Crave

The Guggenheim

(Credit: Lego)

As the flawed human beings we all are, from time to time, each of us needs a break from swine flu fears and waterboarding debates. As a 35-year-old man-child, my distraction of choice is video games. For others, it's Lego.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation on Thursday announced that "The Lego Group is now the exclusive licensed manufacturer of Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) Collection Lego Architecture sets." Good for them, since it would have been pretty embarrassing if someone else won the Lego license. And earlier Friday, we mentioned the set in a brief, but here's some more info.

The new FLW Lego series is part of the Lego Architecture line that debuted last year. The line currently consists of six buildings: The Sears Tower, John Hancock Center, The Space Needle, The Empire State Building and now FLW's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and "Fallingwater."

Fallingwater

(Credit: Lego)

Both Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Architecture sets contain booklets that feature traditional building instructions along with archival historical material and photographs of each building.

Lego appropriately released the first set, the Guggenheim, at the opening of the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit: "From Within Outward" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on May 15.

If I was the kind of guy who'd choose Lego as my distraction of choice and was a FLW fan, I'd be a little disappointed in the pics released of these sets so far. Is it just me or do these look a little too simple and not detailed or complex enough? I guess that's why they're Lego and not scale models.

EA's 'The Sims 3' is scheduled for a June 2 release on the PC. Versions for the Mac, iPhone and iPod Touch will come later in the summer.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Electronic Arts said on Tuesday that The Sims 3, the third full iteration of one of the most successful video game franchises of all time, will hit store shelves on June 2.

The game will be released for PCs first, and versions for the Mac, iPhone, and iPod Touch should come later in the summer, EA said.

The original version of The Sims, which launched in 2000, quickly became the best-selling PC game of all time. In the years since, the franchise has surpassed 100 million total units sold, counting The Sims 2 and all of the expansions for both full iterations.

Originally developed by legendary game designer Will Wright's Maxis studio--which is now focused on Spore--The Sims has since become its own division within EA. As such, it is run out of the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters, while Maxis is based in Emeryville, Calif.

On Tuesday, EA also announced its third-quarter earnings and said it would be laying off about 1,100 employees--about 11 percent of its total staff--and closing 12 facilities worldwide.

This time of year there's no shortage of lists, everywhere you turn you're hammered with Top Ten and Best of 2008 harangues.

Me, I'm not going to waste your time raving about Portishead, TV on the Radio or Vampire Weekend's CDs. Why bother? I'd rather turn you onto great music that slipped between the cracks.

My favorite album of the year was JD Souther's "If The World Was You." JD was most famous for co-writing a bunch of 1970s era Eagles tunes, but this new CD demonstrates the Detroit-born, Amarillo, Texas-raised musician hasn't dried up in the intervening decades.

The new CD, recorded live in a Nashville studio, has a dark, brooding sound. JD's accompanying musicians are serious players. But it's the writing that kept this disc in heavy rotation in my house. There's a bit of the late, great Warren Zevon influence in there, so if you're a fan of 1970s Southern California rock If the World Was You would definitely be worth a listen. It's at least as good as Randy Newman's excellent "Harps and Angels" CD that was also released this year.

A friend turned me onto Lizz Wright's "The Orchard" CD and I couldn't get over her straight from the heart vocals. This woman can sing, this kind of depth of feeling is rare nowadays, but Wright comes from a different tradition.

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.

'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.

Electronic Arts has announced that the third installation of The Sims, that game that rivals World of Warcraft in the "I got so addicted my boss almost fired me" department, will be debuting on February 20, 2009.

(Credit: EA)

That's a worldwide release date for both in-store purchases and digital downloads. EA has famously devoted an entire division (or "label") to the blockbuster Sims franchise, in which players create their own families of virtual characters (or "sims") and let their lives unfold. The game was designed by Will Wright, whose new game Spore is hitting stores next month.

New to The Sims 3 are more advanced customization features (including personality traits like kleptomania, paranoia, and clumsiness) and smarter "neighborhoods" that can more extensively affect the outcome of the game.

In addition to The Sims 3, EA will also be releasing a "collector's edition" with a number of bonus features--including an in-game Italian sports car.

'Spore' developers were surprised by a user's creation of this skeleton because they didn't think this kind of figure was possible using the creature creator they had made.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

After more than three years of anticipation, Spore is almost finished.

Electronic Arts' evolution game, from legendary designer Will Wright's Maxis studio, is about a week from going "gold," I was told Tuesday by Thomas Vu, a producer on the game who gave me a demo Tuesday morning. Going gold, of course, means the game is about to be sent to manufacturing. EA has said that Spore will launch September 7.

As you probably know, Spore is designed to task players with evolving through a series of stages, from the initial cell stage, to creature creation, to a tribal stage, then onto civilization, and then out into space.

Over the last few years, I've had a number of opportunities to see the game in its various stages of development, and let me tell you: It's looking good. What was a fairly rudimentary system back in 2005 when I first saw it at E3 in Los Angeles is now a polished, slick game that looks just about ready for prime time. Its interfaces all seem to work, there were no obvious bugs and it just seemed like a game that is doing what it's supposed to.

"Thank goodness," is what EA must be thinking. Spore has been the industry's most-anticipated title for at least a couple of years. When I first wrote about it, during E3 in 2005, in one of the very first extensive interviews with Wright about the game, I penned these words: "Next year, Electronic Arts will release Wright's next attempted masterpiece, Spore."

Clearly, Maxis didn't release the game in 2006, nor did it come out in 2007, when it was also planned for launch. There have been all kinds of reasons for the delays, but whatever happened in the past, the game is definitely looking good and I think I would be willing to put some money on EA making its September 7 deadline.

Your creature starts out as a small microorganism.

(Credit: EA)

There are a very small handful of brand-name personalities in the video game industry that deserve Hollywood-style, above-the-title billing on the games they design, such as Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto. Arguably, one of the the only other figures who come close to that is Will Wright, the creator of the best-selling Sims series of games (and Sim City before that).

With his latest project, which shares many of the sandbox elements of the Sims and Sim City games, EA is betting big on another hit from Wright. Spore is easily the most anticipated PC game this year, not that there's all that much competition. Spore is best described as The Sims on a cosmic level, where you create an organism from the single-cell stage, watch it evolve, and after millions of years, develop the technology to leave its home world and colonize other planets.

A bit further up the evolutionary ladder.

(Credit: EA)

In anticipation, a software app called the Spore Creature Creator was recently released by EA--allowing gamers to get a head start on designing their creatures long before the game hits store shelves. We've seen the game in action at several stages during its long development, and while it's inventive and will appeal to brainy PC gamers, we hope EA isn't banking on Spore to do Sims-like numbers.

The game is much more esoteric--lacking The Sims' basic appeal, which is to let players create a dollhouselike copy of people and places from their own lives (The Sims is also one of the best-selling games ever for women). We're frankly surprised EA isn't pitching it as the latest offshoot of that successful series, and calling it The Sims: Spore.

Spore will be available for PC and Mac on September 7.

EA's forthcoming evolution game, Spore, tasks players with growing from small cell-like creatures step-by-step until they've colonized far away planets. EA just released some of the first detailed images and video from the game's tribal phase.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

With Electronic Arts' much-anticipated evolution game, Spore, not scheduled to hit store shelves until September 7, it seems that it is stoking fans' interest by releasing bite-size teasers every week or two.

Last month, EA released the first video of the game's cell stage, in which players evolve their creatures from primordial murk.

And on June 17, it will release the game's creature creator, allowing anyone to make Spore creatures for free that they can use later on when the game is out.

In the tribal phase of Spore, players can either wage war against other tribes or make peace with them.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Now, it has put out the first video and detailed screen shots of the tribal phase. This is when players have moved beyond the cell stage and are now competing for, or sharing, territory with other tribes.

Spore is scheduled to be released on Sept. 7, 2008. It is one of the most-anticipated new games in years.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Spore is a single-player game, but it has elements of multiplayer titles, most specifically the ability to upload creations to the Internet that others can then download. This means that players, though using the game by themselves, will be enjoying the entire community's creations.

Spore developers have put easter eggs, little hidden surprises, in the game that they think might take players a year or more to discover. Thats because the game is so vast that it may take players that long to get that far into it.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

I've included video of the tribal stage below. Please forgive the lo-fi quality. It was an experiment in using Qik's streaming video service to get the video up on this blog quickly.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.