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Excited About Spore

I first learned about Spore yesterday, although I’m sure I’ve heard about it before. Spore is a game that is going to come out for both the PC and the Mac. I’m not really a gamer anymore (although you’d think otherwise by my previous PlayStation 3 posts) but having heard the premise of Spore got me excited. The kind of game you always thought would be cool but never thought someone would make.

Spore is basically an evolutionary game. You start off as a single cell organism (or a spore) and through limited movement and eating you start to evolve into a more complex creature. After you “evolve” you can select what traits your creature will have. This can be from a set of eyes, a defense or attack mechanism, or a tail to swim/move faster, etc. Image everything you learned in biology, but you’re in complete control. Theoretically, no two players will have the same experience as you due to your personal choices and the fact that other creatures and elements in the world also evolve as you do in a completely random (procedural) manner. The world is affected by what you do.

There are several phases to this game, each with it’s own gameplay. The first is the “tide pool” phase where you are the spore, the gameplay here is reminiscent to pac-man. As you evolve you enter the “creature” phase, where you control your creature from a 3rd person point of view. Here you develop by eating smaller creatures, mating, and simply surviving. The next phase is the “tribal” phase where by increasing your brain capacity and amount of creatures (by mating of course) you create a small tribe. You’re able to evolve by working together as a tribe and competing with other tribes. The following phase is the “civilization” phase where your creatures have evolved enough to build cities and other modern contraptions. After the civilization phase comes the “space” phase. In this phase you are able to explore the local solar system through your UFO. By upgrading the UFO enough you can inhabit planets in which life can be supported, eventually even inhabitable planets can be converted to habitable planets by creating an atmosphere. It is even possible to venture out of the local solar system and into neighboring galaxies.

The potential to this game is completely limitless. It is truly an amazing concept that brings to life what you learned in school. It seems that the evolutionary process has been very well studied and reacts extremely realistically in the environments. For example, should you “abduct” a creature from your planet with your UFO and drop them on a moon, they will realistically die from the lack of oxygen. Examples such as this are present throughout the game and make it very VERY interesting (and time consuming I suppose).

For more information, check out the above video of actual gameplay footage from 2005 or visit the wikipedia entry for spore.

Filed by tony at February 22nd, 2008 under Computers, Games, Mac, Videos