Spore

There's a lot of third party middleware game engines out on the market: Epic Games has the Unreal Engine, Valve has the Source engine, Crytek has the Cryengine, Emergent has Gamebyro, id has the upcoming id Tech 5 and so on. But Electronic Arts is looking into the posiblity of doing the same thing with the engine that's the basis for their alien evolution sim game Spore.

In an article at the Rocky Mountain News, EA Games president Frank Gibeau states that the Spore engine is "extremely malleable. You could add RPG or action, you could take it to different platforms, like (Web-page) flash games, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii." He even stated that they are looking into licensing the Spore technology to third party game developers. One big problem with this is that third party developers might not want to use technology that's owned by one of the world's largest publishers. A few years ago, EA bought Criterion Software who created the Renderware engine that was used before EA's purchase in tons of games (including the GTA III series). However, licensing of Renderware dissapeared overnight after the EA/Criterion acquisition.

[Via Kotaku]

Electronic Arts' long awaited alien evolution sim game Spore is already shipped for folks in Europe (the US release is due on Sunday) but it appears that the folks across the water have had some issues signing onto the game's online servers.

While Spore is technically a single player game EA has set up its DRM that makes people register their copy on the Internet before they can begin playing. A post on EA's UK message board states, "We are aware that many of you are having login problems with Spore. This is being investigated so please bear with us." While another message from the same message board moderator seemed to indicate things are improving, several other posters are still stating they cannot log in and register their copy of the game. Just for the record we downloaded and registered our review copy of the game without any issues so it's possible that the US release will not have as many problems.

Touted by many as a candidate for the greatest game ever made, we've invested several hours in the first portions of Electronic Arts' Spore in our quest to determine if it's really THAT good. So far, it's holding our interest. In the first few hours in playing the single player portion we can say that Spore's creator Will Wright seems to want to cram pretty much every game genre he can think of in one title (except maybe for first person shooters; maybe he just didn't have time).

Starting up Spore brings up the main menu where you have three choices: Play, Create and Share. Share is basically being able to check out other players' creations in Spore and sharing your own. Create opens up all of the game's various editors to allow you to make creatures, buildings, vehicles and space ships without the need to actually go in and play the game at all. We suspect a lot of folks might just ignore the actual game side of Spore and dive into making stuff.

We just have a few more days to wait until one of the most hyped and most anticipated PC games in recent memory finally finds its way to stores (or if you are a PC owner via digital download). Will Wright's magnum opus, the alien life evolution sim-strategy game Spore, is schedule to be released by Electronic Arts on September 7.

While we expect that this game will get a variety of reviews, pro and con (indeed it seems to be happening already) there are still five reasons why we think we will love the final product once it is released. This isn't a review of Spore; simply some things that have been revealed and discussed about the game in the past that have us excited enough to want to try this game out now.

Click on the image above to continue reading "Five reasons why we think we will love Spore"

Two of the biggest PC game releases in September both come from Electronic Arts; the Will Wright designed alien life simulation Spore and the Mythic Entertainment developed fantasy MMO Warhammer Online. Gamesindustry.biz has word that a financial analyst, Lazard Capital Markets senior VP Colin Sebastian, has given some predictions on how both games will do in the their launch month.

Sebastian has predicted that Spore will generate 2 million unit sales in the US this month (it's due to launch next week). That is a massive number for a PC game and it will be interesting to see if Spore can make those predictions. Sebastian has also stated that Warhammer Online could generate 650,000 subcriptions in its first month (it launches September 18). This would seem to be a solid number considering that the launch of Funcom's Age of Conan last May has similar sales success in its first month.

While online reviews of Spore are technically under embargo at the moment, magazines are apparently under a different set of rules which means the first scores for the long awaited Will Wright-Electronic Arts alien life simulator are now out on the web anyway. PC Gamer's UK magazine has given the title a 91 (out of 100). The review does take the game to task for a lack of an auto-save feature and not being able to back out of wars in the game's last stages. However it did call the game "beautiful," "hilarious" and "annoyingly adorable."

However, two German PC game mags, PC Games and Gamestar, have given Spore 73 and 79 (out of 100) scores (repectively) according to Videogame247.com. The PC Games review stated it lacked depth until the final stage and felt that it was an unease mix of simulation and strategy. Quite frankly we expected this kind of mixed response to Spore; it's a title that really has no other game to compare it to and we think there will be quite a lot of varied reviews when the embargo is fully lifted.

With less than a week before Spore officially releases, the developers go in-depth on the game's final frontier. No longer confined to building up a single planet-wide civilization, players can explore the galaxy, terraform planets and conquer distant worlds to expand their empire to the far reaches of space.

Dowload the Spore Space Stage HD Video (40 MB)
Download the Spore Galactic Edition HD TV Spot (21 MB)

The Spore Community Site has been busy with brand new prototypes for fans to play with. Prototypes are tools the developers use to help test theories and explore design directions. The public normally never gets to see these prototypes, but the Spore developers decided to pass them out for fans to try out and toy around with. We have all the prototypes available for Spore fans to try out. Remember that EA does not support these prototypes, they've never been tested, and many aren't easily explained. All prototypes are less than 1 MB.

Click "Continue" to read the descriptions of each prototype.

Download the Spore GonzagoGL Prototype
Download the Spore Waterboy Prototype
Download the Spore NetCity Prototype
Download the Spore Gaslight Prototype
Download the Spore Crowd Prototype
Download the Spore SPUG Prototype
Download the Spore Space Prototype
Download the Spore Cell Culture Prototype
Download the Spore City Maze Prototype
Download the Spore BIOME Prototype
Download the Spore ParticleMan Prototype

We are just a few days away from Spore's release at this point but that hasn't stopped Electronic Arts from issuing some last minute new screenshots from the alien life simulation game before its scheduled ship date of September 7.

These new shots concentrate on the Civilization section of the game where players design buildings and vehicles for their now highly intelligent creatures that they have helped to push the evolution of in the game. There's also a couple of shots showing the Space portion of Spore where your alien species decided to explore the galaxy full of user created civilizations. You can expect a ton of press (both game-oriented and mainstream) to follow the launch of Spore next week.

Spore ads have been showing up all over the place, including the ivy lined walls of Harvard. Big Download hopped over to Harvard Square station to check out the Spore invasion. Check out how Spore gets into higher education and adapts to peoples' commutes in our gallery!

Anyone can make monsters with the free version of Spore Creature Creator but Electronic Arts seems to think that if a monster is made by a celebrity it's something special. That's why the publisher behind next week's sure-to-be-a-best-seller Spore has recruited a bunch of semi-famous people to have them make their own creatures with the editor. You can check them out on a special web site and even vote for your favorites.

You have really rich people (Richard Branson and Mark Cuban) along with pop culture icons (Adam West and Stan Lee), sitcom actors with three names (Melissa Joan Hart and Neil Patrick Harris), musicians (Andrew WK and Katy Perry) and even people who are famous for . . . well we are not really sure (ANT and Hal Sparks). Even Spore creator Will Wright threw in one of his own creations into the party mix. But the truth is that even if you are not famous you can most likely make your own Spore creation that's better than most of this lot.

Download the free version of Spore Creator Creator at Big Download right now.

We are less than a week before the launch of the long awaited Spore and more odd billboards are popping up in major cities. We reported on News.com spotting one in San Francisco and now the blog Message Board Champion has spotted some more billboards in Boston.

The one pictured above is our favorite so far; a creature with eyes that have the Spore galaxy symbol asking for some DNA. However the other picture on the Message Board Champion blog is kind of cool too; an alien asking for City Hall. If you have any pictures of any more of these outdoor billboards please let us know about it. We will post up pictures and links in future news posts.

Will Wright's heavily hyped alien life simulation Spore is getting ready for its September 7 launch but if you own a PC and don't want to fool with buying the retail copy of the game you can go ahead and pre-load your copy on your PC right now via a download from Electronic Arts' online store.

The pre-loads will allow you to have nearly all of the game on your hard drive before September 7. When the game launches it will take about 30 minutes to decrypt the game from your hard drive and then you can start evolving your creatures to your heart's content. Keep in mind that this is for the game only; you won't get any of the extras in the retail Spore Galactic Edition. Mac owners can get their copy by going to the Green Tree Online web site where they state that pre-orders will get their download link and activation key via email. There doesn't appear to be any pre-loads for the Mac version.

We're fast approaching the final phases before Spore finally releases. The developers give us the low-down on the Civilization Phase, which looks a lot like a trimmed down and Sporified version of SimCity. In this phase, players will need to build up their civilizations based on different themes like war or economics to compete with other rising tribes across the world.

Download Spore Civilization Phase HD Video (292 MB)
Download Spore Tribe Phase HD Video (55 MB)
Download Spore Creature Phase HD Video (28 MB)
Download Spore Cell Phase HD Video (225 MB)

By now we know that Electronic Arts is going to be pushing hard to hype up the release of the long awaited life simulation game Spore but we didn't know exactly how they would do it. CNet's News.com reports that EA has already been putting up large posters for the game on the side of buildings in San Francisco.

EA wants to make this game a huge mainstream success like The Sims but this time they are really making sure people know about this game beforehand. The CNet author speculates about more possible promotions for the game. Will there be TV ads? Yep. Will there be magazine ads? They are already out there. But then he adds speculation about a Spore ARG (alternate reality game) to which we have to say, "Huh?" Isn't Spore a kind of ARG already? That seems kind of pointless.