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Spore Promo Video Leaked to YouTube
Khamura writes "As E3 draws near, those of us who have been following Will Wright's newest brainchild, Spore, are abuzz with expectation. And lo! Someone posted to YouTube a video that shows 'unedited footage of Spore that will be going to TV networks covering E3 next week'. It includes a look at the overhauled creature editor, a first glimpse of the texturing tools, and various other exciting things that had not been shown this clearly in the early prototype seen at the 2005 GDC. One of them is the ambient music when the UFO visits different planets." It certainly looks like the game we saw last year, but take with a grain of salt just the same.
Kinda reminded me of a old game, Populous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populous
Over the last few months the Spore team has had a vareity of job openings for people who have experience in the handheld market. (Similar to this)
[speculation]
While this is hardly conclusive, its quite possible they are trying to hit all the markets. PCs/Consoles/Handheld Game Devices/Smart Phones/etc. On the PC or console you would have a full toolset and on the smaller devices it would be a scaled down version. (Spore Tamagochi)
[/speculation]
I'm gonna lose about 3 years of my life when this comes out...
;)
I just hope that it works well with WINE
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
You need to watch the GDC video to get a good idea of the gameplay. To put it briefly, it's a universe simulator. You start off controlling a single microbial organism, and evolve it up to a cognitive level as a human brain, then you control a community of the creatures and it's sort of like sim city for a while, then you can battle other civilizations, and eventually travel to other planets...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
"Spore is a computer game designed by Will Wright that simulates the complete history and future of life. (...) Spore is, at first glance, a 'teleological evolution' game: the player molds and guides a species across many generations, growing it from a single-celled organism into a more complex animal, until the species becomes intelligent. At this point the player begins molding and guiding this species' society, progressing towards a spacefaring civilization."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(game)
This week's 1up show also has a new Spore clip with some Will Wright commentary.
I think Spore looks like an absolutely amazing game, but the worst thing that could happen to it is all this publicity. Even I realize my expectations are so high right now that Will Wright needs to go to the future and get a microchip to plant inside my brain (for total immersion) for this game to meet my expectations. As much as I love seeing it covered on Slashdot, I think all this publicity will lead to massive disapointment when a million people all fire up their computers, realize it's a great game, but it's not the end all be all of gaming.
On the other hand, part of me really believes Will Wright has a time machine in his backyard.
I've always pictured the color of OS zealotry as a sort of bright flamingo pinkish hue
Totally agree, but the only idea about it that I dislike at this moment is that EA is involved in any way with it. I can't help thinking that it'll be like Battlefield 2, in that it's a cool idea, and it's pretty fun even despite the frustrating bugs, crashes, and in game imperfections that make an otherwise excellent game merely mediocre...
Frankly, when the game comes out and it feels like it's a whole and complete, finished game, with a suitable level of polish, I'll be suprised. Then again, such a game might not be as likely to sell expansion packs!
And another thing that really irks me: Battlefield 2 copy protection. It makes you disable certian functions of CD drive emulators like Alcohol 120%, even if you're not using them to play the game! In the modern age of online multiplayer games, why the hell would a publishing company even care? The singleplayer mode isn't the draw of many gamers today. People want to go online and interact with other people. The key to going online is usually quite literally a unique key that is shipped with the game. If you haven't paid for the game, tough luck going online! A copy of the game is therefore useless for 99% of the people interested in playing it.
I like to make a CD image for games that require the presence of a CD in the CD reader, so I don't have to deal with it when I want to burn a CD, so I don't have to listen to the drive ramp up and down, and so I don't risk damaging my precious disc. Is that so bad? I still have to use my unique key to play online, and so does everyone else. There's not a practical way to cheat that system, so what's the deal?! iD didn't require that I have a CD in the drive to play any of their games since Quake3, I think. My Diablo II account was tied to my CDkey, so it didn't matter if I ripped it to the hard drive, and singleplayer was a yawnfest. That's something I actually like about STEAM; there's no need to screw around with discs and crap.
If someone wants to play the singleplayer aspect of a game there's usually a crack or two that will let one easily do this regardless of any protections the developers care to throw at us, so it's futile trying to protect a relatively miniscule part of a game that is clearly intended to be a multiplayer online game in that way. Make a compelling, fun, online game, and they will come--because they have no choice! Gaming is a unique industry because of this. If the music industry could make it so that you had to go online to get the full value of your music for whatever reason, they'd shit their pants with excitement.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
"I'm not that impressed, really. Maybe it's shooting over my head. I am sure a dumb sonovabitch, I admit, but what's the big deal? It's like SimEarth only you drive the bugs now? I don't get it."
I'm really impressed with the game, but I wouldn't call you names for not liking it. Frankly, I'm sick of that attitude on the web.
But, anyway, what I got out of it was that you could create a species pretty much from scratch. Then you could guide them through various phases of evolution until you get them to become super aliens that can buzz the galaxy and affect other species. Then, the planets you've touched get uploaded to a server somewhere. Eventually your game goes and downloads those planets so you can see what others have done. Essentially, it's a big open-ended game with a lot of variety. (And humor...)
To me, the game does look slick, but I think it's one of those things that just manages to appeal to several things I like. (sci-fi, evolution, advancing through the ages, behaviour of society, mindless torture of small innocent creatures...) I wouldn't say it's for everybody. I also wouldn't say that those who criticize others for not liking this game have much ground to stand on.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Not the same video AT ALL. Plus, that's from the 2005 GDC, and that video is REALLY old.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
While this is generally true, I think you underestimate the number of cracked/private servers out there that don't check CD keys. Witness sites like epcgaming.com. Now obviously with a legit CD key your choices are much larger, but if you limit yourself to cracked servers you can still play a lot of multiplayer games online to your heart's content.
All the youtube video downloading sites are down. I think that this article has produced an Indirect Slashdot Effect!
http://pinopsida.com
who the hell modded this insightful? parent is completely off-topic!
?giS
You misunderstood how it'll work.
Basically, every planet & specie created by players will pe uploaded on the intarwub, and every copy of Spore will be able to "get" them from the servers to include them into the single-player environments. You will see and interact with the creations of other players (or even your former creations), but they will be controlled by your computer, not by other player.
It's a purely single player game upgradable via the web, kind-of like Total Annihilation was if you didn't have any friend and didn't use the Boneyard (you could use the web to download mods and units to expand your game)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
who the hell modded this insightful? parent is completely off-topic!