A branching out of the Spore universe is in keeping with EA's desire to extend the game into the kind of open-ended brand The Sims has become.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)The pseudo-Darwinian life simulator Spore has been pegged by publisher Electronic Arts to evolve from video game to full-blown cinematic feature film.
We've known the film was a possibility since last year, but now we hear that Twentieth Century Fox is behind the CGI movie, and Variety reports that "Ice Age" director Chris Wedge is splicing its genes. Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, who wrote Disney's upcoming "The Princess and the Frog" and the Ben Stiller pic "The Return of King Doug" at Paramount, will reportedly write the script. What's unclear is exactly how Will Wright's schizophrenic sandbox game might translate to 90 minutes of family-friendly linear story-telling.
Read more of "Spore to evolve into major motion picture" at Crave UK.
One of the coolest features for Spore gamers is the ability to create their own creatures. Now, anyone can assemble aliens through a new site set up by Electronic Arts.
Spore Creature Creator 2-D, released Wednesday, lets you conjure up and animate your own creatures using an assortment of eyes, arms, feet, horns, and various unidentifiable body parts.
Produced by EA's Maxis studio, the Flash-based game starts with a large egg cracking open to reveal a simple alien body that you mold online like a lump of clay. Thin, fat, long, or short--you devise your creature's basic shape. Then it's time to build your baby with the right parts.
Choosing from such categories as mouths, limbs, and graspers, just drag your favorite body parts onto your creature to evolve it from a formless blob into a fully-functioning whatever. The game helps you along, directing you to drop the parts in all the right places. You can bend and resize many of the parts, giving your creature big eyes and a small mouth or long legs and stubby feet. You can also add a splash of paint by choosing from a wide palette of colors.
As you develop your creation, it takes on life by showing off its animated parts, such as a mouth that opens and closes, eyes that blink, and graspers that try to grasp. If you're in a hostile mood, you can even add weapons, like the Problem-Solvent that sprays solvent, the Hockitlauncher that spits out water, or the Phlegmthrower that shoots, uh, well, you get the idea.
If you need a helping hand, you don't have to build your creature from scratch. Spore Creature Creator 2-D lets you tap into the Sporepedia, an online gallery of creatures designed by Maxis developers and other Spore gamers. Simply load one of the pre-existing creatures and then tweak it to assemble a totally new organism.
Once you're done, it's time to name and describe your creature. You can then take it for a workout in the Creature Trainer arena, where you move it around the screen to catch bouncing balls with its mouth, hands, or other parts.
If you're proud of your new creation, you can e-mail a postcard image of it to a friend or save it as a PNG file for your own picture gallery or Web site.
A variety of Spore masterpieces are viewable at the Sporepedia Web site. And for all you budding Spore artists, Maxis is offering a Creature Creator challenge. Recreate one of your favorite Spore creatures using Creature Creator 2-D for a chance to be featured on Spore.com.
Caryl Shaw, a senior producer at Maxis who helped bring Spore Creature Creator 2-D to life, told me the game came about because Maxis wanted to make Spore more accessible and let anyone with a Web browser experience the same creativity that Spore gamers enjoy. As one of the most popular features of Spore, the Creature Creator seemed a natural.
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HDMI Netbooks are landing: The S12
(Credit: Lenovo)Just when we were ready to accept the stuttery nature of our Netbook HD video playback, along come Nvidia and Lenovo at long last to change our expectations. The IdeaPad S12, arriving in August, will be the first Netbook sporting discrete graphics from the Nvidia Ion processor. With power similar to the 9400M chipset already in Apple's 13-inch MacBooks, IonNetbooks promise full-HD video output and actual gaming performance--not that we'd want to try Crysis on it anytime soon. However, according to Nvidia, Spore, Call of Duty 4, Portal, and World of Warcraft will all be very playable indeed.
The price is right, too--$499 for the Ion-packing S12, with a 12.1-inch, 1,280x800 screen and Atom N270 processor. For 50 dollars less, an Ion-free S12 can also be yours (though we don't know why you'd possibly want that). The Ion claims a 10x performance boost on existing Netbook integrated graphics with "nearly identical" power consumption. HD H264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 "won't be a problem," say Nvidia. Do we dare believe?
Available in white or black, the 1.14-inch-thick, 3.7-pound S12 has a six-cell battery, 1 GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160 GB HDD, XP Home, a 1.3-megapixel Webcam (stop us if this sounds familiar), and 802.11 b/g wireless.
Other notables: an Express Card slot, 3 USB 2.0 ports, a multitouch trackpad, HDMI port with the Ion model, a full-size keyboard, and Lenovo's Quick Start, VeriFace, and OneKey Rescue System for making backups.
For the price and the size, is this an ideal gaming Netbook? Or is it, in fact, just a variation on 12-inch notebooks? We're not even sure it matters, because for the price, it sounds like an excellent proposition indeed.
Based on a post on the Ubisoft forum today (via Blue's News), it sounds like the French game publisher is trying harder than its Electronic Arts to make digital rights management less cumbersome on its customers. An Ubisoft forum manager outlined the DRM plans for the PC version of its upcoming shooter Far Cry 2. Assuming it works as described, you'll get a bit more freedom to reinstall the game at your leisure than EA has offered with Spore and Crysis: Warhead.
According to the Ubisoft Forum Manager:
- You have five activations on three separate PCs.
- Uninstalling the game "refunds" an activation. This process is called "revoke", so as long as you complete proper uninstall you will be able to install the game an unlimited number of times on 3 systems.
- You can upgrade your computer as many times as you want (using our revoke system)
- Ubisoft is committed to the support of our games, and additional activations can be provided.
- Ubisoft is committed to the long-term support of our games: you'll always be able to play Far Cry 2.
The biggest difference between Ubisoft's and EA's DRM is that EA lacks the "revoke" function. Once you've installed one of its games on three systems, you need to contact EA's customer support and ask for authorization for future installs.
Far Cry 2 will feature a forgiving DRM scheme.
(Credit: FarCryGame.com)Interestingly, EA CEO John Riccotello was quoted yesterday by PaidContent saying, "We implemented a form of DRM and it's something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn't notice." That speaks to the question, who needs to load a game on more than three systems? We suspect that Riccotello is correct, and that install limits on its games won't affect the majority of its customers.
Still, we applaud Ubisoft for taking the extra step and empowering PC gamers to, in effect, manage their own digital rights. We'll also confess a personal interest, in that we've had our eye on Far Cry 2 as a new PC gaming benchmark. We still need to learn more about how it really works, but what we've heard so far sounds promising.
And you thought your Spore creature was cuddly before...
(Credit: Electronic Arts)Your Spore creature could soon get even creepier--or cuter, depending on your preferences in primordial beings. Electronic Arts on Monday officially confirmed rumors that an expansion titled Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack will be available worldwide as soon as November 18.
The expansion, announced just a month after the game's release, will offer more than 100 new creature-building components in two styles--charming, cartoon-esque creatures and scary, monster-like beasts.
The long-awaited game from EA and The Sims creator Will Wright tasks players with evolving from primordial ooze to creature, civilization, and all the way out into space. The expansion pack will include body parts, paint options, animations, and backgrounds, so players will have even more options for customizing their creatures.
But that's not all, creature creators. EA says it also expects to release a space stage expansion pack in spring 2009 that will let players' space-faring beings beam down from their spaceships to explore new planets and earn rewards for completing challenging missions. A new adventure creator will let players build and share online their own custom missions.
(Credit:
Electronic Arts)
Despite a failed deal with Take-Two Interactive, and a Spore DRM backlash, Eidos Interactive signed an agreement on Monday with Electronic Arts announcing exclusivity to multiregional distribution and licensing rights to selected titles from the their catalog for EA Mobile.
Now, Eidos will provide licenses to EA across all existing mobile channels and mobile devices for four key titles: Tomb Raider Underworld, Just Cause 2, California Games X, and Minesweeper, with a future option on the mobile versions of the majority of Eidos videogames for three years.
According to a news release, Javier Ferreira (VP of European Publishing for EA Mobile) was quoted as saying, "Eidos has a valuable portfolio of intellectual property including the world famous Tomb Raider games. This deal gives EA Mobile immediate access to not one but four high profile titles, which will appeal to a broad audience on mobile platforms."
EA Mobile has a piece of that action.
(Credit: Eidos Interactive)Seconding the sentiment of the deal, Simon Protheroe (Online Publishing Director for Eidos) says, "EA Mobile is the world leader for mobile publishing, with excellent carrier and OEM relationships in all corners of the globe. We have had great success with our products on mobile platforms to date. This strategic relationship will allow us to focus on making quality mobile titles and utilizing the presence and scale that EA Mobile has in the marketplace."
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 moreElectronic 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 the game's many levels.
EA had said at the E3 game conference in July that it planned to build a number of games that would take advantage of the accelerometer built into the iPhone, along with its Wi-Fi capabilities.
For those whose video-gaming tastes run to more traditional fare, EA Mobile said Friday that it has nine other games in development for use on the iPhone and the Touch, including Yahtzee Adventure, EA Mini Golf, Monopoly: Here and Now (world edition), SimCity, and The Sims 3.
The company also has versions of Spore Origins for other iPod models and non-Apple mobile devices.
Apple has scheduled a music-related event for Tuesday that's widely expected to involve iPod news.
'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.
... Read morePolaroid is making a comeback with a digital camera that has a built-in printer; the Creative Mozaic has a lot of style; and you get to decide whose Spore-created creature is better: Brian Tong's or Bonnie Cha's. Plus, a bed that comes with frequent-flyer miles!
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