Spore (PC) Preview
Posted by Steven Masters on 09.15.2006
Sim. Everything. Why the hell not?
In the PC gaming community, Maxis is a pretty popular name. Everyone loves Will Wright and his team and their brainchild: The Sims. You can walk down the street and ask someone if they played something with "Sim" in the title and you'll usually get a yes. Well, this next game from Maxis and Co. takes everything to a whole new level. You don't get to sim cities, people, rollercoasters, or even the Earth. You get to sim...everything.
Spore has been in development for about five years now and has cost somewhere in the range of thirty million US dollars. Why spend that much on a game? Who cares, you can do virtually ANYTHING in this game.
The pitch of the game is you create your own little creature and evolve him from a single celled organism to a fully fledged civilization. You get to edit every detail of the creature, from what shape it is, to how big or small it is, where it lives, if and what special skills it has, whether it's a simple farmer or a warrior, and you base an entire species on it.
You begin as a single-celled micro-organism in a 2D environment, running around attacking and eating other cells. When you've gathered enough experience, you lay an egg and design your creature. From there, you evolve a few stages and soon, you have to find a mate, protect the eggs, build a hut, turn it into a city, establish trade routes or attack other species and pretty much unite your planet. From there, it's Maxis' trademark sandbox gameplay, where you can revisit any stage or go around and colonize, terraform, and basically create any planet you encounter. You'll encounter other species made by other players (Everything you do is uploaded into the database and downloaded on someone else's game with no consequence to your game whatsoever) and they'll choose to make diplomatic ties with you, wage war, or worship you.
Spore is due out next year on the PC and possibly all NextGen consoles.
