Okay, that's not fair. You take over my thread, then bung my starter at the bottom? I look like an idiot!
Spore is what is being called a "Massively single player game", in that peoples games are independent, but your creatures are uploaded to the internet, and others are downloaded from it. You can also go about and "Shop" for player created items, which of course can be modified. Coz its not just creatures that are made and evolve, but houses, items, vehicles, tanks, weapons, spaceships and even worlds, once terraforming is unlocked. When space travel is achieved, other peoples planets are also downloaded, and it can even be played on dial-up, because there is a compression ratio for exported data of about 20000/1, so creatures can be shared on just 3 kilobytes of data. Basically, only the basic "Blueprint" is transmitted, so it is rebuilt from scratch on other machines following the instructions.
All player created content gets a trading card, displaying the stats and popularity. Spore was really once called "SimEverything". I think it has huge potential, as stories and legends will appear spontaneously- very quickly the spore universe will be far larger than the Star Wars and Star Trek universes combined!
The tools for making creatures are so flexible, I wouldn't be surprised if there were lawsuits, like the ones filed by Marvel against City of Heroes. Ultimately we will find Spore n00bs crawling out of the primordial ooze with a lovingly created creature, only to be set upon and ripped apart by scrabs, ant lions and rancors.
The first phase is called the "Tide Pool" phase, a homage to Pacman where you play a single celled organism that must evolve to escape predators and beat the competition. You can only evolve when you have grown large enough, and in later stages, when you find a mate. You adjust your design and then play as the next generation.
Next is the creature phase. The outcome of the tide pool phase indicates where you'll be at the start, but you always begin in the ocean. You can decide whether to evolve legs or not, and leaving the sea is entirely voluntary. Each generation must be played from hatchling upwards. When sentience is reached in the tribal phase the game type changes, as you develop their knowledge, designing and building tools and huts. Depending on what you give them, the species will become aggressive or intelligent, and what you make them do is encoded into the species. Everyone else with you species will suffer their wrath or benefit their ingenuity. When you have the biggest tribe in the area (by merging with or eating the other tribes) you move into the city phase
Much like SimCity, only you design the buildings, among other things. This gives way to the civilisation phase, where you build long distance transports and meet other cities and races on the planet, again, you can form diplomatic ties, or annihilate them (if they don't beat you to it)
Taking control of the planet, you move into that last, sandbox phase: galactic. You design ships and leave the planet. Further research gives you terraforming, Genetic engineering, galactic meddling etc. All the editors are opened, and you can land on other peoples' planets.
Sorry about all this, but I'm just so excited about it, plus I was being paid to endorse the game
Spore
Spore
