The latest Spore promo video out of EA with some brief chats with the staff and shots of the game. Is it just me, or was this video wayyy overproduced? It plays more like a recruitment and puff piece for EA investors than the Spore fanbase that it was released for.
In any case, it’s SPORE. I dare NOT question Spore, nor my gaming overlords at EA.
-Scott
The latest Spore video from Will Wright at the TED conference in March has finally made it online.
Will Wright explains his earlier Spore videos and an overview of the design process. The release date is still pretty iffy between late 2008, or early 2009.
Pay no heed to the almighty Wright’s banged up arm, apparently he had a nasty break skiing and has had it in a cast since March.
Don’t deny it. You’ve always wanted to play a baking simulator. Baking cakes is hardcore, and if you haven’t played a cake baking simulator, you haven’t played games. Okay, perhaps I’m being mischevious, but I’m not lying when I say Cake Mania is coming to the PC, and it actually is a cake baking simulator.
It’s called Cake Mania, and sees you taking on the role of Jill, a young girl and a cooking school graduate who discovers that her family’s business has gone down the toilet. So, what else is there to do but set up your own bakery from scratch.
Joystiq scored an awesome video courtesy of Wired Magazine. It shows Will Wright demonstrating his upcoming life simulation game, Spore, and featuring a guest appearance by the master comedian himself, Robin Williams. The video is a big 420MB, lasts 40 minutes, and includes a torrent mirror link.
Gamespy sat down and ate breakfast with Will Wright, and they talk about his upcoming game, Spore, a book he’s writing up, the $600 Playstation 3, Nintendo DS, and more. Here’s a bit about the creature editor:
GameSpy: I keep hearing about blockbuster games made by teams of 300 people.
WW: The Godfather had about 240, so having a team of about 70 feels really good. Basically we are outsourcing the artwork to the players. They are designing the creatures, vehicles, cities, planets. They are designing everything… the plants. Pretty much everything in the game.
To build the creatures, you are starting out with parts. We have seven part categories — feet, mouth, weapons… Each category has four columns of parts, and each column has eight or nine choices. As your brain level increases, you unlock more columns. All in all we have about 400 creature parts. Each of these parts also has morphs.
ThinkGaming has written about their experience of Will Wright’s E3 presentation for the highly anticipated simulation game, Spore. Information abound, including tidbits about the creature editor, how they turn out based on your choices, how the game goes online to populate systems, and so much more. I can’t begin to describe how excited I am for this game, and I’m certainly not the only one.
The space mode has developed quite considerably since the GDC 2005 video (of course) and has a few very nice new features. When navigating across the galaxy and looking at planets, you can mouse over one and there is a small set of sliders that show information about the planet, specifically whether it has wildlife, an intelligent civilization, or the atmospheric features (cold, hot, forested, etc). Another really cool feature is the Sporepedia. The Sporepedia is a card deck where there is a card for absolutely everything that you create and is available in the game – from galaxies to creatures to cities to buildings. The galaxy is incredibly vast and has many different possibilities of alien races to be encountered and planetary conditions.
You can now view the official trailer for Spore in high definition via download or streaming.
There’s nothing more frightening than a game within a niche, and worse yet a niche game within a niche. That’s exactly what A Force More Powerful: The Game is. It is a geopolitical simulator (think Republic: The Revolution), based on the documentary film of the same name, and one that looks to push all the right buttons. That is a rarity for this genre of games. Adam over at Gamers with Job writes about the game, and Bill over at Dubious Quality pipes in as well with his thoughts. Finally a game where non-violence is a viable method of achieving goals.
If there’s one game that is getting massive mainstream press right now, Spore would be it. It reminds me of the interest level before The Sims came out. Not ironically enough, the man behind The Sims, Will Wright, is also behind Spore. 1UP has a preview of Spore online, taking a look at the ambitious simulation from Electronic Arts. Here’s a quote from Mr. Wright himself:
“In some sense, it’s about stepping back and getting a sense of all the different things the universe is made of at all the different scales,” says Wright. “At the higher levels of the game, one of the things you can research is genetic engineering, at which point you can access the creature editor for free and you can design as many creatures as you want, and use them to populate worlds. You could recreate an entire ecosystem designing every creature in it.”
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