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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."
Or really something new?
That would be something new for EA.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think it teaches anything about how life was created. It's about evolution, and evolution has no solid say on that particular question at the moment.
It teaches about how life, once it existed in its simplest form, got to be so complex. That's not the same thing. Not that Pat Robertson is capable of making such an important distinction, since the odds that he's even slightly acquainted with reality anymore are pretty much null, but I still felt the need to make that point.
From now on, I buy only Intel.
I know it's a tenuous link at best... but this game really reminds me of "EVO Search for Eden" which was an old game on the SNES with a similar concept... You start out as a fish, and you eat smaller animals to gain points, you then use these points to evolve your character. The game went through several stages (Fish/Dinosaur/Bird etc) and was great fun! Hopefully SPORE will be just as - if not more -fun!
Schrodinger's cat- A cat is put in a sealed box. Attached to which is a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas
I'd be concerned about the game being too ambitious and not being a particularly good implementation of any of the other games it emulates. In the demo video, he talks about all the other games that it is like. Pac-Man in the beginning, then the Sims, then Sim-City, then Civilization, etc.
It sorta reminds me of that "Sim-Sim" game found inside the old Space Quest series. Anyone remeber that? Those Sierra games were really fun.
Anyway, Spore does look really cool.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Ignoring your typical, condescending, vehemently anti-religious comment about a large cross-section of normal folks with a certain set of faith beliefs you happen to disagree with in an attempt to feel enlightened...
The fringe I speak of is comprised of "a large cross-section of normal folks"? Who have a "certain set of faith beliefs [sic]"?
Congratulations, you just called the typical Christian church-goer a fringe lunatic because you were offended by my comment regarding an actual fringe of lunatics that, by definition, had nothing to do with the typical Christian church-goer.
Maybe you should spend a little less time being a reactionary, overly-critical zealot so that you have some extra open time to think before you post stupid comments like that.
From now on, I buy only Intel.
This game has hit the headlines. Been waiting for further news on this title for over a year now. Really is an awesome prospect. FTR, EA has very little to do with the game... they're just publishing it AFAIK.
A block of code, sufficiently well-written, is indistinguishable from magick.
I think most of Slashdot would like to know this.
Why the fuck do you buy a game series you're unhappy with? At what point in the sale do you think "This is identical to the game I already have 3 versions of. Why am I buying another version?"
It's like buying Tetris over and over because they change the name of the blocks and add more eye candy for each line being removed.
I like muppets.
The full video including Will Wright's remarks about the demo scene and the procedurally generated games and such is also available on Google Video.
In Black and White you have enemy gods, in Spore you have enemy cities, and in both cases your critters do battle. You have little direct control over your subjects, and the game is more or less open-ended. Designing orgamisms is a (fun!) gameplay gimmick, not in itself gameplay. I see parallels here, and it has me slightly worried, insofar as I worry about these things.
Mind you, I think it *appears* great, and the video demo was fun (had me in stitches a few times; that diplomatic 'first contact' bit was great, as were the creature designs), but there has to be gameplay. We didn't see a whole lot of the gameplay mechanics in the video, probably because they weren't done yet. Talk of 'procedurally generated' and 'emergent behaviour' is all nice, but such claims were made earlier.
I am also worried about the lack of (talk about) synchronous multiplayer. At some point I'd want to pop my civilization online, have colonial wars and biological exchanges with critters actually being watched by another player. Hell, leave the world available online for others, so that when I get back there might be a whole range of critters on my world I wasn't aware of. Just disable the planet-pounders.
Black and White was a great toy, but not a particularly good game. I wonder if Spore will do better. This mindless optimism, however, is never a good idea for any game, by any developer.
It's nice to see developers finally taking up procedural generation, which David Braben pioneered 15 years ago in Frontier: Elite II.
That game had hundreds and hundreds of star systems, with full sized planets, to visit and yet fitted on one floppy disk on the Amiga (with additional save disk).
Some of the 'story' planets were predefined, but the rest was entirely procedural.
I miss that game...