Gaming and Culture

Microsoft stunned the video game world on Monday with the announcement of its forthcoming 'Project Natal' technology, full-body motion-sensitive technology that should allow gamers to do what they want without holding on to any hardware.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

LOS ANGELES--For those of you who have been waiting for some really big news to come out of the video game industry, Microsoft answered your call Monday with its innovative "Project Natal," a hands-free motion-sensitive controller system.

Announced during Microsoft's annual E3 press conference, Project Natal seems almost certainly to be the culmination of several years of work by an Israeli start-up called 3DV Systems, which Microsoft recently acquired.

The technology, as demonstrated (see video below), appears geared toward allowing users to control games, movies, and anything else on their Xbox system with their hands alone, and without touching any hardware.

A prototype of 3DV Systems' motion-sensitive video camera, the technology that is most likely behind Microsoft's Project Natal, which it announced at E3 on Monday.

(Credit: Jared Kohler/CNET)

Now, in what is clearly an attempt by the Xbox maker to significantly broaden the potential reach of the console and its Internet component, Xbox Live, Microsoft is betting that it can finally impress many of the millions of people who would never, ever consider themselves gamers but who somehow ended up with a Nintendo Wii in their homes.

How did Nintendo manage to break that barrier? By building a new-style motion-sensitive controller system that allowed users to direct game action by waving the controller around. To swing an in-game tennis racket, you swing the so-called Wii-mote like a tennis racket. To play a bowling game, you swing the Wii-mote in a bowling motion.

Natal, by comparison, provides much of that same functionality, but without having to hold on to the controller. Want to kick a ball in a game? Then make a kicking motion. Want to buzz in in a game show setting? Smack your fist into your hand. Want to share a drawing with an in-game avatar? Draw it and then hold it up to the Natal camera. As seen on-stage at E3, at least, it's all very simple, and very seamless.

So is Project Natal Microsoft's answer to the Wii-mote?

"And beyond, yeah," said Forrester principal analyst Paul Jackson. "Obviously, we've all got, in the game industry...a huge debt to pay to Nintendo for shaking things up a bit with the Wii, and for moving beyond the 37 button controller. This is taking things to the next extreme. Because even with the Wii, you still have (several) buttons, start and select. It's still a physical controller."

Added Jackson, Project Natal looks likely to "remove that final barrier between you sitting in your room and...what's on your screen."

Even given all that, however, a successful Natal launch is unlikely to knock Nintendo from the top of the next-generation console perch. The Wii's install base is huge, loyal and, in many cases, wary of Microsoft. And at the same time, one would have to expect that Sony, too, will be trying to get on the board with a full-scale motion-sensitive system.

Too early to tell
While there's no doubt that Microsoft caught everyone's attention with the Project Natal announcement, it's by no means certain that it will be a business success. For one, the company gave no indication of when the technology would be in users' hands. Nor did Microsoft say whether it would be sold as an Xbox accessory or be bundled with the console.

Microsoft Xbox Senior Vice President Don Mattrick did state that Project Natal would be compatible with every Xbox 360. But he didn't address how much it would cost, or whether it would be backward compatible with older Xbox 360 games. And afterward, Microsoft could not provide any additional details about the technology.

What this all means, then, is that while it's very clear Microsoft has some seriously cool technology on its hands, there's no way to judge--based on what we know right now, at least--whether Microsoft can successfully integrate Natal into its larger Xbox ecosystem. Still, given the company's deep pockets, and its traditional dedication to making new technology dominant, no matter how long it takes, I'd bet on Bill Gates & Co., having a winner with this one.

For one thing, Microsoft will finally have a response to the question of whether it can truly reach the mainstream. At the same time, however, it must find a way to attract that new audience while not alienating its core audience.

That's why Jackson said that no matter what happens with Natal, Microsoft is unlikely to abandon its traditional controller. It has to keep those core gamers, the ones who simply have to have their regular "Halo 3" gaming sessions, happy.

Jackson predicted that initially, Microsoft will sell Natal--or whatever it's called upon its release--in the $99 range. He pointed out that traditional controller systems come in the $50 range, but that Microsoft is going to have to pack some serious high-tech into Natal--a motion sensor, sophisticated directional microphones and video cameras.

SDKs begin arriving
On-stage at E3, Mattrick said that the Project Natal software development kits had just gone out. This means that while most of the video game world is in Los Angeles this week for the show, few people have had a chance to see it.

One who did get a sneak peek at Natal is Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski, the visionary behind "Gears of War."

"I had a chance to be hands-on with (Natal) a couple weeks ago," Bleszinski told CNET News, "and it was damned fun." But even Bleszinski said he hadn't gotten his hands on a SDK yet, and wasn't able to say anything about the development process.

Director Steven Spielberg came on-stage during the press briefing to praise Microsoft's approach to the mainstream audience with Project Natal.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

And while one should always take what is said during a press conference with a grain of salt, one would think that someone like legendary film director Steven Spielberg wouldn't heap praise on anyone or anything unless he really meant it. And when he came on-stage during the briefing Monday, heap praise on Natal is exactly what he did.

"I've been asking the crucial question: how can interactive entertainment become as approachable as other forms of entertainment?" Spielberg said. "The vast majority of people are just too intimidated to pick up a video game controller...Despite the size of (the video game) industry, still 60 percent of households do not own a video game console...The only way to bring interactive entertainment to everybody is to make it invisible."

So now we wait. Jackson said given the time frame of the SDKs and how long it takes developers to bring games to market, it would be unlikely that we would see Natal in gamers' hands before the middle of next year. In fact, given that time frame, E3 2010 may be a perfect place for Microsoft to formally launch the technology.

And whether it chooses to do so, it seems guaranteed that when Microsoft takes the stage for its E3 2010 press briefing, it will have some very big news in its pocket.

"The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive" by John Graham-Cumming could be the answer to the yearly Father's Day gift dilemma.

(Although I know a lot of women who would love this book, too.)

Graham-Cumming's book is not of the tacky so-and-so-slept-here variety, but a compendium of locations of true worth in the history of science and tech breakthroughs.

(Credit: O'Reilly Media)

The book, which is organized by country, includes latitudes and longitudes for GPS devices, and info like whether a historical site is free or available for a price. It's heavy on U.K. and U.S. sites (it lists the U.S. sites by state) but does attempt to cover the entire world.

Some of the recommendations are little-known science museums that happen to have one or two holdings of great worth, but many are a bit more unusual and creative. Graham-Cumming includes things like the descendant of Isaac Newton's apple tree at Trinity College in Cambridge, England, and the first bridge ever constructed from cast iron which visitors can still walk across at the Severn River in Ironbridge, England.

In addition to listing the historical sites, the author gives background and factoids on the inventor, or team of inventors, and the story behind each breakthrough.

For example, Isaac Newton's official position at the University of Cambridge was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the title currently held by the British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

Graham-Cumming discusses why Alan Turing's contribution to computer science was so significant and arguably more important than his role in breaking the Nazi Enigma code at Bletchley Park, England. He explains in detail the Turing Machine and Turing's Halting problem complete with formulas.

The thorough stories and science lessons make the book, which includes a lot of photos and illustrations, a fun summer read for the astute armchair traveler as well as a guide for those looking to explore more than the usual church, museum, and park routes of sightseeing vacations.

The author, a former programmer and computer scientist by degree, also used social-network creator Ning to build a companion social-networking site to his book, GeekAtlas.com, where readers and travelers can share their experiences, and post photos and videos of their travels.

While in this economy you may not be able to go to see Léon Foucault's Pendulum still swinging in the Pantheon in Paris, the U.S. list is so comprehensive, chances are you live within easy driving distance from at least two places and probably more.

The "The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive" will be available June 3 with a list price of $29.99 (some sites are also listing it for pre-order at $19.79).

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 Institute for the Future's new game, 'Superstruct,' posits that humanity may be extinct by 2042 and that only stories submitted by players can mitigate the dangers of five so-called superthreats.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

If you knew the human race was facing imminent extinction, what would you do?

For the folks at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank, creating a fictional scenario in which five "superthreats" have coalesced in 2019 to augur the end of the human race by 2042 became the basis for a new alternate-reality game (ARG) in which players the world over have been weighing in with ideas for staving off disaster.

The game the IFTF created, known as Superstruct, launched October 6, and is the first of what could be many so-called massively multiplayer forecasting games. The idea behind Superstruct and others that could follow it is to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to come up with solutions to complicated problems and do so in a fun, challenging, and entertaining way that encourages people's participation.

The five superthreats include "quarantine," which involves "declining health and pandemic disease," "ravenous," which deals with the world's collapsing food system, "power struggle," which revolves around declining energy and the fight over remaining energy resources, "outlaw planet," which focuses on the erosion of civil rights and "generation exile," which looks at the worldwide "diaspora of diasporas," or a worldwide refugee epidemic.

And it may be working. Already, the game--which ends November 17--has more than 5,000 players from across the globe who have contributed hundreds of ideas, in the form of stories, intended to mitigate the coming faux-disaster.

As of Monday, those user-submitted ideas have already been deemed strong enough that the Superstruct site now says that the end of the human race has been pushed back at least six years, to 2048.

To be sure, Superstruct is nothing more than scenario planning in the guise of a game, and despite the many, many drastic problems Earth faces these days, it is very unlikely that the human race is actually down to its last 40 years.

But for many participants in the game, being involved has satisfied an itch to make some sort of difference in the world.

"It appears that people are extremely motivated by the challenge of fixing the future," said Jane McGonigal, the lead designer on Superstruct. "People are unsettled right now, with the economy (and other crises and) that makes us hungry for the opportunity to contribute."

McGonigal, who previously helped design the famous ARG, I Love Bees, A World without Oil, and more recently led the design on the Olympic-themed ARG, The Lost Ring, said that the early planning of Superstruct involved asking participants to submit stories of dinner conversations they might have in 2019.

She said that very quickly, more than 1,000 people came forward with such stories, something that caught her, and her fellow Superstruct lead organizers, forecast director Kathi Vian and scenario director Jamais Cascio, off guard.

"That signaled to us that people will take this very, very seriously," McGonigal said. "That was the cue to me that this was going to be big and was going to tap into this unmet hunger for contributing."

Among her favorite dinner stories, McGonigal said, was one that a married man from New Zealand who currently has no children, but hopes to one day, came up with about what he would say to his kids about the fact that they could be the last generation of the human race.

"It was really thoughtful, not (like from a) B-movie," McGonigal said. "It was serious, and reflects what people are thinking about today."

The five superthreats confronting humanity include global food shortages, massive movements of refugees and worldwide battles over energy.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

And while Superstruct is clearly fiction, McGonigal and her colleagues at the Institute for the Future see it as imperative that scenarios like the ones raised in the game get talked about now.

"The world will almost certainly be a worse place for the next generation," she said. "If we don't act now, we're going to have a lot of explaining" to do.

Because Superstruct takes place across a wide range of media--including wikis, blogs, YouTube, forums, and others, some feel that it can help players with their own professional development even as they participate in bettering the understanding of how to deal with the problems of the future.

"I think one of the coolest parts of the game is how it takes advantage of players' existing participatory media literacy and pushes them to develop new ones," said Dale Larson, a mobile and social media strategist. "The transfer from game to real world is not only...solving the future problems but (also fostering) real world collaboration from both social and technical perspectives that lead to job skills and organizational skills."

As the game progresses, a series of "game masters" are taking some of the stories submitted by players and incorporating them into the larger Superstruct scenario.

That's why the date of humanity's extinction has already moved from its original 2042 to the current 2048--because of the value of the many user-created submissions.

Indeed, one of the goals of the game seems to be to turn the superthreats on their head and use the submissions made by player in each of the five categories to come up with solutions to the problems. And that's why each superthreat is subtitled, for example, "inventing the future of food," or "inventing the future of security."

Each week, a new update is posted for each superthreat, bringing the scenario current according to the game masters' incorporation of submissions.

So, for example, this week's assessment of the food crisis includes the following: "There are big ideas afoot to confront the Ravenous Superthreat head-on, like irrigating the Australian desert with solar-desalinated ocean water. Alongside this are more subtle ones oriented to ecological stability; this week, for instance, has seen no fewer than three Superstructs proposed to address the challenge of maintaining bee populations. As solutions continue to arise, however, so do the challenges. We're getting reports of continued battles on the home front for personal food security."

Of course, the stories that are used to create these ongoing scenarios are available for public viewing as well. And the best are given awards based on creativity and other attributes.

One example came from a player called Tiny Tegan, who posited a scene from Amsterdam, where supermarkets have closed down due to a lack of stocked shelves--and government regulations against imported food. The fictional Amsterdam resident reported that he (or she) walked past a closed market, only to see people milling around inside. Climbing through a shattered door to see what was going on, the resident found a number of "ragged farmers" trading various meats, cheeses, bread and so on.

"I purchased (an apple) for a resaonable fee and asked (the farmer) where she had come from," Tiny Tegan wrote. "She explained that these farmers were part of a virtual collective, sharing agricultural tips and political news across Netherland's rural expanses--and that the urban food shortage has inspired them to start a co-op in the city. They had arrived that morning and were planning to open their doors the next day. Needless to say, I was ecstatic and asked what I could do to help. She said, 'Spread the word.'"

Hundreds of similar stories exist for each of the five superthreats.

And that's precisely the point.

"It's exciting stuff," said Ron Meiners, the director of community for the Hollywood Interactive Group. "It creates a new forum for people to collaboratively address issues and problems we all face. The technology offers new opportunities for people to work together, but we are just learning the roles we can have together. Superstruct is a very creative way for people to effectively discuss different Issues, and ideally, meaningful solutions...We need to evolve new social structures to collaborate and work together."

As the game has moved forward and players have impressed the game masters with their submissions, the human race has gotten a little more time on its clock.

McGonigal acknowledged that she and her fellow planners did consider letting the clock run in reverse, meaning that humans could die off before 2042.

Thankfully, though, it will only be possible to make our race live longer, at least under the rules of Superstruct.

"We decided that just by throwing your lot in and putting attention on problems," McGonigal said, "that will only do good, so we've decided that there's very little players can do to hurt" mankind's future.

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.

The Institute for the Future is launching a series of what it calls 'massively multiplayer forecasting games' designed to help researchers come up with solutions to long-term global problems. The first game, Superstruct, will launch October 6.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios.

That's been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues.

And now it appears that an august group of futurists is hoping that they can employ large numbers of people to play collaborative games in search of solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems.

That was the word Tuesday from the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on identifying the directions that mankind will take down the line.

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."

'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.

GameSpot review by Kevin VanOrd.

GameSpot score: 8.0

The good

• Intuitive and comprehensive customization tools

• Oozes charm at every turn

• Impressively broad scope

• Great audio and art design.

The bad

• Individual game play elements are extremely simple

• Early stages aren't very engaging.

Spore is an enjoyable game that pulls off an interesting balancing act.

On one hand, it lets you create a creature and guide its maturation from a single cell to a galactic civilization through an unusual process of evolutionary development.

Because the tools used to create and revise this creature are so robust and amusing, and each creation's charms are so irresistible, it's hard not to get attached to your digital alter ego. On the other hand, this intimacy is abandoned in the long, later portions of the game, when you lead your full-grown civilization in its quest for universal domination.

The idea sounds ambitious, though Spore isn't as much a deep game as it is a broad one, culling elements from multiple genres and stripping them down to their simplest forms. By themselves, these elements aren't very remarkable; but within the context of a single, sprawling journey, they complement each other nicely and deliver a myriad of delights.

Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming...

(Credit: Electronic Arts/Maxis)

Spore's greatest asset, by far, is its intuitive set of creation tools. If you've played the separate Creature Creator, released earlier this year, you're only seeing a small piece of the puzzle.

At various stages, you'll construct, for example, town halls, land vehicles sporting cannons, and aircraft that spout religious propaganda. The creatures are the true stars though, and you can mix and match legs, arms, mouths, wings, and lots of other parts into a beautiful work of art--or a hideous monstrosity.

Each part of your creation can be turned, resized, and twisted, so whether you wish to re-create a favorite cartoon character or develop an original concept, you'll probably find what you need in here. You don't need to be a budding Pablo Picasso to make an interesting creature, however; just slapping a bunch of random parts together can result in a truly hysterical beast.

Yet even if your onscreen buddy is a three-armed ogre with scales running up his belly, you'll be spending some time getting to know him in the first few hours of gameplay, and you'll probably develop some affection for him despite his hideousness.

Extensive community tools
You will need to put some creative energy into Spore, but if you aren't the artistic type or don't find the building- and vehicle-creation tools as interesting as those for your creature, you can use pre-made designs that ship with the game. Even better, you can utilize Spore's extensive community tools, inserting other players' innovations into your own game in progress. It's actually a lot of fun to sift through others' creations, if only to marvel at the remarkable amount of imagination on display.

And you can do this from within the game proper using an online database called the Sporepedia. In Spore, community and gameplay come together in a fresh and user-friendly manner. In fact, to get the most out of the game, you should be online whenever you play. Not only will doing so give you access to the Sporepedia, but most of the other creatures, vehicles, and even entire planets you encounter will have been created by other players. The early release of the Creature Creator has already proven that community involvement is a core aspect of the Spore experience, and the sharing factor is poised to give the game remarkable longevity.

In a game of Spore proper, however, you won't start off by molding the creature of your dreams. The game is split into five stages, starting with the cell stage. (However, once you unlock a stage, you can start a new game there and bypass any stage that comes before it.)

The creation tools at this stage are simple, limited to a 2D cell and a few odds and ends, like flagella and spikes. The accompanying game play is similarly minimal, and if you've played Flow for the PlayStation 3 or PSP, you will have a good idea of how it works. You choose the path of a carnivore or an herbivore at the outset, which determines what sort of food bits you can munch on. From here, you maneuver your cell about the screen using the keyboard or mouse, avoiding creatures that are looking to you for their next meal while grabbing a bite or two yourself. If you're an herbivore, you seek out the green algae; if you're a carnivore, you need meat, which means waiting for a fish fight to break out and gobbling up the remains, or starting the fight yourself.

You'll also uncover new parts as you swim about, and can then attach them to your organism.

To enter the cell creator, you send out a mating call, which lets you get romantic with another member of your species. Then, you add a few bits that make you swim faster or jab harder, and jump back into the gene pool.

However, it is all ultra-simple: You swim around eating so you can get bigger, and avoid being eaten. If you do fall victim to a sharp-toothed protozoan, you'll re-hatch with no real punishment. All in all, the cell stage may last you 20 or 25 minutes, which is just as well, since it's not very interesting and wears out its welcome quickly.

Soon enough, you'll leave the environs of the sea, add some legs, and lumber into the creature stage. You'll still find new parts scattered about, this time hidden within the skeletal remains of other beasts.

Again, the game play itself is pretty simple: You wander around exploring for other creatures and advance through the stage by either befriending other nests or conquering them.

If you want to go the aggressive route, you should equip sharp claws, tusks, and spitters; if you want to make friends with the local duck-billed orangutans, you'll go with parts that let you charm, sing, dance, and pose.

Should you decide on violence, the encounter plays out much like a very plain online role-playing game, in which you click on your target and use one of your four special abilities to do damage. If you want to make friends by singing and dancing, you'll play a little game of Simon Says, mimicking the actions of your hopeful buddies.

As you progress through the stage, you build up a little pack of followers, and they will join you in your battles--and your posing routines.

For carnivores, this truly is forbidden fruit.

(Credit: Electronic Arts/Maxis)

The gameplay in the creature stage may be simple, but it's here that you start to see what can make playing Spore such a special and rewarding experience.

Seeing your creature slowly evolve from a flat cell to an awkward, gangly land dweller is fun, particularly if he doesn't look as though such a beast in real life would be able to walk, much less bounce around the forest.

This is where your relationship with the creature is most prominent, and that connection is what makes the exploration of the creature stage so interesting. When you encounter a towering six-legged atrocity charging at the locals, you'll hightail it out of there--yet still be in awe, just as if you were the little guy himself.

It's more about the gawking than the playing, but whether you're joining a pack of polka-dotted parakeets in chorus or catching a glimpse of an overhead UFO, there are some legitimately appealing moments to be had.

Controlling a tribe
Once you reach the tribal stage, you will lose some of that connection with your creation. You will no longer be playing as an individual, but rather controlling a tribe, and the stage plays like a slimmed down real-time strategy game.

It's disappointing that you can no longer make adjustments to your tribe's main features past this point; you can, however, adorn the creatures with different clothing items for the duration.

Fortunately, the charm and personality of the creature stage is still very much evident, and you'll still have the same thrills as you encounter excellent and unusual creatures as you order about your small group of wacky travelers.

Conceptually, the tribal stage is similar to the creature stage, only now you focus the violence on an entire village, including structures. If you like that sort of thing, you can go so far as to equip tribe members with torches and set the enemy village ablaze. If you'd rather woo your neighbors with the sweet, soothing sounds of song, there are a few instruments at your disposal.

Spore then pulls an about-face when you reach the civilization stage. Gone are your creature-controlling days; your beloved brutes, once the jewels of your eye, will now populate the cities, and you will instead create fleets of land, sea, and air vehicles.

Now you don't have just a tribe--you have an entire society to handle, though you shouldn't let the name of the stage lead you to think that you'll find the complexity of Sid Meier's classic series here.

The creation tools are just as easy to use--and just as comprehensive--as those of the creature creator. Designing a mass of metal may not have the same charm as molding a living being from scratch, but the tools give you more control over patterns and colors, so expect to lose more hours of your life tinkering with the possibilities.

You'll also create a town hall, a house, a factory, and an entertainment venue, and placing these in your cities has an effect on the happiness of your residents. However, the happiness mechanic is so simple that most players should be able to beat the stage on even the highest difficulty setting without giving it much thought.

A religious conversion is in progress. Preach it!

(Credit: Electronic Arts/Maxis)

The stage plays out like an even broader version of the tribal stage, though you will be dealing with some light resource gathering.

However, the main strategic element comes from the three different ways you can conquer your foes: economic, religious, or military. Each city is limited to one of these three brands based on how you choose to play, though the process plays out remarkably the same, regardless.

For example, if you go for military victory, you send your attack units toward your enemy cities in standard RTS fashion. To convert the same city, you send religious vehicles over to broadcast a holographic image that preaches to the citizens.

It's neat to watch the transparent creature spouting the word over the opposing city--it's just too bad that the game play is so limited. Each city can produce only one type of land vehicle, one type of air vehicle, and one type of sea vehicle. If you go for a pure military victory, for example, you will see only three units in the stage. It's breezy and enjoyable, for sure--it's just not deep or challenging.

The final frontier
And in its final transformation, Spore enters the space stage, where many of the previous gameplay elements coalesce.

As a result, this stage feels like an actual destination, and while it's not nearly as complex as the space exploration games it cribs from, it does exhibit the great charms of the early stages that are missing from the civilization stage.

This is partially because it harks back to the creature stage, putting you in control of a single spacecraft (one you build using the wonderful creation tools, of course), and sending you off to explore the great black beyond.

The scope of this stage is suitably massive. You travel from star to star, exploring newly discovered planets and searching for your galactic neighbors, and you can skim the terrain of a planet--or pull the camera light-years away to see the entire galaxy at a glance.

This stage is somewhat reminiscent of 2002's terrific Space Rangers and its sequel, and even exhibits some of that game's wacky humor.

You travel from system to system, grabbing missions from the local civilizations who will crack jokes about everything from cake to umbrellas. Most of these missions are quick and to the point: abduct this creature and bring it back, eliminate a bunch of sick animals on this planet, eliminate all of our enemy's turrets on a neighboring world, and so on. Just as in the creature stage, you will eventually pick up some AI companions, further allowing you to expand across the galactic map.

To expand, you can't just plop down a colony and watch it evolve. The economy moves much more slowly in this stage than in previous ones, so you need to be careful about how you spend funds based on how you wish to play.

Nor can you just choose any planet. Some worlds are simply incapable of supporting life, while others need to have the environment altered to allow for expansion and population. This is where the terraforming tools come in. Not only may you need to drop items onto the terrain to increase the density of the atmosphere or make the air hotter, but you'll need to jump-start the ecology by throwing in plants and creatures abducted from other worlds.

Space stage keeps players busy
These tools don't just limit you to gameplay necessities, however. You can terraform entire swaths of land, putting craters and plateaus where you see fit, or even dyeing the water purple. In space stage there is, for the first time in Spore, a lot to do. At times, you are shooting lasers at enemy saucers, like a 3D action game; at others, you're outfitting colonies with turrets; at still others, you're negotiating trade routes with your allies. It's a pleasant and accessible mix.

Unsurprisingly, none of these elements is as deep as you would expect in a deep space strategy game, but the real joys come from swooping onto a planet and skimming its surface to see your own creations--and those of others--populating them, and in various stages of advancement.

The stylized, colorful visuals keep your eyes constantly engaged, from big, bulbous trees to herds of tentacled younglings frolicking about. The animations are top-notch, so while it's hard to imagine what a bowlegged, long-necked crane with four toes on each foot would actually look like as it ambled about, Spore makes such sights look goofily authentic.

It isn't a technical powerhouse; there is a good bit of geometry pop-in, and the game does not appear to support anti-aliasing. Its charming, exaggerated look more than makes up for it though, and on three separate machines of various specifications, Spore ran smoothly at the highest settings without a single crash.

Pirate ships will zoom off with stolen spices. Rival civilizations aren't so cowardly.

(Credit: Electronic Arts/Maxis)

Spore's sound design shines from beginning to end. The creatures themselves sound terrific, and are the source of much of the game's overflowing charm. The creature and tribal stages sound enchanting, from the thumping beat of the drums when you order tribal units to the squawks and squeaks of your creations. The subsequent stages are of similarly high quality. Of particular note is the customizable ambient music introduced in the civilization stage, and the hysterical incomprehensible Simlish spoken by the various galactic leaders.

Spore keeps a timeline of events, pinpointing every decision you've made and assigning you into broad categories based on your overall behavior (social, adaptable, and so on), so there are plenty of reasons to try a different approach.

Not that these varied approaches make for drastically different gameplay, but they do give you a reason to revisit the amusing moments that make Spore unique.

Taken on their own, its pieces are nothing special. As parts of a singular ambitious vision, they work far better. Throw in the best customization tools seen in years and an enthusiastic community brimming with creativity, and you have a legitimately great game that will deliver hours of quality entertainment.