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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
Video of Will Wright's Spore Demo (~35 min): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330 420559198&q=spore
PA's take: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/27
It's so much more attractive / inside the moral kiosk.
I'm surprised to see people going in the opposite direction that GTA did insofar as raciness considering they had the most successful game. Perhaps it wasn't just GTA's R-ratedness that made it such a hit but the quality of the game itself, and it appears that EA and other companies agree if they're making games about microbes in lieu of cop/whore/pedestrian killer games.
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.
Reminds me of a "far side" cartoon: Movie Concepts Walt Disney Never Brought to Cinema: :)
"Bert the adventurous amoebe"
"Andy the sandworm"
etc
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Billy and the Intelligent Design workshop.
They had to tone it down a little.
Conservatives feel that Spore will open the way to fully immersing our youth into the Intelligent Design movement.
They're just waiting for it to mutate into Duke Nukem Forever.
From now on, I buy only Intel.
"Innovative" and "franchise" are incompatible terms. A franchise, after all, is exploiting an existing idea, and is all about "same". A game like Spore, should it be succesful, will be succesful because it is unique, not because there are a zillion and one Spore-a-likes.
On whether the game will be succesful; it's essentially a new gametype (or mix thereof) by an industry vet, it's being hyped to hell and back, and it's got the backing of EA. I hear echoes of Black and White, and the echoes do not sound good.
I wonder if Spore will have an Intelligent Design cheat code that would skip you right to homosapien and win the game.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Its not EA's new ace. I dont give any credit to a company that BUYS good ideas and claims them as their own.
Will Wright is the mastermind of this one. Its Will Wright's next smash hit.
Screw EA, if they had their way, we'd all be buying 6 sports games a year, every year, and thats it.
EA is doing its part to provide slashdot with the weekly 'video games in a slump?' stories.
Will Wright is like a recently eaten explorer trapped inside a monsters body.
http://www.thesporezone.co.uk/screens/index.php?ID =1
http://www.spore.com/screenshots.php
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Hmm, this game sounds like Evolutionay propaganda to me. I demand that the game include a "truth" mode where your civilization simply appears as fully developed humans (minus one rib in the male model) and goes from there. :)
Actually, that would be a clever little joke on the creator's part. Perhaps include a "-dogma" commandline switch that does just that. If they really wanted to get some reactionary types mad, they could even include various modes for all of the crazy creation myths from various world religions.
I read the internet for the articles.
The video links people are posting are about a year old. So yeah, they're cool, but they're nothing new, and we haven't heard a peep about the game since then.
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
Spore: Hot Date
Spore: Bustin' Out
Spore: Nightlife
All along, they've been saying "winter 2006" as a release. I think everyone was hoping that would mean Q1, but Q4 2006 seems to be the target.
Knowing Wright, though, he won't let it out the door until he feels it's done completely, so it may be later.
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
You could make the same argument against SimCity, The Sims, etc: "That looks like a lot of cool technology, and there is a huge degree of player freedom, but is it a compelling game?"
;) Or maybe we have a very narrow-minded stereotype of what actually makes a game compelling.
Maybe Spore is just doomed to repeat the failures of SimCity and The Sims
so here is my idea for EA. I think they should change madden releases to bi-yearly, with a $5 or so roster update/patch in the off-years. The huge pool of resources poured into madden every year could be directed into these smaller home-grown projects.
Will they lose money? I dunno. They'll make money on their roster update, that's for sure. And if they create a few gems with those reallocated resources, they're opening up loads of future franchise possibilities.
so the choices are to continue to cash-in now, or to plant these seeds for the future.
If so it would be hilarious if they included the Norse mythology. Giant cosmic cows & people coming out of salt/armpits/etc & skulls being used to create the firmament!
Raph Koster outlines in his presentation titled Moore's Wall how, right now, the growing power of computers is making games prohibitively expensive to produce. As the power of the machine grows, there is pressure to utitlize the new power to improve on the presentation (mainly, the graphics) of the game, which makes the game a lot more costly produce without adding much in terms of gameplay, and usually resulting in a reduction in the amount of actual game content.
One way to break this trend is to utilize the increasing CPU power of PCs to procedurally generate content, or to assist the player in creating his their own content. Of course, our procedural algorithims and software have to improve a lot if it's going to be an important supplement (let alone replacement) to the traditional way of doing things, which is to have professional artists hand-craft everything.
In this regard, Spore looks to be a huge step in the right direction. We need more projects like Spore to mature the technology. The fact that EA seems to be recognizing Wil's genious and throwing their support behind his project is a good thing, if the suits at top see the promise of this kind of approach, it can only mean good things for the industry. EA was not exactly in love with the idea of The Sims before it was proven an unmitigated success, despite the fact that Will was already an acclaimed game designer well before that game's release. So, even if EA isn't entirely turning over a new leaf, at least they're trusting their golden boy enough to say that they're pinning their hopes on his newest experimental idea.
Why would that be "something else?" As you said this is just a game. Whether or not you agree with what it claims is no reason to ban it. The Bible Game claims that the biblical representation of Genesis is 100% truth and you don't see atheists storming the streets in protest. It's EA's right to make a game that claims whatever they wish, as long as that claim isn't outright slanderous.
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.