Posts Tagged “News”

An interesting detail about Spore emerged from the Comic Con presentation by Will Wright. When the game releases in September players will be able to capture images and video in game then upload them to a site called MashON.com and create comic strips from them.

Or people could go there right now and create e-cards based on their Spore creations!

It doesn’t seem like you can add your own creatures to the cards at the moment though – if you discover otherwise, please share the procedure in the comments.

The comics are supposed to be embeddable and sendable via email when the full service launches. It looks like Spore will be popping up in many more places than we might have imagined!

[Source: Spores Illustrated]

It seems like only yesterday the Sporepedia was celebrating the 1 million creature mark. It wasn’t, of course, but today is a new milestone for the game with the total creature count surpassing the 2 million mark.

If you were unaware, the Creature Creator has only been available for a bit over a month at this point. Given that the trial version leaked early, it’s around the 40 day mark.

Which makes an average of 50,000 creatures added to the Sporepedia every day!

If you were to look at 1 creature every 10 seconds it would take you 231 days to view them all!

Not that I would recommend such a course. Assuming an average of 25KB per thumbnail file, you’re looking at downloading a staggering fifty gigabytes!

Something tells me we won’t be running into the same creatures too often when the full game ships in September.

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 »

According to various websites that provide files of dubious legality, the trial version of the Spore Creature Creator has been leaked off a magazine coverdisk. Or possibly from one of the dozens of folk who’ve received it via other means.

Be aware that this file is likely to be the target of the more nefarious denizens of the internet over the next couple of days. If you can’t wait two more days and decide to chance downloading it, make sure you run a virus scanner or two over it.

Note: I will not be posting links to this, nor should you in the comments. I’m not going to download them all and check their safety for everyone. If you want to run the risk then it ought not be too hard to find!

[Update]
It is unclear at this point where the leak may have originated as fansites (not this one) were given a link to download the trial version of the Creature Creator en masse within the last 24 hours. A magazine coverdisk, as above, has also been cited as the source of the leak.

Given how quickly new registrations and creatures have been popping up on the Sporepedia it seems likely that this leaked out in more than one fashion.

And considering the Sporepedia is now over 8,000 creatures uploaded and still rising, this may actually be a blessing for EA. Even in its trial version the game is proving to be extraordinarily popular.

Just think what will happen when the general public can play it and when we can all get our hands on four times as many parts!

[Update]

The Trial version of the Creature Creator is now available via Internode. See this post for details on how to download the Spore Creature Creator!

[Update #2]

The full version of the Creature Creator is now available. See this post for early details.

VentureBeat have a fairly lengthy interview with Production VP Lucy Bradshaw on various aspects of Spore, how she sees it fitting within gaming culture and how they decided to create the Creature Creator version of the game.

VB: How do the cell, planetary, and galaxy levels of the game differ?

LB: They are different games. In the cell phase, you do things like eat and grow and survive. In the space stage, you look at your colonies and whether your empire is expanding. It becomes a larger area to experiment in. The player gets a lot of choice. You can find relics and artifacts. You can explore planets. Like with The Sims, a lot of people never played through the entire career campaign. Spore can cut at both levels. You can beat the campaign or you can just explore and create.

You can read the rest of the article here on VentureBeat.

[Source: Spores Illustrated]