The Game of Life: Spore
 

As any intelligent person did after the sims 2, I concieved a game in my head of going through life from microbe to society and beyond. Naturally, Will Wright beat me to it. At least I dont have to spend eons designing it myself, anyway...

If you havent heard of it yet, you're not geeky enough. Spore is a game about evolution. It takes a pan dimensional look at science, life, socialogy, anthropology, and social evolution and combines into a program that will merely give you tools, you're the sculpter.

Spore starts as follows, you start as a single celled organism, you guide your little tyke through evolution from drop of goo, to sea life, to land life, to communal life, to war, to intersystem travel, to pan galactic travel. The Universe is yours to shape. The System seems to take a single player approach by allowing you to allow your planet to flourish without suckas' coming along and blowing it up before you can get off the ground so to speak, but it has a multiplayer feature, in it you can download player created content from a server and use it in your universe, the system allows you to interact with them based on huiristic information based on how that society you downloaded evolved on its home computer. This allows you to do just about whatever you desire, from creating a screaming army of carebears (a deadly carnivore evolution-wise) to a happy planet of hello kittys. (Yea, I would blow that up too.)

Spore shows GREAT potential as a... I dont know if i would call it a game anymore, simply because it to incredibly wide angles. Its an epiphony in a box.

Best of all, early in the game when you want to evolve and gain points for evolution... ::looks around:: you send out a mating call, you find a mate... then... funk starts playing and you... watch your creation... do IT... Fucking immersive, eh?

This site saw the same video I did on the game, you can probably find it online somewhere yourselves.
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/595975p1.html

i found a great long video of it online somewhere, the game looks absolutely amazing. to go from a molecule basically, to a destroyer of worlds...an incredible scope.

here's the video in question...worth the time investment (35 mins, give or take):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...559198&q=spore

This is a neat concept flash game.. someone said its a rip off of spore but that's a far stretch. It's unfinished, but worth checking out.

edit: Now with URL!
http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/

Spore looks like it would be pretty fun, but it doesn't really seem like anything too new to me. The evolution concept has been covered in several games already, and even the micro-to-cosmo scope has been covered by Katamari.

The real innovation is the way it does procedural graphics.

I've heard that word tossed around, procedural? what the hell does that and you mean? it sounds like a word dumb people toss around to sound smart, why not just say what you and it means?

other words like that: Proactive, synergistic, paradigm

maybe because procedural graphics is exactly what i mean? it is a method of creating 3D graphics on-the-fly as opposed to using a 3D modelling program like 3DS Max or Maya or Blender to create the geometry and texture information.

a procedure is a command, a function, or a calculation in the code, and procedural graphics uses procedures to generate graphics.

from what i understand of spore, they actually use procedures to generate procedural graphics. basically, the user, in some sense, gets to create the landscape.

Sim... Earth? Remember that old game where you create microbes and raise them to humans and beyond? It was like civilization 1 without the fun.

Speaking of.. civ 3 sucked. 4 any good?