you begin. You create your creature using incredibly powerful tools that are downright deceptively simple - pull and stretch bodies, add limbs where you like, throw on eyes or mouths or feet or hands - and every choice you make helps determine what your creature is (herbivore? carnivore? how do they move?). A very simple interface lets you put a skin on your buddy, even overlaying colors and patterns, in a way that looks incredibly natural - and knows, for example, which way stripes should run on your beastie.
Once your little race is created, you can level them up by garnering DNA points from things like finding stuff to eat - and you can spend those points on beneficial mutations when your little creations get together in a very Sims-like mating dance to create new members of the race.
Eventually your civilization gets more technologically advanced, until finally you can start doing space travel, colonizing new planets, terrorizing other people's colonies and the like. That's when it starts looking especially fun. And because this is an MMO, you can grab other people's best creations, upload your own, track how many other people are using your templates - you name it.
It's hard to describe in brief, but it's hella fun to watch. I'm looking forward to officially seeing "Spore" in action.
GB
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