Posts Tagged “News”

To say that this was a tough decision would be an understatement. To say that I am actually kind of glad I didn’t get hundreds of entries would be even more of an understatement. I can only imagine trying to pick and choose a mere 5 from so many, it was agony enough trying to choose from those I did receive!

Please note that at the time of this writing the Sporepedia is down. Links and/or images may be broken if it isn’t back up by the time this is posted. If any of the links/images turn out to be the wrong ones when the Sporepedia is up again, let me know!

But without further ado and in no particular order, the winning entries:

Disco Danica by Legodragonxp.

Why it won: Purple leg warmers! Awesome!

Also had a great compilation dance clip provided and Disco Danica grooves quite well.

While green and purple are not usually a colour combination I would think of, they work well for this creature.

Inferno Dee by IamMe.

Why it won: Big poofy hair and bright colours make this guy somewhat worthy, but what really sold me on choosing this guy is the effort gone to for the description.

When the Sporepedia is up again, I highly advise checking it out!

Pluffer by Marrow.

Why it won: A great big puffball of hair and a very retro paintstyle that makes it look like he’s wearing some kind of pantsuit.

The 70s in particular were very much about peace, love and mungbeans (baby) so the description helped Pluffer over the line!

Pscyhedelica by psychedelicsim.

Why it won: Pink and green? Only in the 80s, man! Only in the 80s!

Another good description and another good dance video helped get Psychedelica across the line.

Not to mention the name!

Disco Stew by Fobok.

Why it won: Well, look. He looks kind of funky.

He dances kind of funky.

He has a funky description.

But mostly… It’s a Simpsons joke. And that’s just groovy!

Congratulations to all the winners and make sure to check your emails (and junk mail) carefully. If you still haven’t got your notification by the weekend, please let me know and I’ll resend it. :-)

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.

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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The informational pages have gone up two days early on the website for The Daily Telegraph, detailing how you get your hands on the Creature Creator:

Q. Where can I obtain a Spore Creature Creator PC Game?
A. It’s FREE with a token from The Daily Telegraph on Saturday 2 August.

Q. My Spore Creature Creator disk was not in my paper when I purchased it. What do I do?
A. The FREE PC Game is not inserted into the paper itself. You need to cut the token from page 2 of the paper and present it to your newsagent to redeem your Spore Creature Creator disk.

There’s also an address you can send the token in to in order to get your disk, if the newsagent has run out or if you nick a copy out of someone’s garbage or something.

Today’s paper also has a short little pictorial guide to the creator which raises a concern – the pictures show the trial version of the creator, not the full version, as there are clearly parts that are greyed out. This is probably just an error. But, well, the paper costs a buck, and if it’s the trial version it’ll give you a great reason to be even more angry at EA!

… and one other little tidbit. The paper’s Spore FAQ includes September 4th as the release date for the full game. I guess we’re getting it before everyone else to make up for getting boned on the Creature Creator?

There’s a Creature Creator Manual to download from this page.
The FAQ is here.
A little blurb about the offer is here.

Note that while all this is coming from the Daily Telegraph site I would expect the other papers’ (Herald Sun and Courier-Mail) offer to be exactly the same in every way.