Spore for the Macintosh FIRST HANDS ON!

Spore First Thoughts

I'm at Macworld in SF and the EA booth has a playable demo (the first ever) of the long awaited SPORE, from Will Wright of Simcity fame. Plus, it was running on a Mac.

First the bad news. Even the EA rep couldn't comment on the release date, only said "late 2008". I'm thinking October, but for a game that has been continually delayed this is an even further disappointment.

What was on display was the character generation tool. Apparently there's a first phase, kind of a mini-game, where you are a single cell creature and must eat and evolve, in order to get to the actual generation.

You start with a big galaxy map, and pick somewhere in that galaxy, and make a planet. Apparently if your friends are online, you can see their planets as well, check out how their creatures are doing, etc. There's also a big library of content from both Maxis and your friends that you can see what crazy stuff people have come up with. Not just creatures, but machinery their creatures have made, the houses theyve built, etc. Apparently you'll be able to download that content into your own world.

Anyway, you start with a big blob with a spine. You can extrude the spine to make your guy longer, shorter, dinosaur like, humanoid like, etc. Then you go to the creation palettes. Each category (hands, eyes, noses, spikes, etc) has about 50 different little things you can add to your creature. The only thing you have to add to your creature is legs and a mouth.

You have DNA points, kind of works like cash. Every thing you add takes DNA points, and adds different attributes to your creature. Add 10 sets of ears, his awareness goes up. Add different mouths, he's either a carnivore or has a different mating call.

It's very easy to add things to your blob. When you drag an item over it, little control points appear, where you can stretch it, rotate it, etc. You can make long thin arms coming from his back that point downwards. You can add multiple mouths if you want. The freak of nature I built walked on all 4s and had 3 sets of arms coming from it's back - and each hand had a mouth on it.

If you drag a set of eyes onto your blob, you can set how far apart they are. Drag them close together, and it merges into one eye for that cyclops effect. Finally you can make the eyes giant or small, or if you put them on eye stalks, make the stalks point in different directions, or make the stalks really thick and the eyes really small.

You can add eye stalks, noses, dinosaur scales, all sorts of stuff. You can then paint your entire creature, add scales, give it some special abilities like flight or swimming or gills.

Finally, once your freak of nature is done, you were able to put them in the little testing arena. Here, you have a place you can watch them walk around, and yu can use all their emotes to see what they can do ala World of Warcraft. Looked to be about 50 different emotes. Happy, sad, eating, mating (!!!), dancing 10 different styles, running, sulking, injured. All that stuff, you just clicked the emote and watched the guy perform it.

Now there wasn't any actual game play being displayed. Only the character generator, which arguably was the most fun for the showroom floor.

I'll head back to Spore today and try to take some screenshots, or maybe a video. They're kind of strict on what you can take pictures of, so we'll see. Or I might have to use my cell phone camera to do it.