Gaming and Culture

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.

The Spider

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

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.

The Chamelon

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

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.

A scene from Spore Hero, a new variation on Spore designed for the Nintendo Wii.

(Credit: Business Wire)

Aliens beware. Nintendo gamers will now be able to transform into galactic Spore heroes with the release of two new games for the Wii and DS.

To be unleashed this fall by Electronic Arts game studio Maxis, Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena, are new additions to the Spore universe created exclusively for the Nintendo platforms. Spore transports players to a virtual galaxy in which players create entire civilizations, explore new worlds, and befriend or battle alien creatures.

In Spore Hero, created for the Wii, players take on the role of hero to defend their planet from a dark alien force bent on worldwide destruction. The game includes a Wii-enhanced Spore Creature Creator, which lets players design their own aliens from over 200 different body parts (tentacles included).

Earlier this month, EA said that gamers had concocted more than 100 million Spore creatures.

In Spore Hero Arena, for the portable Nintendo DS, players create a gladiator-type hero trekking from one planet to the next to complete missions and vanquish dangerous aliens. Spore Hero Arena offers a multiplayer feature for use by up to three peoples locally or with one person over a Wi-Fi network.

"Whether it is the stylus-driven action of the Nintendo DS or playful controllers of the Wii, the massive Nintendo audience is the ideal home for Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena," Lucy Bradshaw, vice president and general manager at Maxis, said in a statement.

The Spore franchise has grown in sales and popularity since the first Spore game was released last year. A recent addition to the franchise is Creature Keeper, a kid-friendly version of Spore. Another new game, Spore Galactic Adventures, will be unveiled in June for the PC and Mac.

The Spore Creature Creator.

(Credit: Spore/Electronic Arts)

With all this hysteria about the pig sniffles, you'd think that an announcement about 100 million strange little organisms would be cause for alarm. That's not the case, however, when we're talking about the oddball life forms that players grow and control as part of video game Spore. The game created by industry legend Will Wright announced Monday that 100 million creatures have been created, far outrunning the number of species on Earth.

The game publisher, Electronic Arts, started counting last June. That's when it first released its Spore Creature Creator, several months ahead of the full Spore game itself.

There's more Spore on the way. Electronic Arts' Maxis studio is releasing the Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack for PC and Mac players, Spore Hero for the Wii, and Spore Hero Arena for the Nintendo DS. The player who created the 100 millionth Spore creature now has a chance to win a copy of Spore Galactic Adventures as well as a souped-up PC graphics card.

Last month, Will Wright announced his departure from Electronic Arts. Wright, who soared to the heights of video game fame with Sim City and The Sims, has said that his new project is an "electronic think tank" that goes by the interesting name of Stupid Fun Club.

Will Wright, creator of the Sim City and Sims franchises, is interviewed by John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Are video games really all about feeding your ego? Maybe, suggested legendary game designer Will Wright in a keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Expo on Thursday morning.

"Most people are very narcissistic," said Electronic Arts' Wright, creator of the Sim City and Sims franchises and now last year's avant-garde Spore, onstage with Federated Media's John Battelle. "The more you can make the game about that person, the more interested, the more emotionally involved they will get."

Advancements in technology have made it possible for the customization craze of the social-networking world to permeate the console and PC gaming sectors, and that has begun to open up the industry to new users who didn't see the appeal in hardcore gaming or immersive role-playing virtual universes.

He suggested that virtual world Second Life was on the right track by making it possible for members to create elaborate in-game items, but they were too difficult for most members to partake in. "The sophistication...was pretty high," Wright said. "For a lot of people, programming does not sound like entertainment."

Even though games--especially role-playing games--have a reputation for being a lonely form of escapism, Wright suggested that mainstream appeal can be found in, well, getting to be yourself. And that's where it gets back to the narcissism.

"The more this game can be about me, and my real life, and my real experiences and where I live, and my real friends (can mean more than) 'I'm going to go to the game and become an orc and get a real sword'," he suggested. Granted, Spore is all about building and growing strange creatures in a bizarre, science fiction universe. But there's a lot more out there, he said, as we're seeing a "Cambrian explosion" of ways to play and interact.

"The Wii, to me, represents the idea of non-immersive gaming," he said. "When you think about the Wii...most of the entertainment is not happening on the screen, it's about watching your friend act like a doofus swinging the thing around and maybe throw it into the TV set."

So maybe gaming can temper that ego, too.

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.

Starting Monday, Electronics Arts will sell its popular video game Spore free of any digital rights management restrictions.

It's part of a slew of titles which EA will offer on Valve's Steam distribution platform, according to a report by Ars Technica. Besides Spore, the collection will include Warhammer Online, Need for Speed Undercover, Mass Effect, and FIFA Manager 09. Crysis, Crysis: Warhead, and SiN Episodes: Emergence are already available on the service, and there are more on the way.

Prices for the DRM-free versions are said to be on par with what the games would sell for in a box in a retail store.

It's a move likely to win EA some points with gamers after the disastrous public response to its DRM policy for Spore. Originally the company locked the game using DRM software called SecuROM to no more than three machines, which it later upped to five.

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.

Electronic Arts may have attempted to appease angry customers by amending its digital rights management policy on Spore, but the company's DRM troubles aren't over yet.

Earlier this week, a class action suit was filed in the Northern District of California Court on behalf of Melissa Thomas and all other Spore purchasers. The suit contends that EA violated the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act and Unfair Competition Law by failing to inform consumers that by installing Spore, they also inadvertently install a program called SecuROM. SecuROM is a copy protection program that limits the number of times software can be installed on a PC. In the case of Spore, that limit was set to three (and later upped to five).

"Although consumers are told the game uses access control and copy protection technology, consumers are not told that this technology is actually an entirely separate, stand-alone program which will download, install, and operate on their computer," reads the complaint (PDF). "Once installed, it becomes a permanent part of the consumer's software portfolio. Even if the consumer uninstalls Spore, and entirely deletes it from their computer, SecuROM remains a fixture on their computer unless and until the consumer completely wipes their hard drive through reformatting or replacement of the drive."

The suit accuses EA of "intentionally" hiding the fact that Spore uses SecuROM, which it alleges is "secretly installed to the command and control center of the computer (Ring 0, or the Kernel) and [is] surreptitiously operated, overseeing function and operation of the computer, and preventing the computer from operating under certain circumstances and/or disrupting hardware operations." The suit also claims that SecuROM takes over a portion of a PC's processing resources "to transmit information back to EA."

The filing asks the judge to certify the class action complaint and award all plaintiffs the $49.99 purchase price plus damages.

The copy protections associated with Spore have dogged the highly anticipated game since its launch earlier this month. The original restrictions placed on the game outraged many consumers, thousands of whom retaliated by posting negative reviews of the game on Amazon.com or downloading it illegally from file-sharing sites.

Tor Thorsen of sister site GameSpot contributed to this report