Spore

Spore

Put in grossly simplistic terms, Spore is Tamagotchi for 2008. Except, of course, while there are similarities to the decade old virtual pet craze, Spore is so very much more.

Best described as a ‘life simulation’ game, you evolve and develop a microscopic organism into a complex animal through to intelligent, self-aware being. Designed by Will Wright, creator of The Sims, and Soren Johnson, the man behind Civilization 4, and with an on-the-fly soundtrack created by none other than Brian Eno, Spore is a project with some important names behind it, as well as some genuinely innovative ideas.

This week’s release of the creature editor has given the world a glimpse of what’s on offer but there’s a lot more to come when the full game appears later in the year. The full game’s structured into five separate phases: the cell phase, the creature phase, the tribal phase, the civilization phase and, finally, the space phase, during which your creation ascends into space where it interacts with alien species across the galaxy. Each chapter has a separate difficulty selector and, the choices you make at every point dictate the directions and manner in which your creature evolves into a unique being.

At the start of the game a meteor plummets to earth, landing in a tide pool and splitting in two. Your creature emerges from this broken geode and the path to intelligent life is begun. Each of the game’s five phases employs a different set of game mechanics, increasing in complexity as the game progresses. To begin with you’ll be guiding simple protean microbes around a 2D environment, avoiding predators and eating other microbes and plants in order to grow. Conversely, the creature phase sees the game move to full 3D, and now you must hunt food for DNA points, reproduce and avoid being eaten while you’re at it.

As the game progresses it moves from a ‘grow-your-own’ animal’ style simulation into a more fully fledged God-sim in which you’re managing ecosystems, societies and, eventually, interactions between whole races. The scope and inventiveness is extraordinary and, as your creatures can be edited to look and behave in an almost limitless number of ways, the game actively encourages community interaction.

Creatures can be posted into Facebook or Myspace profiles. In fact, the creature creator software, just one element to the whole package but which is already available to play separately, allows even non-gamers who aren’t engaging with the single player thrust of Spore to try their hand at creating creatures simply to see what they can come up with.

To sample something of what Spore is all about, download the Creature Creator demo from here: http://eu.spore.com/home.cfm. The full game releases this September.