After being in development for more than three years and suffering a year of launch delays, Spore finally has a release date to its name. Will Wright’s much anticipated Sim game will arrive on PC, DS and Macintosh during the weekend of September 7. The game has not yet been officially priced or rated, but online retailers expect it to be around $49.99. However, the Wii version which was reconfirmed at an EA analyst event has not been dated. The game itself is looking much more complete, though it has been almost six months from its last showing in Leipzig. The game is now in a fully playable form and anxious gamers got a chance to witness the gameplay as it progressed from a miniscule single-cell organism to colossal intergalactic warfare and everything in between.
Spore features five evolutionary stages and a hell lot of space exploration. The game lets you create your own weird flying saucer shaped space vessels, replete with customized colors, patterns and an array of cannons. The game holds your hand through a tutorial that lists out the basic control and abilities of your ship. Controlling the ship in air is pretty easy, you use either the WASD keys or a right clicks of the mouse to move around. Weapons and tools are selected by clicking the icons at the bottom of the screen. Your ship even has a cool tractor beam with which you can click on unsuspecting creatures and pull them into your ship. The game has a wry sense of humor, and calls on you to gather creatures which ultimately results to your own nefarious ends. There is a downside to your sinister experiments; you just might manage to introduce a rogue infection in your city by collecting bug ridden creatures. You’ll then have to eradicate the surrounding colonies using your onboard laser.
Aside from the gameplay, the major theme of the game was user-generated content. Spores seems to have learnt much from Myspace and Facebook, and instead of being a separate entity, the online features are woven into the fabric of the game. In fact much of the game’s terminology is borrowed directly from the web, for instance sporecasts lets you subscribe to other user’s creations and sporepedia is the in-game directory for all your content. Although no specific announcements were made, it’s pretty obvious that the developers want a variety of badges and links that can be used to embed them in blogs and in social networks to let others know about your activity in the game. Spore is clearly a franchise title for EA and the game is bound to be massively supported once it hits the store shelves. Spore is also released on the Nintendo DS. Though you can still build creatures and explore worlds, the handheld version tends to be more task-oriented compared to its PC counterpart. The character–building aspect is basically to solve problems. The game boasts of a phantom hourglass styled cell-shaded visuals. You control the creatures by touching the screen and use the stylus for shaking trees for fruit or attacking other creatures.
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