Archive for the “News” Category

Yes, that’s seven pages of interview. It isn’t all about Spore but it is all quite intriguing for fans of gaming.
If you just want to stick to the Spore info, it’s pretty much done by the end of Page 4.
Other topics covered include real time strategy gaming versus turn based and the difficulties present in pitching a turn based title versus the difficulty in improving a real time strategy title.

Relating specifically to Spore, Soren talks about why some people avoid real time strategy games:

Yeah, doing an RTS is really tough inside of Spore, because I would say the RTS genre in general has a big problem, in that it’s one of the most ghettoized. I’ll dip into almost any genre nowadays except for maybe fighting games or whatever.

I’ll play almost any different type of game, and I play strategy games, so I play RTSes. But I think there are a lot of players who will play almost any type of game except for RTSes, because people just have the sense of, “There’s a thousand things to do. I’ll never be able to get them all. I’ll never be able to handle it all.”

As I said, it’s an interesting read for Spore fans and gamers in general.

Check out all seven pages on Gamasutra.

[Source: Spores Illustrated]

I realise I haven’t been posting much in the way of news lately (though I made it clear that was never my intent, I did hope to post a little more often) so here’s a couple of things you may or may not have missed elsewhere:

Fargo from Gamespy has a very extensive write-up based on the journalist preview build many were invited along to see recently. Way back in the day, when Spore was first announced, an article by Fargo was the very first thing I read about the game. I’ve been hooked ever since!
Fargo writes:

During the microbial phase, we could choose our creature’s diet based on how we played the game (herbivore, omnivore, carnivore). At the end of this stage, our species was tagged with the “Herbivore” characteristic, which gave our creature special herbivore abilities for every future stage of the game.

Garnett Lee over on 1Up also got in on the action. Unlike Fargo, Garnett chose to have a look at the Civilization phase of the game.
Garnett writes:

The Civilization phase presents you with three roads to global domination. If you begin with a religious city, you’ve gotta build the faith and dispatch missionaries to convert rival cities to your cause. Alternatively, you can take the military route and raise a conquering army to take the world by force. I elected to take the remaining choice and began my quest on the economic path. Building wealth is the name of the game here — first by improving your home city, then by establishing trade routes that ultimately lead to buying out all who stand in your way.

Christopher Grant from Joystiq was another of the lucky sods who got to try the game.
He wrote:

Eager to round out my tribal experience, I tried hunting. My first prey: A giant, one-eyed creature who, perhaps unsurprisingly, became rather irate when attacked. Will informed me that I had virtually no chance of defeating a creature of that size right now so, I ran.

There’s a couple more links to previews over on Space Oddity’s Spore Blog if you’re interested, but once you’ve read a couple from the same demonstration you’ve basically read them all. Yes, we know what Spore is, yes it sounds awesome, yes we would like to play it now… :-)

On Space Oddity’s blog you’ll also find a very long write-up of a breakfast chat she had with Chaim Gingold, who did a lot of work on Spore though is no longer on the team. It’s an interesting read so check it out!

Almost last but by no means least, Jube over on Spores Illustrated is running a contest with fantabulous prizes! You can click here for all the details, but the gist is you need to create a creature based on one of three concepts – beef, beer or bandwidth. Pappy-R from Planet Quake will be the judge, you see…

After the break are a couple of video interviews with Will Wright. You can also see someone creating what looks to be either a vehicle or UFO on a very large screen behind him.
I’ve never embedded GameTrailers videos before so let me know if they’re not working for you.
Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you may be familiar with Kittenwar, a site where you’re presented with two pictures of kittens and tasked with choosing which is cuter.

Well, now there’s a Spore themed version, Best Spore Creature, where you have to pick which of the two presented creatures is the best!

You’re able to submit your own creatures for consideration if you want, just signup for the site.

The only problem I have noticed so far is that some of the images are blurred rather badly. I’m not sure if that’s a result of poor images being uploaded or some artifact of the system, but if you want to submit your own creatures try and make them as clear as possible so we all have an easier time voting!

[Source: Spores Illustrated]

Well, I expected the Sporepedia to reach over 1 million creations in fairly short order, but this is quite astounding.

As of right now if you go to the Sporepedia you will see the number is well above 1,000,000. Even when you consider that some of those creatures are probably “inappropriate” and scheduled for deletion, that is huge!

So what’s next? Can it continue to grow at such a pace?

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As of today the Sporepedia now plays host to more than half a million creatures in less than a week since the initial leak of the Creature Creator.

Whilst the pace is likely to slacken somewhat from here as people get over the initial rush, it’s looking like the million creature mark will be hit by the end of the month. Which is a staggering number of creations.

Currently the number of registered users sits around the 270,000 mark, which means the average number of creatures uploaded to the Sporepedia is only two a piece. Perhaps a result of the widespread issues players are having with the game losing creatures if you try and upload too many?

As yet there is no word on a patch for the Creator, but one would hope it’s not too far off.

To celebrate hitting the 500,000 creature mark, here’s a selection of some of the current high-rated creatures on the Sporepedia!