Your Grandma Will Be Playing Spore This Fall
July 16 2008 / by jcchan
Category: Entertainment Year: 2008 Rating: 11 Hot
Will
Wright wants you to play god. To open the floodgates of your
imagination and fill an entire living universe with unique
species.
His massive plan seems to be working as people are already ravenous for Spore. In just 18 days nearly 1.6 million species of creatures were uploaded in to Sporepedia, Spore’s worldwide database of user-created lifeforms.
The nascent Spore universe is already up to 1,876,714 creatures (and counting) in its genetic database, surpassing the 1.75 million identified species on Earth. By itself this is a spectacular feat but even more so when you realize that the full game hasn’t even touched store shelves yet.
Wright, Spore’s creator, and also of The Sims, Sim City, and Sim Everything (an actual former name of Spore), hopes the advance release of the Spore Creature Creator will tease us into the full serving of Spore available in September.
With the Spore hype in full effect I thought to give it a test run myself to see if such games are truly the future of user generated content. So today I will take you on a brief tour through the Spore Creature Creator.
The Creature Creator is available both as a free-trial version with a quarter of the full content and a $10 boxed version with all of the creature body parts. The version I am going to take you through is the trial version, readily available at the Spore site.
Upon installation, the game asks you to register for an
online account to Spore. You can play offline too but you won’t be
able to store your creatures in the massive Sporepedia database. I
jumped right into “Create a Creature” mode and got started
with…
A Pear. Or a Gourd. I can’t tell, but it squirms around. I assume it’s dying for its creator to give it some life. You are given 2,000 genetic points to spend, and limbs, eyeballs, and tentacles all vary in cost. The system is simple, drag body parts from the menu to attach and pull to detach. (cont.)
So I look through the categories of body parts for eyes and
found a few pairs to go with. This long one looks cute, and it
gives my creature +1 to charm, neat! A few pairs of legs too, so
I’ll start with this dinosaur leg. 
Now, what does a creature need to survive in an hostile environment? Weapons! I am going to give it a spiny head to headbutt enemies with. I can adjust the size of each spine and even the curvature.
A few minutes later, I think I’m quite addicted to pointy things
so I’ll give it an entire roll of spines as protection. My creature
will be totally ruthless, i assure you. My creature’s attack rating
is quite high now.
Time to give it a little charm to attract some mates. A pair of feathers add a charm point, so I went overboard again and added a crown of it above its head.
I also gave it a nasty looking mouth, giving it some more attack points and a mating call. I go to the body shop for a few coats of paint.
Here is my first Spore creature, I name it Lolita.
Check out its spines. 
The verdict? It’s a neat tool and I’m almost convinced to sell Wright my soul this fall, but here is hoping that such an ambitious project won’t fall on its behind this fall from bugs. Polish, Polish, Polish! And if you were wondering, yes, there already has been players making creatures that resemble certain body parts that are on Youtube.
And in the Fall, I’ll love to see what crazy designs you come up with.
First Screenshot courtesy of Maxis.
Comment Thread (4 Responses)
-
I’m not even a gamer and I’m excited. I remember playing simworld on old Macintoshs. I loved that game.
Posted by: Mielle Sullivan July 17, 2008
Vote for this comment - Recommend -
Yea, sounds like fun. My boyfriend’s brother created this site that allows you to pit Spore creatures against each other..well, anyway, they “fight”..the outcome is really the results of users voting on which creature they think would win (or which one they think is cooler)...When I find the link to this I’ll share it..
Posted by: justinelee July 17, 2008
Vote for this comment - Recommend -
I am a gamer and I’m a little unsure of how Spore runs. Do you just create animals and they run around while you keep tabs on them or do you control their actions like in the Sims? Otherwise, it does look like an entertaining game.
Posted by: fantasywriter July 17, 2008
Vote for this comment - Recommend -
justinelee: I’ll love to see that site, I want to put my nasty spine creature up there to do some damage. ;)
fantasywriter: Will Wright’s original title for this game was SimEverything and his idea was to take all the ideas from the best of his games, SimCity, The Sims, SimSafari, and SimEarth and put it into a smoothie of a game.
The game comprises of stages, the first stage is where you control bacteria in a Pac-Man like game gobbling up other bacteria, then the game switches to the creature creator and you can take your creature to survive in the wild and eventually evolve.
The game then is more like Simcity as you build your cities and advance your lifeform into a space-faring race. The last part of the game you will explore other planets and eventually populate the galaxy with your creatures.
Pretty ambitious if you ask me, lets hope they get it right.
Posted by: jcchan July 17, 2008
Vote for this comment - Recommend