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Spore Is EA's New Ace
BusinessWeek reports on EA's Next Big Thing. From the article: "EA is stumbling, and a big part of its time-tested strategy is about to change. The company hopes that its next mega-franchise will revolve not around a football star, a boy wizard, or a dashing British spy, but...a microbe. The game is called Spore. Developed by Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, it lets players design an invertebrate in its primordial stages and then guide its evolution until the creature's offspring develop into a thriving civilization with cities, religion, and spaceships. EA's ambitious goal is to create more such innovative, internally developed games while lessening the company's dependence on professional sports and Hollywood movie franchises."
Spore video on Google: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330 420559198&q=spore
It's really something new. If you watch the demonstration, this game is basically many games in one. You start off as a microbe basically eating other micro-organisms in order to gain strength or points or whatever and trying not to get killed by other microbes. As you evolve you eventually go from bacteria->sea creature->land creature, then after you are finished that evolution, tribes form allowing you to have control over the tribe. After this cities form and a civ like game goes on. After you have populated the whole world you can leave your home planet and populate others. Magnificent. The most impressive bit had to have been when I saw him drop a creature from one planet onto a moon and the creature simply exploded because the moon had no atmosphere. Then there's the fact that this will use an online database to link up everyone's creatures and try to maintain an eco system. I mean, I honestly think this game is a little bit more than a "sim" something. It's more like a computer incarnation of the living breathing thing, maybe a little sillier looking, but very scaled and nice otherwise.
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