With all the fervor about next-generation consoles like the PlayStation 3 and the Wii, casual gamers may overlook the next great advance in the art form.
Luckily, they have plenty of time to prepare.
Electronic Arts recently announced a delay in the release of “Spore,” the next PC title from legendary game developer Will Wright. His need to ensure the quality of “Spore” bumped the game back to early 2008.
“Spore” is expected to carry on the pioneering video game spirit that ran through the two richest feathers in Wright's cap, “SimCity” and “The Sims.” Wright has demonstrated its groundbreaking game design in presentations at “E3” in 2005 and the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, earlier this year.
The game encompasses all things, from the very small to the very big. It begins at the cellular stage of life, where players can maneuver through a primordial swimming pool and attack or evade microbes in Pac-Man-like style. Soon they can spawn an egg and modify their microbe with an editing workshop.
The next stage of “Spore,” the creature phase, immerses the player's self-designed organism in a 3-D environment to interact with those created by other players. The object here is to accumulate “DNA points” in order to accelerate your organism's development.
Once an organism has evolved enough to become sapient, the player enters the tribal stage of “Spore.” Players can join with others to form tiny communities and outfit them with weapons or musical instruments for their interactions with other tribes.
Once the tribe reaches 20 members, players can continue to the civilization phase, where they build and refine their cities in a manner akin to that of “SimCity.” They can then leave the terrestrial sphere on spacecraft and go into the galactic phase to conquer other planets in the final portion of the game.
The key innovation of “Spore” is its use of procedural generation (creating content on the fly) to allow players a seemingly infinite amount of variability in their experience of the game. The possibilities are multiplied by rumors of the cellular phase being preceded by a molecular stage, modeled after “Tetris.”
It is not a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, like another well-known time-waster, “World of Warcraft.” “Spore” downloads content from other players' computers, but instead of interacting with those players in a real-time setting, the game assumes control of that content.
With so many paths for the gamer to pursue within the gargantuan scope of “Spore,” the game promises to remove many a player from their real lives and glue them to their monitors for a few hours or even a few years.
The debate over the healthiness of devoting countless hours to “Spore” is another column altogether. Here it is important to anyone who calls him- or herself a gamer to consider how games are evolving into life experiences. Or in the case of “Spore,” life cycle experiences.
Staff writer David Wilcox reviews video games for The Citizen. He can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 245 or david.wilcox@lee.net
Electronic Arts recently announced a delay in the release of “Spore,” the next PC title from legendary game developer Will Wright. His need to ensure the quality of “Spore” bumped the game back to early 2008.
“Spore” is expected to carry on the pioneering video game spirit that ran through the two richest feathers in Wright's cap, “SimCity” and “The Sims.” Wright has demonstrated its groundbreaking game design in presentations at “E3” in 2005 and the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, earlier this year.
The game encompasses all things, from the very small to the very big. It begins at the cellular stage of life, where players can maneuver through a primordial swimming pool and attack or evade microbes in Pac-Man-like style. Soon they can spawn an egg and modify their microbe with an editing workshop.
The next stage of “Spore,” the creature phase, immerses the player's self-designed organism in a 3-D environment to interact with those created by other players. The object here is to accumulate “DNA points” in order to accelerate your organism's development.
Once an organism has evolved enough to become sapient, the player enters the tribal stage of “Spore.” Players can join with others to form tiny communities and outfit them with weapons or musical instruments for their interactions with other tribes.
Once the tribe reaches 20 members, players can continue to the civilization phase, where they build and refine their cities in a manner akin to that of “SimCity.” They can then leave the terrestrial sphere on spacecraft and go into the galactic phase to conquer other planets in the final portion of the game.
The key innovation of “Spore” is its use of procedural generation (creating content on the fly) to allow players a seemingly infinite amount of variability in their experience of the game. The possibilities are multiplied by rumors of the cellular phase being preceded by a molecular stage, modeled after “Tetris.”
It is not a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, like another well-known time-waster, “World of Warcraft.” “Spore” downloads content from other players' computers, but instead of interacting with those players in a real-time setting, the game assumes control of that content.
With so many paths for the gamer to pursue within the gargantuan scope of “Spore,” the game promises to remove many a player from their real lives and glue them to their monitors for a few hours or even a few years.
The debate over the healthiness of devoting countless hours to “Spore” is another column altogether. Here it is important to anyone who calls him- or herself a gamer to consider how games are evolving into life experiences. Or in the case of “Spore,” life cycle experiences.
Staff writer David Wilcox reviews video games for The Citizen. He can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 245 or david.wilcox@lee.net
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