spore

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 … Read more

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.

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 … Read more

Spore could change gaming forever now that it has shown that you can be a developer too.

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It's all about rumors today, and a contest to win Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09! We want to give you a copy of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 for Xbox 360. All you have to do is make us laugh. Leave us a voicemail or send in an mp3 in that oh-so-soft golf announcer voice. Four! Oh four!

Speaking of nines, today is the ninth anniversary of a fateful day in gamer history: The launch of Sega Dreamcast. Dan the Mantern here. Does anyone else remember the hype surrounding September 9th, 1999? It was bigger than Y2K. I did not get a Dreamcast, but I recall being ridiculously jealous of my friends who did. You may disagree, but Dreamcast was a dope system. With quirky fighters like Power Stone, games like Shenmue and Phantasy Star Online to satisfy RPG nuts and just the right amount of the blue hedgehog, how was Dreamcast such a failure? Was it released too soon or too late? Was it bad marketing? Too much hype? Talk amongst yourselves while I wait in line for the opening of Sam Jackson's latest: Snakes on a Cul-de-Sac.

The evil power of Dr. M is even greater than we thought...strong enough, in fact, to tarnish the shining reputation of the long-awaited Spore. Also in the news today, DVD ripping goes legit, a little too late, thanks to RealDVD, but we determine it's probably not worth getting sued over. And we put gurus against geniuses in a battle to the tech support death. Listen now: Download today's podcast

Happy Birthday Google - 10 http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9930 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-09-06-google-ten-years_N.htm

DVD ripping goes legit with RealDVD … Read more

Just released in the U.S. on Sunday, September 7, Spore is Electronic Arts' big holiday push for the still-alive PC gaming market. The game is from Will Wright, creator of the best-selling Sims and Sim City franchises, and developed by the same company, Maxis, so expectations are naturally high.

But despite the buzz, which includes full-page stories in the New York Times and numerous TV news segments, does Spore have a chance at mainstream video game success at the level of GTA4 or Guitar Hero (or The Sims)?

After spending the last week playing an early copy of the full game (where we created the Danosaurus, which lives on the planet Danlandia), we're ready to say that Spore is a monumental achievement in game design, and a genuinely engaging experience, but at the same time, it may lack that mainstream accessibility needed to resonate with non-core gamers. … Read more

Electronic Arts is bringing its new creature feature to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The game giant's EA Mobile unit announced Friday that it will offer Spore Origins for Apple's gadgets, starting later this month. The variation on EA's new Spore game is designed to take advantage of the motion-sensing technology in the iPhone and the iPod Touch so that players can tilt and angle their way through a digital take on evolution.

The full-fledged Spore goes on sale Sunday in North America. Players get to design their own creatures before beginning on an evolutionary quest through … Read more

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. … Read more

I thought I made up a word, but upon further review, slaver turns out to mean to smear as if with saliva. Ew. But we also talked further about listening to media in the shower and even got to some tech news. That involved the release of Spore, the recall of Sony laptops, and Amazon launching a new video streaming service. Listen now: Download today's podcast

Spore (PC) game reviews http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-games/spore-pc/4505-9696_7-31484467.html

Microsoft cuts Xbox 360 to $199 in throw down with Sony http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080903-microsoft-makes-play-for-second-place-360-price-cut-to-199.html… Read more