Geek Gestalt

Love "Spore" but wish you had more creative control than just being able to make your own creatures, spaceships, buildings and other objects? Well, now you can.

Electronic Arts has released a "Spore" API, which for the first time will make it possible for fans of the hit evolution game from legendary game designer Will Wright to create their own applications.

Maxis has released the 'Spore' API, making it possible for the games community to create their own applications.

(Credit: Electronic Arts/Maxis)

"We're working on some features to help the community create their own 'Spore' applications," EA's Maxis studio--which made "Spore"--wrote on a new site, Sporeapi.com, aimed at developers. "We're collecting these features into a web-based 'Spore' API. Using simple web services, you can access our huge database of creations and creators."

As a way to help inspire people to begin using the API, Maxis has also announced a contest to see what the best creations might be. Maxis said on its site that a few examples of what people might come up with are a "display of your own creations;" a "trophy case of challenge winners;" a "visualization of current most popular new creations;" and a "scenic diorama of Sporecast creations."

We're interested in seeing what kind of application or widget you can develop, utilizing our massive database of creations, Sporecasts, and player information.

Create your app from scratch, or download the source code from one of the sample apps we've posted on the API page. You can use this source as a reference or template. Head over to our forum to discuss ideas!

Winners of the contest could score an Nvidia graphics cars, a copy of both "Spore" and its recent "Galactic Adventures" expansion.

And while those prizes may not be worth all that much, Maxis is likely betting that fans of the game will participate in the contest for the simple pleasure of seeing what they can build with the API and in the hope of being recognized by the "Spore" community for their creativity.

SAN FRANCISCO--Electronic Arts said Wednesday that it plans this summer to release an all-new, stand-alone version of Spore for kids.

The new game, which will allow multiple children to play together in a very Spore-like universe, will be called Creature Keeper, said Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of EA's Emeryville, Calif.-based Maxis studio, which created Spore.

In addition, at its "State of the Universe" event here, EA also unveiled plans for Galactic Adventures, the first expansion to Spore. It is planned for a spring release and will feature a set of new tools for the massive space stage of the hit evolution game that, in addition to the existing "play," "create," and "share" tools, will let players choose to create their own adventures in space.

(Credit: Electronic Arts/Maxis)

And EA topped off its set of announcements by saying that it expects to release all-new versions of Spore for the Nintendo Wii and DS game consoles, titled Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena, respectively.

The announcements were the first EA has made that showcase the video game giant's future plans for Spore, a game that it has clearly invested huge resources in. The game, from legendary designer Will Wright, tasks players with navigating five distinct stages--cell, creature, tribe, civilization and space. Though it has sold fairly well, some have argued that it hasn't lived up to its advance billing, particularly because it was years in the works. Also, the game was originally released with a version of digital rights management that limited the number of installs consumers could have. Many people resisted the DRM restrictions, and late last year, EA removed them.

However, either because of the DRM or in spite of it, Spore became one of the most pirated games of 2008.

Now, with Creature Keeper, EA and Maxis hope they can attract a much younger audience to the Spore universe. Unlike the original game, the kids version will allow multi-player play. It does not require Spore to play, but it will allow kids to import creatures from the original game. It will be released for PC and Mac, just as the original game was.

The idea, said Bradshaw, is to give kids an easier way to experience the fun and exploration of Spore, and to do so with other friends.

"They can invite friends over," Bradshaw said, "and have play dates with their creatures."

With the Galactic Adventures expansion (see video below), meanwhile, EA is attempting to address one of the biggest criticisms of the main space stage of Spore: That players could not directly interact with the worlds they encountered during their interstellar journeys. Instead, they would be restricted to flying above any planets they found along the way.

Now, however, they will be able to beam down to new planets. More important, however, may be that Maxis is making available to Spore players a set of planetary adventure creation tools they've previously only had in-house.

Among other things, the expansion offers players terra-forming tools, making it possible to build all-new planets from scratch, and populate them with all manner of buildings, creatures, rivers and other geographical features. Players can choose any creation from the 65 million item-strong, player-created Sporepedia, the official Spore social media system.

Bradshaw said that the tools that will be available in Galactic Adventures were not ones that were originally planned to be included in Spore. Nor was the expansion long in the works, she said. Instead, she explained, the team at Maxis saw the ways that people were playing Spore and listened to requests from players to have more interaction and control over the space stage.

While EA isn't talking about total sales figures for Spore at this point, Bradshaw did say that to date, there have been more than 65 million creations uploaded to Sporepedia, and more than 6 million downloads of the Creature Creator, a tool that allows people to make their own Spore creatures without owning the full game.

The Around View Monitor, from Nissan's Infiniti division, is designed to give drivers a 360-degree view of their car while parking. The monitor was among the 10 products that won a 'Popular Mechanics' 2008 Breakthrough Product Award.

(Credit: Popular Mechanics)

Popular Mechanics magazine will unveil on Wednesday its Breakthrough Awards, the publication's annual celebration of the brightest innovators and innovations.

This year's winners include tech that lets you read books on a thin, digital device, see all around your car as you park, and explore outer space through your imagination.

Logan Ward, a contributing editor at the magazine, said that he and a team of fellow researchers scour the country looking for 30 to 40 candidates that are then winnowed down to the eventual 10 winners. The magazine also identifies 10 individuals for special innovator, leadership, and future-looking awards.

To identify the potential candidates, Ward and his team contact most of the country's research institutions, including universities, engineering organizations, robotics labs, government labs.

"The thing that's most important in looking at all these tech advances," said Ward, "is what is its impact...So when we evaluate innovations, we really look at how it's going to change people's lives for the better.

Of course, given that Ward's efforts take him through a wide variety of science- and technology-related fields, he has had to develop competencies in an equally wide spectrum of disciplines.

"I think I'm a very good generalist and a pretty good journalist," Ward said of the challenge of having to understand so many different kinds of science and technology. "I bring my curiosity to the table. I ask a lot of questions...And I'm honest about my limitations. If something comes across my desk and I don't understand it, I'll reserve judgment about it until I do."

All in all, though, Ward's journey through the best innovations of each year leaves him "with a sense of awe at how technology really can improve our lives."

Photosynth, from Microsoft, is a software application that creates 3D models by analyzing a series of individual photographs. The resulting model is browsable.

(Credit: Popular Mechanics)

This year's awards go to these 10 products:

• The M-Spector Digital Inspection Camera, from Milwaukee Tools. This device is designed to give people trying to do home repairs a way to see behind walls without cutting holes first. It features a 17-mm-wide 2x zoom lens and a 2.5-inch LCD. It costs $259.

• Spore, from Electronic Arts. The long-awaited evolution game from famous designer Will Wright tasks players with evolving from single-cell muck to outer space, with stops along the way as individual creatures, small tribes and city-size civilizations.

• The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen. This pen-size device allows its owner to take notes on special paper while simultaneously recording audio. Later, by tapping on a specific section of notes on the paper, users can get a playback of that section of audio. It can also perform simple language translation as well as other functions.

• Potenco's PCG1 power generator. This user-driven device allows anyone to power up small devices like mobile phones with their hands. Pulling on the unit's cord for two minutes provides 40 minutes of power-up.

• Intel's Atom processor. Microprocessor powerhouse Intel has built a low-power chip designed to give high-performance capabilities to mobile devices and light laptop computers.

• The Craftsman Nextec Multi-saw. The well-known toolmaker is giving buyers a combination jigsaw and reciprocating saw. It is powered by a 12-volt lithium-ion battery that can drive the unit to cut in a variety of places difficult to reach by any single tool.

• Microsoft's Photosyth. This free software from Microsoft allows people to create a browsable 3D model based on a series of related photographs. The software stitches the pictures together, creating the model based on overlapping elements of the images.

• Amazon.com's Kindle. An e-book reader from the famous online bookseller, the Kindle allows people to read books, newspapers, and other documents on a thin, light digital device. It has been panned by some, while others have written rapturously about it. Either way, it is sparking innovation in e-readers.

• The Around View monitor from Nissan's Infiniti division is designed to give drivers a 360-degree view around their cars while parking and backing up. The system features a series of ultra-wide-angle high-resolution cameras that produced images that are aggregated to give the driver a top view of the car and the area around it. It is hoped that the monitor will save lives, especially those of children, who are difficult to see from inside a car, especially when they are behind a vehicle while a driver is backing up.

• The Caroma Profile dual flush toilet. This system pipes gray water from a bathroom's sink into the toilet's tank, cutting down on water wastage.

In addition to selecting products, Popular Mechanics is honoring people as well.

Amy Smith won the Breakthrough Leadership Award. Smith, a senior lecturer at MIT, was cited by the magazine for research into water purification and both boosting the quality of medical care and reducing daily work burdens of rural women. Popular Mechanics said, "she is leading a movement to tackle complex problems with simple technology."

Rudy Roy, Ben Sexon, Daniel Oliver, and Charles Pyott are the co-winners of the Next Generation award. Recent graduates of Caltech and the Art Center College of Design, the four have made names for themselves with a technique that makes wheelchairs for residents of developing countries out of inexpensive bicycles. One major benefit of their innovation is that the wheelchairs can be repaired in any bike shop, unlike normal chairs.

The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen records audio as a user takes notes on special paper. This allows the user to later tap on a particular point in his or her notes and hear an instant playback of that section of the recording.

(Credit: Popular Mechanics)

And for Ward, what is the most rewarding part of the annual project?

"A combination of talking to all of these really incredible people," he said. "People who are at the top of their game, but people who also care about others, people who are trying to solve some of these problems we read about in the headlines. So I always get a sense of hope at the end of this project. You know, there are people out there making a difference."

For fans of the Electronic Arts franchise Command and Conquer looking forward to the spinoff game, Tiberium, I'm afraid I have some bad news.

According to a story in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, EA has decided to shutter production of the new first-person shooter, citing quality issues.

Tiberium was "not on track to meet the high quality standards" EA sets for its games, a spokesperson told the Journal. "A lower quality game is not in the best interest of the consumers and would not succeed in this market."

The Journal article calls the move a setback for EA, saying the company "has been working to turn itself around under (CEO) John Riccitiello (who) has made moves to help boost the game publisher's growth and lower development costs that have contributed to six straight quarters of loss."

But to me, I think it's a good move by EA to yank the cord on games it sees as sub-standard. To be sure, it would have been better for the company to have Tiberium be a big commercial hit; short of that, however, it shows a bit of maturity on the part of management to make the decision to cut short development of sub-standard games that would, in the end, water down its brand.

And that's because one of the reasons the company has seen quarterly losses piling up is a sense in the marketplace that its games have stagnated a bit. Of course, it has its regular stable of big hits like Madden football and FIFA soccer, and new games like Spore. But one big criticism of the company over the last few years is that it has relied too much on low-quality franchise games that have ceased to get the faithful worked up.

In a recent interview, EA Games label president Frank Gibeau told me that, "We (had) lost faith with our customers because we were churning out games that might have made sense from a financial standpoint, but frankly we had walked away from the art of making games and offering breakthrough creative experiences. There weren't as many games in our lineup that I wanted to play anymore."

Tiberium was a new game, but it was a spinoff of the Command and Conquer series, and so I suspect that the quality bar for it was very high. So I think it's good to see EA realize that it's better to lose a year's worth of development time than to keep throwing good money after bad, especially on a game that was not an entirely new experience.

Hopefully, the design team behind the game can now put their energies and efforts to work on something new that will excite them, the company as a whole, and the market down the line.

Spore, the new evolution game from Electronic Arts, has sold a million units since its September 7 launch, the publisher said Wednesday.

The sales figures are for copies of the game on the PC, the Mac, and the Nintendo DS.

The results are impressive and important for EA, especially given the heavy expectations that awaited the game, which was first announced in 2005 and was first expected in 2006, and also because the game has been beset by some controversy surrounding its DRM (digital rights management) restrictions.

And early indications from retailers around the country showed that the game was selling well in its first few weeks on store shelves.

However, the sales numbers don't match those delivered by recent hits like Grand Theft Auto IV, from Rockstar Games and Guitar Hero III, from Activision, which sold multiple millions of copies right off the bat.

Still, for a game with what some might see as a wonky or overly intellectual theme--the evolution of species and the colonization of space--a million copies sold in just 17 days is a good sign.

The big question, of course, is whether Spore can continue to sell over time and justify EA's stated hopes that the game could end up becoming a full-scale franchise along the lines of The Sims.

In its first week on the market, the long-awaited evolution game, Spore, from Electronic Arts and The Sims creator Will Wright seems to be holding its own at retail.

In interviews with retailers across the country, there is ample anecdotal evidence that the game is doing well, especially for a PC title. However, its initial sales don't appear to be in the same ballpark as massive hits like Grand Theft Auto IV, from Rockstar Games, Guitar Hero III, from Activision or Wii Fit, from Nintendo.

There are no official sales numbers available yet, as industry analyst NPD won't likely release such information until the end of September or early October, and Electronic Arts itself said it relies on NPD for its sales data.

But in cities across the U.S., Spore definitely seems to have struck a chord with gamers, though it is unclear if the game's strong initial sales will hold up in the coming weeks and months.

"The day it came out, we were sold out (within an hour)," said Douglas Shepard, who works at a San Francisco GameStop store. But "I'm willing to bet that it is going to go slower at this point, because the big hype around its release has passed."

Shepard added that he thinks the game's sales this weekend and next week will say a lot about whether Spore can continue to command a significant audience over time.

For EA, there's a lot riding on the game. It first announced Spore in 2005, and in the interim, delayed its release several times. It was first supposed to come out in 2006, then in 2007, and then earlier in 2008. But it locked in its September 7 launch date several months ago and in recent weeks, EA looked ready to put a lot of muscle into promoting the game.

And no wonder. It is the latest from Will Wright, the industry genius behind not only The Sims--the best-selling PC game of all-time--but also SimCity and other big titles.

And given its theme--evolution--as well as its innovative creature editor, many people have been expecting very big things from Spore.

Its initial reviews have largely been good, though not superlative. And some people wonder whether its scientific theme may make it a bit too wonky for mass audiences.

Still, there seems to be a lot of excitement behind Spore.

"We did pre-sales before it came out, and there were tons of people interested in it," said Shane, the media specialist at a Best Buy store in Milwaukee. "On Sunday (when the game launched), there were about 50 people waiting outside" to buy it.

Tyler Block, the manager of a Game Crazy store in Las Vegas, said his store sold out its initial allotment of 15 copies of the game in a couple of hours, and has nearly gone through a second shipment of 15 it received shortly afterward.

"We see people of all ages picking it up," Block said. "It's appealing to a lot of people."

But Block agreed that it's too early to tell how the game's sales will hold up.

"The verdict's still out on that," Block said. But "I'm a big fan, and I'd like to see it continue selling, and it hasn't slowed down yet."

And while Spore didn't produce midnight madness-like first-day and ongoing sales, Block said that the game--which is available on PC and Macintosh--is doing well for those platforms.

"It's not on (the) level (of GTA IV)," he said, "but still, it's rare to see a PC title do this well these days."

More than 2,200 one-star reviews of the new Electronic Arts game Spore, left on Amazon.com as part of a well-publicized and coordinated user revolt against the game's digital rights management restrictions, disappeared Friday.

Before Amazon.com took down the reviews, there were more than 2,200 one-star reviews for 'Spore.'

(Credit: Flickr user TINZ)

And while Amazon customers reacted angrily to what they said was obviously Amazon's caving in on a bad situation, the retailer itself said that the take-down was the result of nothing more onerous than a glitch.

Users have been angry at EA because the game's DRM system appears to limit the number of activations per copy of the game to three.

And as a way of striking back, some users had coordinated their efforts by leaving the more than 2,200 one-star reviews on Amazon.

On Friday, every single review for Spore for the game was gone.

But Amazon says there was no foul play at work.

After users of the new Electronic Arts video game, 'Spore,' revolted against its DRM restrictions by leaving hundreds of one-star reviews for the game on Amazon.com, the online retailer temporarily removed all reviews for the game, though it claims the move was nothing more than a 'glitch.'

(Credit: Amazon.com)

"There's just a glitch on the site that ended up wiping those reviews clean," said Amazon.com spokesperson Tammy Hovey. "So we're working on putting them back up. I don't have any details (on what happened). But we're working on it so all the customer reviews will be back up on the site."

Asked if perhaps Amazon had decided to put the reviews back up in anticipation of bad PR for taking them down, Hovey said, "Customers always have their opinions about all the products on our site, and we don't censor them, whether they're favorable or unfavorable."

By 2:10 p.m. PDT, the reviews were back up on the site.

For its part, EA said it was looking into the situation.

Although the actual reviews were removed, Amazon did leave up a discussion thread on the Spore page. And during the period while the reviews were down, some users angrily employed the thread to paste in reviews that had originally been left for the game.

For example, "1.0 out of 5 stars Dumbed down experience and draconian DRM, September 7, 2008," Amazon user Keri Gibson-tutt posted.

"Utterly disgraceful," wrote Amazon user Paul Tinsley. "This means that the Amazon review system has not value at all to its customers. Sad days indeed."

It's not clear how users will respond now that the reviews are back.

'Spore,' the new evolution game from Electronic Arts and 'SimCity' and 'The Sims' creator Will Wright, started with a series of small prototyping systems.

(Credit: Electronic Arts/Maxis)

Electronic Arts' much anticipated evolution game, Spore hits store shelves Sunday in North America, and for those that have been on the project since the beginning, it has been a long road from concept to completion.

The game's creator, Will Wright, who is famous for previous games like SimCity and The Sims said recently that the game has been seven years in the making, meaning the project was getting under way not long after The Sims launched and became the best-selling PC game of all time.

Wright has talked at length about how Spore's origins lie in the SETI project and other flights of his fancy.

"The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore," Wright told me last month. "As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy."

In the highly anticipated lead-up to the Spore's release from EA studio Maxis, in Emeryville, Calif., almost all the attention has been on the game itself or on its Creature Creator, which gives users an easy and sophisticated way to create complex beasts and which was made available in June as a free download.

But for many people, an equally exciting element has been the series of prototypes available for free download on the Spore Web site, each of which provides a look at the origins of a small piece of the larger game.

In fact, the prototypes were a crucial part of making Spore a reality. For example, since the procedural animation of the creatures in the game is one of its most-heralded elements, it's notable that before the system was ever built into the game, it started as a prototype.

"The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing if we could teach the computer to make them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior," Wright said. "We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or if some part of it wasn't doable, where we have to scale it back."

The first programmer on the Spore team was a Maxis veteran named Jason Shankel. Prior to joining Wright on his evolution project, he'd been working on a project known as SimMars, which was essentially a Mars terraforming game that was supported financially by NASA before the plug was finally pulled.

For Mac users, one of the best pieces of news of the year was the announcement in January by Electronic Arts that it would be releasing a version of its long-awaited evolution game, Spore, on their beloved platform.

But if you're one of those Mac users who is shaking with anticipation at playing the new game by SimCity and The Sims creator Will Wright, and you don't have both an Intel-based machine and the Leopard version of the Mac OS X operating system, I'm afraid you're out of luck.

This news isn't new, as it's been listed on the Spore system requirements for some time. But having noticed it Tuesday morning, I did a search and didn't quickly find any stories out there that talked about it. So, I thought it was worth a quick mention.

On Windows machines, it requires XP or Vista, so a much wider range of fans will be able to play on that platform. But on the Mac, only those that have pretty much the latest hardware and operating system will be able to do so.

Still, that number is probably in the millions, so there's a big market there. It's just a shame those other Mac users are locked out. On the other hand, as one Mac user friend said to me Tuesday, it's an excuse to upgrade.