Spore Released Today
by Ian Harding
After six years of production, Spore, the highly anticipated PC game from EA Sports (also to be available for the iPhone and Nintendo DS), has finally been released. Dubbed "The Year's Most Anticipated PC Game" by PC World, Spore has been down a roller-coaster of release dates and delays. Today, however, is the day people scramble for their email purchase downloads and run out to gaming stores across the nation.
But why? Why are people so excited about it? A quick blog post is not merely enough space to give you all of the guts of Spore, but giving players the ability to create, well, everything in the game, makes for the most customizable gameplay around.
Its evolutionary. As you proceed through the game, you design the creature along the way. Created by game designer Will Wright (original creator of the Sims series), this game is unlike any other game available. With the Spore Creature Creator, players have the ability to easily create an endless array of beings, vehicles, buildings, and even planets. And its not just adding an arm here and an eyeball there, its much more than that. Its not complex, but it does offer a wide range of options to choose from. You'll probably spend more time choosing colours than playing the game itself.
For those with online capabilities, Spore loads in other players' creations from all over the Internet world into your own Spore universe for you to see and interact with. And with five life phases in the game (Cell Phase, Creature Phase, Civilization Phase, Tribal Phase, and the Space Phase which is exactly what it sounds like... a vast universe of galaxies and planets to explore), the game possibilities are seem almost endless. And so are its creations. Keep an eye open, you could apparently run into one of your own creations somewhere along the way.
Back in June, EA released the Creature Creator online for people to get started in creating vast numbers of life-forms. Since then over 5 million player creations have been submitted. Pretty interesting, considering those initial creations (plus some made by EA and Maxis) will be populating the game when released. The Creature Creator is so fun, in fact, that people have attempted to create well-known characters with it such as Homer Simpson, Bender, and the Xenomorph Alien. Some have even gone as far as making what io9.com has termed as "Sporn" (NSFW).
I myself have been out of the video game realm for almost seven years now. Not having purchased a video game in seven years means that I either have no time, or am just not impressed with what has come out to play so far. However, I have been anticipating Spore for a while now (like most others) and have been playing around with the slick trial version of the Creature Creator, available free from Spore.com (get it here for PC and Mac). I have some creatures already created and even put in my pre-order before todays launch. Heck, I have been out of it for so long that I didn't even realize you could purchase games digitally online with just a download. I purchased mine through GameTreeOnline.com
My social life is about to slow and after spending some time in the game, I'll give you my more in-depth thoughts on my first purchased video game in seven years.
Official Spore Website: www.spore.com
Get the free trial Creature Creator here
Check out the full 60-second tv trailer: