Archive for the “News” Category

After the “scheduled maintenance” period for the Sporepedia there’s been a few updates made - check them out now!

Highlights:

• Creations from creators other than the Creature one are now showing up.
• Sporecasts are now available!
• You can now add a creator to your buddy list from a creation’s details page. Just hit the gold plus sign beside their by-line.
• The creations can be sorted by a number of criteria, from tribal creatures to UFOs to vehicles to buildings.

Anyone seen any other neat new features?

At this point creatures still heavily outweigh all the other creations on the Sporepedia but with more and more people getting their hands on the game now it’s only a matter of time before you start seeing a lot more than just creatures popping up.

Easing the pain of my current ill-health I received confirmation this morning that my copy of Spore has been bundled off and is on its way to me, hopefully to arrive tomorrow.

One whole day early, here in Australia. But potentially not until Thursday.

In any event I will hopefully have my hands on the game tomorrow some time and if I can tear myself away from it I will try and have a review up… by the weekend or something!

Anyone else getting their’s early? Or already got it? Feel free to sound off in the comments so we can all hate you and plot your downfall and so on. :-)

NOTE: THE COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED!

I realise it’s been a while between challenges but with the imminent release of the full game it seems like a good time to launch the Coolest. Challenge. Ever!

That’s right, we’re returning to the land of superbright colours, bad hairstyles, strange dancing and groooovy chicks, man!

Yes, this week’s challenge is to create a creature you think would have fit into the disco dancing scene of the 70s and 80s.
Not sure what that entails? Perhaps you’re a little too young to know the 70s and 80s? Check out this YouTube video and you ought to get the idea. And possibly some bad flashbacks!

And since this is the final challenge before the release of Spore it seems fitting that this week… there be prizes!

NOTE: THE COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED!

With thanks to the good people of Direct2Drive.com I have five - yes FIVE - copies of the full version of Spore to giveaway!
These copies of the game are the digital download version, the same one you can preorder from them now or buy as of the 7th of September.

NOTE: THE COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED!

How to enter:
1. Create a creature in the Spore Creature Creator.
2. Make sure you put “sporedaily.com challenge” as one of the tags for the creature.
3. Include a groovy description for your creature. It doesn’t have to be 70s-80s related.
4. Upload your creature to the Sporepedia.
5. Reply to this post before 5pm, Wednesday the 3rd of September (Pacific Daylight Time), with the name of your creature and a link to the Sporepedia entry for your creature. Be sure to include a working email address with your comment (or have a working address attached to your Disqus account) as that is how I will contact the winner! Put the address in the “Email:” line, not in the comments box.
5a. (Optional) Include a link to a YouTube video of your creature busting some groovy dance moves!

Winners will be selected by me, based on how good your creature looks and moves, your creature’s description and the overall grooviness, dude!
Winners will receive one copy of the full game, Spore, available via digital download from Direct2Drive.

NOTE: THE COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED!

Rules for entry:
1. You must be a resident of the United States of America or Canada. Sorry. As an Australian myself, I feel your pain, but Direct2Drive can only offer me copies for the US and Canada.
2. You must use a real email address when entering as I will need to contact you with details on how to claim your prize, should you win. Your address will not be recorded or displayed publicly, it will only be used to contact you if you win. If you cannot be reached to claim your prize it may be given to the next person in line. Add sporedaily.com to your mail filters if necessary!
3. One entry per person, please.
4. The judge’s decision will be final. No correspondence will be entered into, etc.
5. All entries must be posted PRIOR to 5pm, Wednesday the 3rd of September, Pacific Daylight Time.
6. Your creature MUST be tagged with the “sporedaily.com challenge” tag. I must insist on this to confirm that creatures are in fact owned by someone entering the competition. When the competition ends you are free - win or lose - to remove the tag, it is purely for the purposes of competition verification.
7. Responsibility for downloading the game is the winner’s. Spore Daily will not be providing DVDs, you will have to download the game from the Direct2Drive (Fileplanet) servers. As part of claiming your prize you will need to register a Fileplanet account. Registration is free.
8. The prize is not redeemable for cash. If you do not want a copy of the game, do not enter!
9. Reply to this post directly to enter, do not reply to another comment “higher up” or you will be disqualified. If you do so accidentally, there is an edit button available so you can remove your misplaced entry and enter correctly.

Failure to follow any of the above rules will result in disqualification. I realise there’s quite a few of them but I expect I’ve managed to forget something anyway. Ignorance will not be accepted as an excuse for rulebreaking.

If you would like to participate in the challenge but live outside the US or Canada, please clearly mark your comment “(Non-US/Canada)” so that I know to exclude your entry from consideration for the prizes.

And if you have not yet pre-ordered yourself a copy of Spore then I can recommend Direct2Drive’s digital download store, and not just because they’ve given me fantabulous prizes to hand out. Their system is simple and painless. It is, in fact, how I got my copy of the Creature Creator!
To order the game from the US/Canada store, please click here.
If you’re in the UK/EU, you can buy it from the UK Direct2Drive instead.

Take your time and make sure you submit your best entry if you want to win yourself a free copy of the game. You have until Wednesday!

(Please note, I have never given away anything remotely like this before so excuse the length of the above. I wanted to ensure all bases were covered.)

NOTE: Please wait a couple of minutes before reposting an entry you think did not go through. My site is cached to reduce server load so you may not see new comments immediately. Sorry for any confusion!

NOTE: THE COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED!

Ran into an interesting popup today while creating my inevitable daily creature…

Too many? Inconceivable! You can never have too many photos of anything! </photographic geek>

For those wondering about the magic number, I had around 200 files in the saved pictures folder at the time. That’s not 200 photos though as each shot creates two files, typically.

Given the creativity sure to be inspired by the Creator it seems a little odd that such a small limitation would be placed on the number of pictures you are able to take.

Has anyone else run into any strange limitations such as this? And has anyone downloaded the patch that is available (thanks, Jube) and found the limitation removed?

And because that isn’t enough questions, has anyone patched the game and had it still work fine afterwards? Wydraz on the Spores Illustrated forums posted a warning that there are some issues…

And I know I didn’t post a challenge last week but you’ll probably want to be sure to check in for this Friday’s challenge… I will (hopefully) have something a little special this week.

You’ve probably seen the news everywhere else by now but for those who missed it, Spore has “gone gold”.

For those not au fait with technobabble, that means the game has been “finished”, the final shipping version of the client has been burnt to a disk (traditionally a gold one) that is then used as the source for replicating all the millions of disks we’ll be receiving in just a couple of weeks time!

With the game due in a bit over 2 weeks it seems an appropriate time to mention that the Sporepedia is currently sitting on 2,812,257 creations. With an average of around 26,000 being made a day (still!) it seems very likely the game will launch with well over three million creatures.
Some will no doubt be essentially duplicates of each other, or very similar in design, but that is still an incredible number.

It certainly makes you wonder how many creations will be on there by the end of the year!
Well, it makes me wonder. It makes you answer this shiny new poll:

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