Spore is the latest game from the brain of Will Wright- the creator of The Sims. Not only does Spore look amazing, it relies on a very new kind of playing, a very new technology.

 I’m talking about procedural generation; the downloading of other peoples creations, picked from an online database and used to create your world. This will make much more sense when we get to the actual game.

You begin, in Spore, as a micro-orgasm living in a drop of water, steadily building yourself up and clumbing the food chain in pac-man like gameplay (3D though.) As you become stronger, faster and smarter you eventually grow into a larger creature, completely (I mean completely) made by you. Every time you progress you can edit your creature with an amazingly in-depth editor. It allows you to scale parts (feet for example) with the mouse wheel, mould them to any shape with the mouse, twist spines and bones. In the demo Wright creates a snake-like fish that swam around eating smaller fish (all created by other players- they are downloaded and streamed to your computer- via the internet I would presume. The same applies to the plants and weeds in the ocean.) You can pick whether your animal is a carnivore or a herbivore, even omnivore.

 Soon enough this fish lays an egg, and clicking on this egg re-opens the editor. Adding three legs to the underside of his creature, twisting the spine a bit and sticking a ‘clamp’ on its tail Wright has the next generation of his animal. It now has legs, so it walks out of the water onto a beach. After a short period of annoying some nearby bouncing (almost Kirby-like) animals and eating one, (remember, this was a live speech given by Wright, so everything’s speeded up.) Wright continues to show us more of the editor. He shows an extremely tall dog, and one with a mouth at each end of its body. What is amazing is they all move properly, animation created for them on the fly. As you make creatures they are instantly made to walk / fight / eat / dance / drag etc according to how you make them.

 From here you have to survive, and soon evolve into a sentient creature. A small tribe of your creations band together and make a hut (again, completely customised by you) and can upgrade their society with new weapons and other items such as log fires and drums. When you give these things to your tribe (which are now fully evolved in every aspect except from intelligence) the game works out how your creatures will react to and use these things. Depending on how you played your animal originally they will react differently. Perhaps they will prefer peace and trade with other tribes, or war against them?

 We now move to the city level- (again all vehicles, buildings roads and walls are created completely by you,) and you are in control of many more of your creatures. You have to tend to them as in Sim City and such, and soon you will begin to seriously interact with other cities around you that do not belong to you; peacefully or otherwise. At this stage, you are working towards taking over your planet, city by city. This can be done diplomatically or by war, it’s your choice. After taking over your planet, you reach the second last stage of the game: The space stage. With your new UFO, designed by you again, you can fly from your planet and explore the 3D space around you. To begin with you only have a good enough engine to explore the immediate space around you, visiting planets and sometimes civillisations nearby. Now things get really amazing. The whole universe around you is full of planets, blank canveses for you to populate, experiment on (perhaps a cross-breed zoo? You do have an abduction beam and the ability to unlimitedly edit animals now…) Some of these planets are occupied by aliens, ready for you to interact with however you like. Wright demonstrates a nifty death-ray that wipes out an entire planet very beautifully.

 Now, having gained the ‘Steller-Drive’ you can venture from your solar-system and explore the rest of the universe. Zooming out Wright displays the size of it all. It is huge. Hundreds of clusters of stars, all housing their own solar-systems and possible alien-races. You can terraform planets with the ‘Genesis Device’ and make them liveable, dropping domed cities into your new world.

  If done right, Spore could be huge. Very huge indeed. I for one can’t wait for it’s late 2007 release.

 

 

Zelda games are a funny thing to me; in early stages of their developement, when all we see is half-finished code and primitive screen-shots I have no intrest at all in Zelda games. This is because Zelda is not about looks. It’s about gameplay that you can really sink your teeth into. Twilight Princess is the ultimate example of this.

Many people refer to it as Ocarina of Time’s spiritual succsessor, a game that remains modern (like Ocarina of Time when it was released) but holds onto the Zelda magic. I, having only breif memory of OoT would prefer to steer clear of this kind of comparison and concentrate on Twilight Princess as an individual game, not one belonging to a series.

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Hey guys! It’s me again! I have some interesting and exciting news to share with you. You may already know this, but here goes anyways;

The Legend of Zelda: Twillight Princess has recieved a whopping 96.5% based on 21 Media Outlets, and thus has been dubbed the second best game of All Time! The average vote was 9.1 (rounded to the nearest decimal place). Second to only the best game of all time: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which recieved an enourmous 97.7%, placing it atop the rankings for the highest rated video game ever, and with an average vote of 9.0 (based on 32 Reviews). Nintendo have done a brilliant job. And although the game is not perfect…it’s not that far away.

People already own it, but sadly, I, and many others, must wait 16 more days for the release. Lucky ducks! And looking at these statistics, I’m sick of waiting…I loved Ocarina, and I’ll love Twillight Princess. The case for many of you too!

Information found from www.Gamerankings.com. All credit goes to them for statistics.