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2 years ago
Feature: Turning over a new lifeform
Trees that grow from seeds you plant? Easy. 18 quintillion planets? Whatever. If you want to talk about videogames' most ambitious endeavors, there's only one contender for the top spot. Spore, released in 2008, let players control a species they created from single cell organism all the way through to becoming space explorers. That included designing everything from the huts you lived in during the…
3 years ago
Feature: Pretty pictures
You might have noticed all your friends' avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That's because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let's you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a…
5 years ago
Feature: Mohawks And Martians, Pt 1
Mohawk Games is an excellent name for a company. And so it is that former Civilization IV lead designer and Spore man Soren Johnson approaches me sporting the company haircut. It's a recent trim job for the old headshrub, he tells me, but he wears it well. However, the brain beneath the mohawk - the mind behind some of strategy gaming's greatest greats - is…
Feature: Sir Mix-A-Lot
This is the latest in the series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills. When Paul Weir gave a talk at GDC 2011 about GRAMPS, the generative audio system he designed for Eidos Montreal's Thief, the games press took notice. Not so much of the contents, though, or indeed the subject, just Thief. Here, finally,…
Soren Johnson is a clever man. He was a programmer on Civilization 3, the lead designer on Civilization IV, and then he moved over to Maxis to work on Spore. Now he's building himself a new home by founding Mohawk Games, a studio dedicated to creating "core strategy games".
8 years ago
Increasingly nebulous mega-brain Will Wright has finally revealed what the hell he's up to next. He's spent his post-Spore years working at an outfit he calls Stupid Fun Club, which has had all sorts of wild ideas about TV shows and toys, but now he seems to be turning those historically ingenious eyes back to games. He's working on adapting a short story about a…
Feature:
What has eight legs, three eyes, and a nose that spits deadly mucus? Doesn't matter, just kill it in the face and take its stuff. Richard's been playing a pre-release version of Spore's psychotic cousin, where life is simple, death is cheap, and the only good alien is one that drops a particularly snazzy hat.
10 years ago
A new patch for Spore has made a few interesting tweaks possible. Perhaps the most immediately interesting is the ability to build asymmetric creatures. No longer to features have to be applied in pairs, which enormously opens up the possibilities for creature design. And once you've designed your creature, as spotted by Offworld, there's now the ability to export it to your favourite Collada 3D…
Cleverman make cleverthinks! Fresh from the Web 2.0 expo earlier this month is this entertaining and educating half-hour talk with Will Wright about everything including but not limited to his career and games to date, what's next, lessons learned from Second Life, the intersect between games and reality and -ooh missus - Spore's controversial DRM and the business considerations around it: "These people have paid…
Ooh, just a kind of radar-blip news post for Spore's expansion pack, Galactic Adventures. No firm release date yet, but we understand it's not far off. So here's something: Galactic Adventures delivers a whole load of space-stage stuff to do, mostly with missions on the planet surfaces that you can undertake with your creature and his/her space chums. There's rescuing of princesses, destroying aliens motherships,…
What's that on the horizon? A storm of controversy, you say? Better batten down the hatches and man the lighthouse, we got some dark times ahead. For the seventh game of Christmas, my true blog gave to me…
EA have released a deauthorization tool for their much debated DRM system for Spore. By running it, you get back one of your five installations instantly, even if you haven't actually uninstalled it. If you try to run it, it'll require to be reauthorized, but this means that abstractly you can now install Spore on as many machines as you want - it's just that…
The newly released v1.02 patch of Spore has actually caused a minor furore with one of its changes. Is it that you can hold down control in sporepedia to select multiple things? Nay. Is it the improved gait for two legged creatures? Nope. Is it the fact that there's an occasional cubic planet thrown in? Why, yes, that's it entirely. Here's an enbiggened image of…
Via VG247, early word on what might be for the first add-on pack for the famously uncontroversial Spore. And it's... Cute & Creepy Creature Parts Pack? Oh, man. That sounds worryingly superficial, though I guess it embiggens the element of the game that's been most well-received. Still, there's only so much creature-tinkering I can do before getting bored. New/expanded stages plzkthx.
Time to stick my hand into the angry beehive again... The EA/Spore/DRM issue isn't likely to go away any time soon. In a funny sort of way, the ridiculous DRM on Spore might well turn out to be a good thing for gamers - like it or not, EA's weight in the industry means they're trend-setters to some degree. That a company so big attempted…
Spore has only sold 1 million copies. Warhammer Online has a piffling 500,000 subscribers. Ah well. Might as well call it a day for the old IBM Compatible, eh? Pffffffft. It's been a grand Autumn for PC so far, and with Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 (shut up) also incoming our beloved maths-box's star isn't going to dim any time soon.…
The good news is this: EA are taking a big step back on Spore's DRM. From three installs ever and one account per copy of the game, they're switching to as many re-installs as you want on a maximum of five computers, with a patch for multiple accounts for one machine on the way. That's a big change of heart. We hinted that there might…
Much like everyone else, we've been thinking far too much about Spore recently. Alex Hutchinson, the game's lead designer, has been thinking about it for years. With the game released, we grabbed the opportunity to talk candidly and extensively with him about its design choices. From high level decisions like the actual in-game effect of customisation to basic technical elements like the lack of autosave…
Feature:
We've all had a go at that Spore game, so it's time to bang the hammer of judgment and sound great horns across the internet. Spore: What is it good for? Absolutely something. Jim: Right, shall we discuss Spore? Everyone ready? Kieron: Well, the trad way to start would be to say how much we've played, yeah? I've taken two races up into space, and…
We don't usually pay much attention to the charts, but I spotted the September 6th line up over on Shacknews and it amused me. And there's a mystery...
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