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What Spore May Spawn
ches_grin writes with "A new look at Spore, including a slideshow that examines the broad influence that the game is expected to exert on fields ranging from law to education. From the article: 'Spore's unprecedented level of user-generated content is sure to send ripple effects through and beyond the video-game world. Could the mass-market game provide the tipping point for the burgeoning retail trend of mass customization? How will it redefine the roles of game designers and publishers alike? We asked a variety of experts to predict the economic, educational, legal, and other effects of the game.'"
WILL WRIGHT IS GOD!
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
If someone creates a Borg creature that takes over the game, whatever fun it had will be gone. I'd guess some advertisers will buy the rights to such characters, so that Pepsi will eat all your spores, but not long after, Coke will eat all those, etc.
stuff |
news story? advertisement? what's the difference?
Because like all Will Wright games, people will try it and admire it for its creativity and inventiveness, and then go play something else that's a good deal more fun.
Or does the 4th slide look like it's from C&C Generals? How is that incorporated into Spore? Can I turn my 7 legged, beaked, tentacled, wingged, silver-backed behemoth into a war powerhouse by picking up the remains of my fallen foes like the GLA? FOR MY PEOPLE!!!!!
This game will dissapoint in much the same way Black and White promised us the world and turned out slightly dull.
...but how long does a game last? The old video of WW playing Spore seemed to take only a couple of minutes. He zoomed right through it all--completely unlike the other Sim games, which take forever to play (at least without cheating). Also, a card game? WTF?
Everytime i read a new review on this game the pins and needles im on multiply. This game can not come out soon enough!
Help test the
"It may not be there in the same form in the final game, but you could also hit a menu item and send your creature to Maxis' 3D printer, which automatically creates a model of it. It is likely that a model-making service (which will probably require payment) will be available when the game appears."
Holy shit how cool would that be? Unless they became sentient and we had to welcome our new 3-legged overlords.
Argh.
We will finally have world peace. Linux and Mac will each own 50% of the desktop market. BSD will stop dying. Democrats and Republicans will start making sense. And a few years later we will all get Alzheimer's.
Considering people make anything and everything for The Sims 2, I can't see how Spore is going to have more than "everything".
These videos might prove to give you a better idea of what the game is all about.
;)
If Robin Williams likes the game, it must be good.
Nice clean printer friendly version. Yum. http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content /jul2006/id20060720_289503.htm
Sounds like an interesting game to play. It mentions the "space phase" as the "business end" of the game. The database of content created by players can be shared between other players. Not sure exactly what this means. Maybe as simple as evolved planets can be visited by others, and tens of thousands of users will be able to have quite unique planets, none too similar. And technology can be passed from race to race.
Does this mean that my "planet", which I spent 2 months building after I spent 3 months evolving my race, can be wiped out by an evil player who simply wants to nuke everything in site? I hope I have time to spend 2 months on defense systems...
Another year to release...wow. Nothing ever lives up to the hype.
It sounds cool and looks cool, but I want to get my hands on it before I decide. I hope it's not like Wil's other games where it's fun in the beginning but then just gets tedious as you get farther along. The Sims was fun for me at first, but I ended up hating it because all I ended up doing was chasing the stats instead of doing cool stuff like putting them in unique predicaments. Those damned Sims have to hit the can more than my girlfriend.
With that said, even if Spore isn't as great as everyone makes it out to be, I'm hoping it will spawn a new class of games that use procedurally generated content for some incredibly unique gaming experiences.
-R
The "nukes" gameplay feature drove the fundamental design decision to enable user-created content?
What. The. Fuck?
If I read the article correctly then you will be able to buy models of the animals you create. That is pretty neat and impressive if you ask me. Also, the article hints at the same idea in creating your own cars in a card game. This whole game is starting to remind me of second life only this time it's crossing over.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
... we are GOD! Haven't you heard anything about this game?
Spore will turn out to be a good idea, but have the odd spot of poor execution. There won't actually be that many ways in which you can evolve creatures, and there will be fairly obviously fixed levels where you progress to another level of evolution. The game when first released will work poorly, and require a series of patches. The CD copy protection will be annoying. There will be many expansion packs.
Don't get me wrong, I think Will Wright is great, and I think this game will be too. But I don't think it's going to "change the face of gaming", any more than the sim, simcity Psychonauts did (sure a lot of people bought the sims, but has it really effected anything else?)
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
First of all, "mass customization" has been a meme for a while, but I think it's a bit premature to call the area "burgeoning". Most people still buy mass produced goods at Walmart, and customization of their computer consists of baby picture wallpaper and stains on the keyboard.
Second, Spore may be the most flashy and well-executed variety of computer game that permits user customization or attempts to do things with evolution, but it is far from the first. And to be commercially successful and appeal to a mass audience, it has to make compromises in terms of constraining gameplay and guiding the player. But regardless of how good Spore ultimately will be, what it will do is spawn more experimentation in this area, and that's probably going to lead to many more interesting games.
sometimes it leaks...
unprecedented level of user-generated content is sure to send ripple effects through and beyond the video-game world. Could the mass-market game provide the tipping point for the burgeoning retail trend of mass customization? How will it redefine the roles of game designers and publishers alike? We asked a variety of experts to predict the economic, educational, legal, and other effects of the game.'"
Wow do you need a cigarette? That has to be one really great game or are you a shil for the vendor?
I'm getting the impression that this is going to be a pretty controversial game.
Not so much for 95% of the planet, but for that one little chunk of America that's hell-bent on shutting down all things evolution-related. I mean, this is a computer game, right? And kids love computer games, right? But it talks about evolution, right? Oh no... Except that maybe it's not evolution so much as intelligent design, right? But that means that the kid is in the position of God, and that's blasphemy, oh no... etc. etc.
I think it'll be a good test to see how much closer to the dark ages these idiots can push us back...
It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone but gamers want to interact with their environment. How long have we been screaming for fully deformable terrain? When I miss someone with a rocket launcher I want it to take out the fucking wall. Granted the technology hasn't been there, so it's understandable it's taken this long for even a few games to do such a thing.
If you look around, just about every multiplayer game has some customization. At the lower end, you can usually pick colors. At the upper end, you have... Well, Spore :) Somewhere in the middle you have custom models, custom skins, tags, decals.
But also, keep in mind that customization is the difference between good and great in a lot of genres. Sure, I still love Civilization 2, and play it. (Civ 3, on the other hand, I found to be ugly, with muddy graphics.) But Alpha Centauri keeps me captivated far longer, mostly because of all the things you can do with customizing units and so on.
Gamers want control. Otherwise they could go live life, where you have much less of it. :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're talking about time and productivity lost, right?
Canthros
Spore isn't going to revolutionize anything. It's not going to change the landscape of videogaming as we know it. Spore is just a video game. Sure, an awesome, unusually creative, really fun videogame, but just a video game nonetheless. Everyone out there please stop hyping it so much, because the more you hype it, the more I raise my expectations, and eventually they're going to raise up so high that not even Will Wright will be able to meet them.
Please, just let the game be, and we can talk about it after it comes out, okay?
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-342393567 4619182066
Robin Williams likes it, it must be good.
Slashdot should filter out any article that has the word tipping point in it. Also, tipping points are not PROVIDED by anything. Fads (and the products and markets behind them) REACH a tipping point. Not mine, but: "Damn, why I always gotta be the busdriver? " Could another slashdotter provide the citation for this quote. It slips my mind.
Spore seems like even less of a 'game' than Black and White.
I hope you don't get modded down to much by people who are caught up in the hype. Hell, we are looking at an article which is basically about how Spore will change the world as we know it. I think that's slightly out of control, in the end most of us will just move on to something else after a week or so (like we did after B&W). I'm certain it will be a technical masterpiece (as with B&W again), but that alone will never be enough.
Spore somes a lot like Creatures, except Spore seems a lot more restrictive... more of a traditional game than the simulation Creatures is.
m epage
(If you don't know about Creatures, Wikipedia a decent overview.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures
(And then there's the Creatures wiki... no overview but more detail.)
http://creatures.wikia.com/wiki/Creatures_Wiki_Ho
I'm one of those hobby game design types who thinks up great ideas, but doesn't have the patience to really see any of them through. Spore's inspired a lot of good ideas, I think, that could revolutionize the RPG (particularily the MMORPG) genre, but it doesn't look like anyone is taking to them.
An item creation system that functioned like the creature builder in Spore would go a long way to revitilize the MMO genre for people who are big into crafting. Instead of having to gain a few levels to be able to purchase a new blueprint, crafters could get different technologies that would allow them to manipulate raw materials in different ways. The game would determine the properties (durability, damage, speed, etc.) of the item based upon it's shape and material components.
Another idea, for a single player game, would just be to use that vast ammount of data created for Spore to create and populate worlds for the hero to explore. No more killing the same orc or spider or whatever a billion times, if you get sick of the monsters that populate one game, you can transfer your character to another for a new sort of challange.
I just wish I had the money to hire a (more) competant (than me) staff to realize some of these ideas.
and was left with one thought.
Spore starts off as Pacman, moves on to being the Sims but ends up as Space Invaders.
It seems to me that this game has been a year away for about a year now. Not a good sign. (Especially since two major sections of the game, one of them quite important, were not available to the reviewers.) Lots of hype here - very little meat.
The publicity being generated around this game also reminds me of that which was generated in advance of [IT|Ginger|Segway].
Here, read this:
More:
Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens
Moreover: Battlebots viewers with long memories may recall that Wright's daughter built at least one entry for the robot combat game. No doubt as part of a contingency plan to eliminate those who try to avoid the Games.
Stefan
I am ever so grateful that there is still at leat one designer willing to do huge, epic and different games. This comment is aimed solidly at David Braben. Elite II (Frontier) had the entire galaxy, each star, planet and rock condensed into a 500 kB game. All thanks to procedural generation and fractals, much like Spore. I know that Braben has planned an Elite III for many years which would be fully multi-player... Come on David, you know you want to...
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
I like how this site copy-and-pasted the article from the NextGeneration site.
I really can't see Spore reaching the 'moms and girlfriends' market the way The Sims did. The Sims does indeed represent a virtual dollhouse, but Spore is something else all together. Outside of 'gamers', Spore is only likely to interest the kind of people who are really interested in things like micro-biology, evolution, space exploration, etc. That doesn't doom it to failure, but I don't see it having the mass market success of The Sims.
Unless I'm wrong, that is... can anyone sell me on this game on the basis of the above points?
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
I am the most jaded gamer you can find, but this is a Will Wright game. WILL FUCKING WRIGHT. You know how American McGee get's his name plastered inexplicably onto shipping product? That's hype. Contrast that with a totally white box, save for the words "WILL WRIGHT MADE THIS" printed in bold on the front. That, my friends, is the closest thing you will get to guaranteed quality in the gaming industry.
"In other news, Will Wright's latest video game entitled Spore generates almost no funds with little sales on release day, yet 5 million are playing it due to the ability to pirate the game"
All kidding aside, while I know I will be purchasing this game when it is released (if all other reviews and whatnot are at least decent), I hope that the rest of the world decides to do this. In my opinion, this is the reason why we dont see very many revolutionary game ideas and IP. When you create video games based off movie and tv show IP, it is easier to generate sales -- you got the group that needs to collect every thing from a repetitive IP, and you got the group of kids and the younger generation that know how to ask for the game by name -- "Mommy, I want that (place your own tv show/movie here) game". I guess I just hope that the rising piracy problem in the world does not kill off other possible great games like this.
The one thing that makes me irritated is the backseat Simcity has taken in Spore and The Sims' halo. What, if anything, happens with it now? Neither is a replacement and no competitor has been able to match the scale and simulation.
Spore isn't going to revolutionize customzation. Hint 1: We've had customization since the begining of time.
When you made a D&D character in table top games that was customization, games are adding more and more options in for that, but it's been around for ever. MMORPGs tend to have a great deal of customization as well. And Spore isn't even the only game that has such indepth customization. Remember a game called The Sims? Maybe you know the lead guy on it? Will Wright?
Customization is a growing area of gameplay, however there's a problem with it. Once customization grows to large games have to be built around customization, rather than customization built into the game. The problem is 99 percent graphics. If I could have any type of character then either hit detection suffers, or level design suffers. If my character can be 7 feet tall or 1000 pounds of blubber, then every door way I should have to go through needs to be those dimensions which looks odd to the 4 feet tall character. This isn't a problem when you work in a world system where you make homes as the player. But in a large scale world, there's limitations, in most games the world has to be designed with every player type in mind.
This brings us to Hint 2: customization is good, as long as the game doesn't suffer for it.
Will Wright makes free form customization games, Sim City, Sim ant, The Sims, all of these are simulations where you can create what ever you want in the game, where there's no real win condition, and where the player plays how he wants to. There's "scenarios" in these games but that's about it. That's his goal and that's what he excels at, I'm happy for him.
But that doesn't mean every game is going to have aliens that you can design. They won't. People want to play humanoids at worst, and humans at best. They might want to grow aliens, and that's a possibility, but you won't see it "ripple" through the field. You'll likely see the same levels of customization. Saint's row is currently coming out with decently indepth customization, this is coming out before Spore, so does that mean Spore is copying it? or it is copying spore? Neither. Customization has been coming for a long time, we just needed better systems and programmers to generate it.
Does will wright have a lot of flux in the world and a lot of people copy his ideas? YES but Spore isn't going to revolutionize the industry, the Sims already did that. And it was already being done before that point. We will see crap like "the singles" or what ever crap they made based off of the sims, there was a couple of them, and each one was a fraction of the sims. Those same types of games will be based off of Spore, but no, the level of customization that Will Wright touts is not going to exist in the entire industry. FPSes will continue to use humans, RTSes will continue to use set standards, the only games that will allow you to create new monsters and such is... that's right, Will Wright-esque sim games (as well as stuff like Monster hunter and so on) The rest of the industry will keep using the customizations we've had in the industry for years, which is growing pretty indepth.
Which leads us to Hint 3: Brains are for using, not for sitting on.
First, if you haven't watched the video of this game yet, do so now. I have the same concerns that many others do about WW's games starting off great and then tanking. At least he's creatively pushing the boundaries of games though. There have been a couple of comments about being able to take over other players worlds, destroy them, etc. This isn't an MMORPG people, that can't happen. As is my understanding of how the game works, it essentially pulls information (planets, creatures, vegetation, buildings, etc.) from other players games. That is how it creates new worlds and how the creatures exist. Any world you blow up with a nuke however, will only exist on your personal computer. Basically there's a database of all of the user created objects that everything gets pulled from. I can't wait for this to show up on the retail shelves.
Has anyone else noticed that the quote in the summary isn't actually in the article linked to? Do a serach for 'tipping point' and you'll find that it's not in there. The article the summary steals from sounds more interesting, the article linked to is just hype about Spore.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Will Wright makes excellent games.
But there are severe problems using them as educational material.
SimCity's demolition is a case in point: $5 to bulldoze a city block. No fair market value, no Fifth Amendment (or the equivalent, if there are any), no neighborhood groups, no angry owner mounting a campaign against you.
Maybe it's prophecy, and Will Wright foretold what America will be like post-Kelo.
Now of course, there are hundreds of games which have valuable educational content. With an appropriate counter-bias, even SimCity could be educational.
But out-of-the-box, it trains people to become authoritarian apparatchiks.
In interests of fairness, I should say that I was a programmer at Maxis. We were supposed to make non-violent games. Those who say we succeeded just don't realize how violent totalitarianism is.
There are no human controlled bullies. There are no human controlled -ANYTHING- apart from your own creatures.
The multiplayer aspects of this game are solely limited to populating your local, single-player universe with stock creatures and creatures created by other players. None of them are ever controlled by anyone else.
It's like player created content in the Sims, except the player created content is delivered to you automatically to fill the ecological niches necessary to make your universe's ecology functional.
Actually, I specifically didn't mention Fable because I don't think it suffers from the same problem at all. I thought it was quite a good game, with a strong narrative and decent gameplay. It's an example of how to take an impossible concept and turn it into something 'fun', instead of 'interesting'.
I get your point, but I think you can come up with a better example.
Great article. Should be on the front page... unfortunately there is no room for it, in between all the slashvertisments and dupes.
been released yet.
What a load of tripe.
I eagerly anticipate Spore, but I certainly don't think it revolutionize gaming. At best it will be the WoW of strategy games and at worst it will be overly ambitious and appeal primarily to a certain niche of gamers. Hopefully the game wont have excessively high system requirements, because if it does I think it will hinder sales.
I do, unfortunately, expect this game to spawn countless uninspired clones.
I can't wait to get my hands on this game: To create my own little creatures. To explore the possibilities of life. To raise my own little species.. and then murder them by removing the ladder from their pools.
http://wormbrain.com/
This newspost is just stupid marketing hype.
What comes to "unprecedented" customizability, I'm sure that Second Life beats Spore 10-0 any day!
And the game itself looks like bunch of classic-style games after each other, none of them being executed that well. They have just put a mega-customization-engine on top of that, with some network feats, and hyping it like it's something ground breaking.. no, it's not.
I'm sure it will be a boring game!
The article implies that Spore will 1) be wildly popular, and 2) be the beginning of a revolution in game development and design.
I assert that it WILL prove to be a fantastic game; but that the rest of the game industry will be notably UNrevolutionized... because this is exactly what happened before.
2000. The Sims is released. This is a totally new type of game; in some ways, a totally new form of fun. It sells through the roof, and to this day, there probably hasn't been a week that's gone by without The Sims or one of its sequels or expansions being somewhere on the Top 10 best-selling games list.
Logically, this should be a watershed. In terms of the game industry's history, this should be on the level of the release of Wolfenstein 3D, or of Dune. In other words: a game this fun and money-making should spawn many other games like it; which will at first be sneered at as "rip-offs"; but in fact people come to realize that this is a new genre, and each new entry brings something new to the table. Then, sooner or later, someone (e.g. Blizzard in the RTS and MMO genres) will create a fantastically polished new entry that pushes the genre to its next level.
But what happened with The Sims? We got "Singles" and "Playboy: The Mansion." That's pretty much it. There was no rush to make new "people simulators." The Sims still has essentially no competition - it is its own genre. Why hasn't it spawned a new genre? Lost Garden has some ideas about this. I think it's a combination of being unwilling to take on the difficulty of a really hard game design problem; combined with an ironic risk-averseness (what could be less risky than following in the footsteps of The Sims? oh, I know, continuing to crank out FPS and RTS games); combined with developers being too proud to make something someone might call a "rip-off."
Whatever the reason, I think it's going to repeat with Spore. Game developers have become too narrow-minded. Not only do they not try to conceive of a radically ambitious new type of game - like Spore - but even when one plops in their mist and draws the multitudes to it like the Monolith in 2001, they look at it for a moment and then go back to picking fleas off each other (i.e. making platform games) like they've always done... because they like doing that... and that's they're used to it... and they'll be totally safe doing that... until they get their skulls bashed in by the few apes that were smart enough to learn from the Monolith, that is.
The game industry as a whole - mainly publishers, but many developers as well - is resisting change. They didn't attempt to adapt to The Sims, and they'll be similarly complacent in their response to Spore.
Shouldn't we wait until the game is out to make such outrageous claims? For all we know (though I hope not), the gameplay could suck and the game could disappear into the bargain bin within a few weeks.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Watch the demo. Listen to WW. Spore is not multiplayer. It is "massively singleplayer". You play the game all by your lonesome, but the game can connect online and automatically download new creatures, buildings, or entire civilizations from other players and put them into your world. They are *not* controlled by the other players, they are run automatically by the game AI. Any griefing that takes place is done to you by the computer, not some jackass 14-year-old.
Even better it got modded off topic. http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=200 [VGcats.com]
no matter what, i'll always love maxis games because of the creativity and the wide spectrum of directions in which you can make their games take you. even if a lot of the games they put out are pretty limited, they're just plain fun (my rapist/murderer sims 2 character with a graveyard in his back yard does a damned fine job of occupying my time at work), and of course, every game has its limits. i realize that maxis games may be viewed as more limited than most, but if you think about all the work that went into, say, the sims 2...would you want to wait another year and a half for a few extra cities? or would you rather get the game now and download more user- and maxis-created cities later and then maybe make your own? THAT is going to be one of the defining marks of spore, half of the game's elements will be either generated on-the-fly by what you're doing in the game, how you're playing it, or by other players. i certainly hope i'm not the only person who thinks that that is downright fuckin' rad. the procedural generation of sounds, movement, creatures, world elements and skins will offer a chance to make the game radically different every time you start a new spore. now, if, as questioned above, big corporations get in on this game and make pepsi and coke universes...i think it'll be fun to build up my universe and form my own coalition of the willing to go smash the pepsiverse. there might be a chance here to reverse-advertise, so to speak; instead of pepsi telling you that you like pepsi, you can tell pepsi that you've allied with the coca-colaverse and well, unless you receive 100 lbs of coupons for free pepsi, sorry pepsi, but you're gonna hafta fuck off 'cause all your base are belong to me.
while spore looks like an awesome game and i look forward finally playing it, it will not "change the gaming industry" in any way. Thats just a stupid thing that has been said way too often already. Remember Black and White ? It got all the similar praises, revolutionary blah, still, it was a mediocre game that didnt change anything around. The only game i can think of that actually changed the game industry a bit was WOW, which had next to zero innovation but the largest Hype ever ( putting the Sims on #2 hypewise). The only thing that matters these days is the hype: More hype -> many authors write articles on websites/blogs -> more hype. Its a self-fullfilling prophecy
So many of you are missing the point. Take world of warcraft for example. 6 million subscribers.
Now, imagine if all those items you can craft in the game can be made procedurally on the client and only requiring a 3kb file which contains the model and the textrues. WOW. User created in game content that can be sold in an in game auction house. If the wire gets too heavy with bandwidth the download manager simply works in the background and continues to download content and delete content that no longer exist.
Sure people will create a ton of crap, but just imagine all the twinks wanting their ubr loot to look really cool as well. It will come, one day, if not blizzard than someone else.
Hasn't anyone heard of Second Life? From what I've seen of Spore, only creatures are user created. You can't sell them and don't own the IP rights.
In Second Life you can create creatures, vehicles, gadgets, pretty much anything and sell them in-game while retaining the IP rights. Yes, the graphics suck in SL. But when people talk about the "economic, educational, legal and other effects" of a game they should look to SL, not Spore.
Okay, I watched the 1 hour demo. It really looks impressive. I admit. The shared content does make sense. Other players planets and creatures, and items, are shared among everyone, throught the Spore database. And the Spore online databsae sounds like it would be smart, resorting content, delivering the best based on criteria. It was explained pretty well in the demo. I'm sold. A great creative universe. When can I buy it? Dammit! Another year!
it even lets you recreate the experience of standing in line to buy Spore!
amazing.
One thing in the article that heralds a huge change - perhaps not via Spore, but it's coming - is the fact that they can print out models of your creatures using a 3D printer. They just sort of toss out that you might be able to pay a few bucks to a service and get your own plastic creatures made in the same way.
Can you imagine the toy industry if this becomes popular? Using Spore's open-ended creature generation, plus the ability to make a plastic model for a relatively low-cost, and kids will be able to create their own figures that will be totally unlike any others. If that gets popular enough, it might create a market for home 3D printers...
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
I predict that within 48 hours of release someone has created a goatse creature.
This would be bad enough but this person will also have created a macro to deposit said creatures on every single planet that they can find.
Upon infestation every sighted creature on the planet will throw themselves into a volcano leaving the goatses as the dominant species. The Spore universe will never recover and Will Wright will decide to pull the servers within the first year.
I think a time of mass customization is already here to a large extent. Look at the auto industry. There was a time when car mods were for a very small crowd. Now Scion is marketing their X series cars with 35+ mods from the factory. And Will Wright I want to have your babies...thanks for Spore!
Reminds me of the Penny Arcade comic that came out last year.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
This is a seriously cool idea, but how long before someone uses Spore and 3DP to make alien sex toys and gets the technology banned in Alabama?
Hmmm.
On second thought, if the printer-makers charge as much for the plastic composition used to lay out models as they do for inket ink, it will cost $500 just to make a gaming-miniature sized item.
For all the fawning over Will Wright and Spore, I can't help but think back to a couple of other titles that were supposed to the The Next Big Thing. Both were designed by legends that had enjoyed previous success.
"Black & White" from Peter Molyneaux
"Trespasser" from Seamus Blackley
Who can think of others?
I'm not trying to flame, and I'm certainly not saying the Spore will be an exercise in box-stacking or mouse-gesturing. But these types of compliments have been said before about other titles.
WTF are you talking about? Did you pay attention to any of the videos? It sucks user-created content from userspace and integrates it into everyone else's game. Who the fuck needs an expansion pack when afterwards you could possibly cross-breed with any other creature in the game (possibly?) The only thing an expansion pack could do is maybe be a cheap 2K piece of code to allow creatures to just supernaturally float off the ground or something silly like that, simple engine optimizations and additions.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Personally, I have far too much interesting going on in my *own* life without feeling the need to go worrying about whether one particular game to be released sometime soon will be good or not. Yep, I may end up buying it and suffering severe sleep deprivation as a result of being unable to put it down - but for the moment, I've got walls to paint, reports to write and beer to drink.
Please be proper little Capitalists and keep a tight hold of that nice green roll of cash in your pocket. And only when the "dancing of the corporate monkey-boys" have truly amused you with a brand new CD, movie or game, do you pat them on the head, say thanks, hand over some cash and tell them to bugger off and not bother you until they've made something else for your amusement.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Wise guy once say, "Too many chiefs, not enough indians."
Wise guy will say, "Too many stars, not enough groupies."
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This is looking to be a worthy succesor to the Elite series, though you can't land on planets.
Ship customization, a storyline thrown in, good space combat, and trading/smuggling. No multiplayer, but I can deal with that. From what I played of the demo, I'm more excited about an upcoming game than I have been for a long time.
One word: SimAnt.
Please note that Spore has not been released yet.
it deals with all the topics you are talking about, it broke records of audience in many countries.
If you present a topic properly (any topic) you can make it interesting for any person with the most basic curiosity.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I liked SimAnt.......