Meet Will Wright's Penis Monster In San Francisco
San Francisco gamers without anything to do tonight take note: Will Wright, the designer behind SimCity and The Sims will be demoing his newest title, Spore, tonight at the Apple Store on Stockton Street. The presentation should include a look at the full game, and not just the geni-tacular Creature Creator that saw release last week.
The event starts at 7:00 pm Pacific, and since I don't really know how large a space they've got for this, you may want to show up early. At the moment, I'm not sure if any of GayGamer's local writers are planning on attending, but If any reader happens to make it, feel free to fill us in on any nifty details in the comments or in the forums.
Will Wright Demos Spore in S.F. Today [Kotaku]
Dawdle
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 21 June 2008
· Comments (6)
Other stuff like this: ea, event, mac, pc, spore, will wright
It was fantastic!!! Will demo'ed every stage, from Cell to Creature to Tribe to Civilization to Space. The game starts off in the Cell stage with a FMV showing a meteorite crashing onto the planet, breaking up in the water, revealing a little amoeba that starts feeding on small plants or animals. There's an evolutionary path that shows which direction your cell is growing into: Herbivore, Omnivore and Carnivore. The cell grows in size/abilities about 10 levels in the Cell stage.
Finally, you get legs to add to the cell, and it climbs out of the sea onto land into the Creature stage. Your creature socializes, attacks, defends, mates, forms packs with other creatures of the same species or other species. Then the creature gets hands and is able to use tools, leading to the Tribe stage. You get abilities to build your village, special powers the tribe chief can use like a rain dance that grow more fruit for the tribe to eat. Your tribe can socialize with other tribes or attack them and your actions lead to acquiring achievement heads for your tribe's totem pole.
Moving into the Civilization stage, you gain the ability to create vehicles and buildings now. Your city gets upgraded and moves along either an Economic, Religious, or Warring path. You need to mine for 'spice' to get money to upgrade & build. At this stage, evolution for your creatures ends and you're making friends or enemies with other cities. All through the game, you're able to check out your timeline, showing your evolutionary path. Every decision you make affects how your creature/tribe/civilization turns out.
You then get the ability to create spaceships, moving into the Space stage. The spaceships are now able to move to other planets in your solar system or other solar systems, other galaxies....the universe in the shape of the Spore logo contains practically hundreds if not thousands of planets and systems. Your ship can terraform a planet, colonize it, mine it for 'spice', destroy a planet (a crowd fav), make alliances with races from other planets who add a ship to join you in a sort of federation fleet, attack other races, take on missions. At this stage, you can still move back down to the Civ stage to manage your different colonies, or leave them be to exist in the path you helped set them on.
Look for "2001, A Space Odyssey" homages in several of the FMVs. As with the creature, vehicle, building, spaceship creators, we saw so many recognizable images people have created. The game samples from the online Sporepedia to use creatures/races/vehicles/buildings/spaceships to fill out your game. You can also download those creations from the online Sporepedia to use or improve on. Each picture/file downloaded contains the genomes/traits to move it on its on logical evolutionary path. There's a lot of real science and astrology added into the game, from how a creature develops to how to recognize a star system (Red Dwarf, Blue Star) that may possibly contain intelligent life.
The game also contains "Epics" which are uncontrolled events that affect your creations. In the Creature stage, since you're on a young planet, there's meteor showers you have to avoid, natural disasters, creature attacks, etc.
Will called the game a "Massively Single-Player Online Game", you as a single player, but getting to share creations with everyone. Creations can get tagged with labels (e.g. Star Trek ships, Vegetables, Pokemon...)
Brian Eno contributing with music.
Oh, and one question asked about the x-rated creatures which Will collectively calls "Spore-nography". You can flag and/or ban what you don't approve of. EA will also do the same. After all, its a game even kids can play.
There is so much to this game I haven't even mentioned, and I'm totally revved for it. Will said they had hoped to have at least 100,000 creatures before the full game comes out in September, but they have already surpassed 750,000 creatures within the first week of the Creature Creator being released.
Thanks Chris!
No probs!
Oh, and 2 words: Alien Abductions!
Hey Chris, did Will say if we actually get to play as any of the millions of creatures that we can download?
Probably by skipping the cell phase if I had to guess.
I don't believe he said anything about that. I do remember him saying you can download the creatures and edit them. Maybe its possible to play them after you edit them.
I sure hope so, cause there are tons of creatures that I've downloaded, and a few I've made and would love to try out in the game and am sure that I couldn't recreate.