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A week with Spore Creature Creator: Day Three
In our quest to familiarize ourselves with the laws of nature (and subsequently defy them), this week we're going to share at least five abominations, one each day, that we've concocted in Spore Creature Creator. You can keep track of this our progress via our various profile pages: Justin McElroy Ross Miller Randy Nelson Alexander Sliwinski Kevin Kelly Today's highlights include a living guitar, a chocobo and a failed attempt at recreating the faun from Pan's Labyrinth. You can see all the creatures from the week starting here. Each page contains a link to the creature's respective Sporepedia page where you can download and edit our work.%Gallery-25321% Put your skills to the test and win some gear. BigDownload is offering BigPrizes to see your Spore creations.
A week with Spore Creature Creators: Day Two
In our quest to familiarize ourselves with the laws of nature (and subsequently defy them), this week we're going to share at least five abominations, one each day, that we've concocted in Spore Creature Creator. You can keep track of this our progress via our various profile pages: Justin McElroy Ross Miller Randy Nelson Alexander Sliwinski For day two (new entries start here), we've got an elated peppermint, an attentive dinosaur, and a hiphopapotamous with flows that glow like phosphorous. You can see all the creatures from the week starting here. Each page contains a link to the creature's respective Sporepedia page where you can download and edit our work.%Gallery-25321%
Force your older Mac to evolve and run Spore Creature Creator
If you've been living under a rock lately and haven't heard about the Spore Creature Creator, we forgive you. However, if you actually just live under a rock and look like something spawned from the Creature Creator, and have been pouting because you have an Interl Mac Mini or an older MacBook with Intel's GMA 950 integrated graphics, then turn that frown upside down.The Unofficial Apple Weblog will let you know how to fool the program into thinking you're sporting a different graphics chip, and you'll be able to play God on your precious piece of outdated, but still loved, hardware. Just don't blame us if your now hacked machine becomes sentient and starts spawning.
BigDownload offering big prizes to see your Spore creatures
How intelligent is your design? Our friends at BigDownload want to see your best work using the Spore Creature Creator demo, and they're offering 10 copies of the full version, a Wacom tablet and two NVIDIA video cards to tempt you. Click here for details and contest rules.
Spore Creature Creator demo available now on PC and Mac
Like another layer in the Russian nesting doll of Spore hype creation, the Spore Creature Creator demo is out now for both Mac and PC. Big Download reports the demo contains 25% of the content available in the full $10 retail version releasing tomorrow. We've got some impressions up on the Spore Creature Creator after fiddling around with it for a week. Spore proper will release Sept. 7 -- make sure to check your system specs.
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Spore Creature Creator now available
EA has made the Spore Creature Creator trial available for download on both Mac and PC. A while back EA promised simultaneous release for Mac and PC, and they seem to be on track with the Creature Creator which is available for purchase at $9.95.The Spore Creature Creator is a preview and demo for the full Spore game, which is scheduled for release on September 7. As you might expect from the name the Creature Creator allows you to build and customize creatures which you'll later be able to use in gameplay once the full game is released. I've been playing with the trial this morning and it does look very promising.The Spore Creature Creator is Leopard and Intel Mac only. It requires at least an ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100. It will apparently not run on computers with the GMA 950 integrated graphics chipset on OS X (though, it will on Windows). The trial version can be downloaded directly from the Spore trial site.Thanks, Shiraz!
A week with Spore Creature Creator: Day One
In our quest to familiarize ourselves with the laws of nature (and subsequently defy them), this week we're going to share at least five abominations, one each day, that we've concocted in Spore Creature Creator. You can keep track of this writer's progress via this Spore profile page. While we've got no Murlocs today, we did try our hand at making a Moogle. Check out all our creations via the gallery below. Each one contains a link to the creature's respective Sporepedia page where you can download and edit our work.%Gallery-25321%
Quirks: the 1980 board game equivalent of Spore
As you know, we sometimes like to cut the wires and take things Off the Grid, which can lead to bouts of surfing through websites like BoardGameGeek until 5 in the morning ... allegedly ...However, all of that browsing paid off in spades when we stumbled across Quirks, a board game from the magical year of 1980. Looks a bit familiar, doesn't it? We wonder if Will Wright ever sat down with this back in the day. He would have been around 20 years old when it came out, and he's admittedly a huge fan of board and strategy games, so you do the math. Find out more about genetic manipulation in the 80s after the break (spoiler: it wasn't all big hair, bangle bracelets, and friendship pins).
The Spore report: Murloc sightings
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/Murlocs_in_Spore'; It won't be long until you'll be able to hear the lilting sound of "mgrlllmgrlrrr" across the universe. Spore, the new game from The Sims' Will Wright, which involves creating a species from a single living cell and evolving it all the way through space colonization, is growing murlocs. The official release of Spore's Creature Creator isn't due until Tuesday, June 17, but somehow it broke free early, giving WoW players an early start in trying to create their favorite Azerothian creatures.We got a peek at some of these creations. The little guy to the right was created by a Spore user named Saphirus. If you check the Sporepedia, you'll find some more murloc attempts -- including one by WoW Radio's Duncor. There's even an odd attempt at a kodo (you wouldn't know it except from the description) and a strange looking crocolisk.[Thanks, Andrew.]
Spore Creatures evolves new screens, Japanese release date
In the beginning, there was a confirmation.Shortly thereafter, a release date and gameplay details emerged from the primordial ooze a Newsweek interview, and an involuntary chemical reaction a Joystiq hands-on session soon produced screens. Then, for some time, nothing. Until this morning, that is, when we found that the screens had suddenly multiplied in number, and had inhabited our gallery!The newly developed screens were joined by boxart for the Japanese version of the game, which sort of reminded us of Pokémon Trozei!'s box, and a Japanese release date: September 11th.So goes the ongoing story of the evolution of Spore Creatures.%Gallery-15944%
Spore's system requirements
We're not exactly sure how long it's been up on the official Spore site, but below we've posted the basic system requirements for running the sim-everything title on PC and Mac. The "recommended" (read: real) requirements are not currently listed on the site. For the super-breakdown of supported graphics cards and other nit-picky details, check out the Spore site.Windows XP: 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent 512 MB RAM A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 At least 6 GB of hard drive space Windows Vista: 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent 768 MB RAM A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 At least 6 GB of hard drive space Mac: Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher Intel Core Duo Processor 1024 MB RAM ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100 At least 4.7GB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for creations. This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac). [Thanks binturong]%Gallery-15870%
Spore: Creature Stage wanders onto land, into blog post
click to enlarge EA just dropped a handful of screens and a short recap of Spore's second stage – the Creature Stage – into our laps (we have a hand there ... and some eyes ... and mandibles). Of course, they did the same thing last week for the opening "Cell Stage" and we presume they'll keep doing so in the coming weeks; we've still got Tribal, Civilization, and Space to look forward to.The Creature Stage jumps from Cell's 2D world into three dimensions, where you'll gather DNA points which you can use in the Creature Creator (check out our hands-ons and meet Sporky) to expand your critter's abilities. Here you'll encounter other strange species as you explore your world – "all of them created by other players" – and you'll "race" to "become the first sentient being" on your planet. It's like massively single-player online gaming. %Gallery-23862%
Counting Rupees: Digital Rights Madness
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: When EA announced that Spore and Mass Effect (PC) would have a DRM program that did performed online verification every 10 days, it generated a massive backlash amongst the gaming community. Many people, who were originally excited about Spore and Mass Effect, now claimed that they would not purchase the games, solely because of the DRM. To be honest, I'm no fan of DRM either. It basically treats all legal customers as potential criminals, and seems futile anyway, as anyone with an internet connection can typically find ways around the DRM. The only people it probably deters are those with little technical savvy and who just want to share a game they bought with their friends and family. The amount of actual sales that would be lost to this is probably pretty limited. With all that said, I'm glad that EA has backed off this new DRM and scaled it back to just an initial online verification. Given the current state of PC gaming as well as the traditionally more "accepted" versions of DRM (like the initial online verification), however, I didn't find this new DRM to be all THAT much worse, particularly with some slight improvements to it, such as allowing a manual verification and extending the timeframe for re-verification slightly (say, to 30-60 days instead of every 10). The reason for this has a lot to do with what's been going on with PC gaming in the last few years. While the "death" of PC gaming has been talked about for years, it isn't quite here. The landscape is just shifting. While the total NPD sales for each year has been decreasing, other avenues of making money have been developed. For instance, subscription-based games (mostly MMOs, but also games available on GameTap), cheaper more casual downloadable games (eg, PopCap Games), and even free, ad- or feature-driven games (eg, Dungeon Runners, Battlefield Heroes, Quake Zero) make up an ever increasing portion of PC-based revenue. Thus, the actual retail sales are taken up mostly by a few casual games, MMO starter kits or expansions, and maybe the occasional shooter or RTS game. Take, for example, the most recent NPD PC numbers for the week of May 4-10:
This Week in Review is still in love with Sporky
click to get up close with "sporky" Apologies to everyone, but we're still in that "blind adulation" phase of our relationship with Sporky, the cute little abomination from Hell we made in Spore. Also receiving love this week is M-rated MMO (or MMMO) Age of Conan, a plethora of WiiWare reviews and a surprisingly positive outlook for Alone in the Dark. Check out all of our hands-on impressions and reviews from the Joystiq Network this week:PC Age of Conan: The pros and cons Joystiq hands-on: Spore Creature Creator and the birth of Sporky
Joystiq hands-on: Spore Creature Creator and the birth of Sporky
click to get up close with "sporky" var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/Hands_on_Spore_Creature_Creator_and_the_birth_of_Sporky'; We dropped by Maxis' offices today to get our feet wet in the stand-alone "Creature Creator" component of The Sims architect Will Wright's epic cell-to-galactic-civilization sim, Spore (which hits in September). Set to launch on June 17 in two flavors (a $9.99 "full version" and free downloadable demo, also included with The SimCity Box) the creator could be incorrectly described as a "utility" – in fact, as we found while tinkering with it, the Creature Creator could very well have a life of its own. Read our full impressions after the break.%Gallery-15870%
Spore 'Cell Phase' flOwts into view
click to magnify EA today passed out some new media of Spore's first stage, the "Cell Phase," a top-down 2D minigame that looks a lot like flOw (but, you know, maybe, actually ... fun). Perhaps not coincidentally, flOw's original designer Jenova Chen was briefly employed by Maxis, suggesting that Spore's Cell Phase may be a direct evolution of Chen's elegant Flash-based creation. Like its predecessor, Cell Phase features a player-driven microorganism, a little fish in the primordial ooze, which can be designated as herbivore, carnivore or omnivore before crashing into the ocean by way of immaculate meteor. The primary objective is to eat -- and not be eaten -- as you "earn DNA" and collect parts to enhance your creature's abilities (read: grow legs and get on to the good parts). Everybody's gotta start somewhere, eh?Don't miss the Cell Phase trailer posted after the break!%Gallery-23321%
Spore, Mass Effect to require online validation every 10 days
BioWare technical producer Derek French lit up the Mass Effect forums this past week announcing that both their game and (on page 2) fellow Electronic Arts title Spore come with SecuROM, a DRM system that requires activation the first time you play the game and then a re-check every ten days, with the first check on the fifth day.French explained that there is no external program installed and the check will be run through MassEffect.exe (or Spore.exe, presumably), the data transfered will be the CD key and a "unique machine identifier of some type" and that he has been told, "there will be clear labeling on the package."Despite all these reassurances, an unfortunate scenario brought up by one poster -- of ignoring the game 11 days and then trying to play with no internet -- was proven true, as French confirmed you wouldn't be able to play the game under that situation. Of course, it's not like you're gonna put any of these games down for ten days, right? Right? Eh, we hate DRM.(Note: We do understand the irony of making a Samara/The Ring joke when -- spoiler -- her primary goal was to have people make as many copies as possible.)[Via Shacknews]
Spore Creature Creator and demo coming June 17
If you're the megalomaniacal sort who wants nothing more than a race of sentient creatures of your own design bending to your every whim, we have good news! The Spore Creature Creator, once only dated for the murky, fingerprinted window of June, has now been specifically nailed to June 17. If you're megalomaniacal but also too cheap to spring the $9.99 for the game, you'll be happy to hear that a free demo will also arrive that day on the Spore site.Once the full game arrives on September 5, you'll be able to import in all your created beasts. Until then, they're a perfect way to see if friends and family love you enough to feign interest in the computer animal you made. Gallery: Spore
Free, retail versions of Spore creature editor coming in June
While reaffirming Spore's September 7 release date, VP of Marketing at Maxis Patrick Buechner has told IGN that both trial (free) and retail (premium) versions of the creature editor are coming in June. The trial version will be available for download and in The SimCity Box, while the retail version should be available in stores around the same time Box launches."The free Creature Creator has about 25-percent of the creature making parts from Spore. The retail version will have 100-percent," said Buechner. Any creations you conjure can be shared online via the upcoming Sporepedia, and they will be compatible with Spore once it's released. No price was given for the retail version, and it wasn't mentioned whether any discount would be given to those who pay a premium to be teased about Will Wright's evolutionary time sink.%Gallery-15870%
Rumor: Spore Creature Creator included in SimCity Box
Ever since EA announced the early release of Spore's Creature Creator, we've been wondering how the company planned on distributing the pre-game title. Fingers were crossed for a free demo, but now it seems that EA would rather entice players into buying their SimCity Box, which will reportedly include the Creature Creator amongst its lineup of classic SimCity titles.On the game's Amazon product page, the box art indicates the presence of the "Creature Creator Trial Version" as a bonus feature. This same bonus is stated in the product description. If Amazon is to be trusted, we still don't know whether the "trial version" indicates a limited demo of the soon-to-be-released creature editor, or whether the editor is considered to be a "trial version" of Spore.We also don't know if this is EA's only intended method of distribution for the Creature Creator. We've contacted EA for further clarification, and will let you know once we have a few more facts.[Via GamerTell]
