PC, MAC: Spore Approaches

On September 7th it will arrive, are you going to be ready?

Spore is likely to be the seed (bad pun intended) of a whole new generation of "user content generated games" or UCGGs as I like to call them. MMO examples like this exist of course (see Second Life). However, Spore is poised and has the potential to rip open our pre-conceptions of this genera and replace it with new demands we make on all our video games.

In spore you get editors, such as the creature editor (released as a sole demo product earlier this year). These editors you can then use to make in game content. The creature editor lets you make... well you guessed it-creatures. There will be vehicle editors and building editors and so on. Creatures and vehicles and buildings-OH MY!

The results of your tinkering with these creation programs will be your own personal "user generated content". This content will be upload-able to the Sporepedia where other users can download it. Sounds pretty manual right? Well, therein lies the rub.

Will, the head honcho of Spore has said, lets have the game download content seamlessly while players play it. This of course is going to allow for strange new creatures and models that you've never seen to be populating your games. All of it on the fly and all of it with you doing nothing at all, other than playing-if that's all you want to do.

How you play Spore though, becomes almost a philosophical question. No doubt the various stages of development wherein you guide a creature made of cells through it's evolution, into societies and buildings, and eventually even off the planet to explore the galaxy... well surely those stages will all have their own objectives and ways of winning (think getting to move to the next stage).

However, there's going to be a whole new type of play with Spore. I call it e-Lego style. Spores editors are so easy that a retarded monkey could master them. This will allow for anyone to make really impressive and interesting creations. It's more of a "given this set of building blocks, show me what you were thinking of making" approach and it works REALLY well.

Anyway, just a heads up that Spore is one of the games that we here at Gamer NOP are most excited about. Come September 7th, we'll have to beat some of the authors to make sure posts get out in between gaming sessions on their brand-spanking-new copies of Spore.