Spore

Spore is a video game that consists of 9 releases

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Spore spreads itself a little thin, but the epoch-spanning gameplay and communal creature creation culminate in a one-of-a-kind experience.

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Simulate the development and progression of an alien species as it evolves from a single-celled organism to a sapient level, rises up through various stages of civilization, and eventually becomes a space-faring species.

Overview

Spore is the latest game from the prodigious brain of Will Wright and aims to simulate the development of an entire species. The player begins the game in the form of a microscopic organism that arrives on a planet via exogenesis or panspermia, deposited in the primordial oceans by a meteorite impact. From this point on, the player has the ability to change the physical shape of the creature, giving it different evolutionary traits depending on what path the player wants his life form to take. Eventually, the creature evolves to the point of sentience, and a new gameplay mode begins in which the species establishes its own civilization. Cities are built, technology is researched, and eventually the player's species becomes capable of space flight; the player is able to first explore and colonize their home solar system and later, the entire galaxy. Will Wright has stated that the game's overall goal is to get to the center of the galaxy, and that the game does, in fact, have an ending. What the ending is, however, remains to be seen.

EA is already planning Spore not just as a game but an entire franchise. The property has already been targeted for post-release expansion packs, Wii, and iPhone adaptations are already underway. Additionally, EA has announced an iTunes-style "Spore Store" which will be built into the game itself, allowing for the digital distribution of future Spore expansion packs as well as Internet sales of Spore merchandise including t-shirts, posters, a collectible card game, and possibly custom figures created from 3D prints of submitted creature designs.

Spore Creature is the Nintendo DS version of spore, featuring different gameplay and overall design based more on story.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Spore takes place on a massive scale, and as such, the game generates many of its assets through procedural programming and system interconnectivity. The majority of Spore's content is generated both by the game itself, by the player in his own game, and by other players. Spore is being referred to as a "massively single-player" game, in which the procedurally generated content (animals, sentient species, planets, vehicles, civilizations, and so on) of each copy of the game are spread to every other copy of the game on the planet, as long as that person's computer is connected to the Internet. Spore's gameplay is comprised of five individual phases, each based on a previously released franchise and genre. The initial cell or "tide pool" phase is based on a blend of Pac-Man and Flow, the creature phase is based on World of Warcraft, the tribal phase is based on Populous, the civilization phase is based on SimCity or Civilization, and the Space phase is based on Master of Orion.

Editors

There are a total of eight editors in the game, governing the creation of vehicles, buildings, creatures, and more:
Each editor has a built in complexity limit to prevent the overpowering of vehicles or creatures. However, this may be easily overridden by a console command.

Game Stages

The game consists of five stages in which you will play through using various play styles while following the life cycle of your creature and the galaxy that they are in.

Cellular

After a cinematic opening of a meteorite crashing into a planet, the player begins his creature's journey as a microscopic cell, or microbe. During this stage, using the control of the mouse, you must survive by eating smaller microbes and avoiding larger ones, similar to gameplay in Pac-Man or flOw. After you have eaten enough, the microbe will lay an egg, allowing you to enter the first editor. In the Microbe Editor, you edit your cell with various parts including weapons, eyes, appendages, etc. These will aid you in survival and also grow your creature. After you leave the editor, your cell enlarges and the camera zooms out, allowing you to see even larger and more versatile microbes. After eating enough food, you progress into the Creature Stage.

Creature

Upon finishing the Cellular Stage, you will begin constructing your creature that will become your official species throughout the rest of the game. The Creature Editor (along with the other editors) will function the same way as the Microbe Editor, however will allow you to create a sentient, land fairing creature using arms, legs, eyes, mouths, etc. You will then need to carry out tasks such as eating, communicating, and eventually mating. You will encounter many other forms of creatures, both predator, prey, and your own species, and you basically play in a third person free roam. By doing so you will earn DNA points for the editor and evolve your brain, which is required to move onto further stages. After visiting the editor multiple times and meeting the requirements for brain level, mating with another creature of your species will allow you to advance to the Tribal Stage.

Tribal

After mating, your creature becomes sentient, which means it is intelligent enough to communicate and hold relations with other creatures. The gameplay style now switches to somewhat of an RTS; you can now control multiple creatures of the same species. The goal of this stage is to grow your tribe to fifteen members or conquer/ally with five other tribes on the planet (no matter what the species) by way of violence, diplomacy, or religion. Each tribe has a hut, which acts as a base of operations and can have many things added for the tribe members, such as for entertainment and weaponry, however at the cost of food. Your tribe also has 2 special abilities based on how you played creature, for example a omnivore type creature in tribal will be able to summon all creatures around it at the moment to help in combat and will be able to cause a giant sea monster to knock fish out of the water for free food.

Civilization

When the Tribal Stage is complete your creatures move on to build a city. Gameplay still acts as a RTS, however also adds in the need to maintain your own city, such as Sim City. Once again the goal is dominate the other cities around the planet, however with the addition of having to collect gas from geysers spread across the planet and keeping your enemies away. Cities are obtained in one of three ways. The first two invovle building military or Religious units and sending them at a city. If victorious it will be conquered or converted respectively. Both of these methods likely will start a war. The third peaceful method is building Economic units and sending them to open a trade route, leading to you eventually making an offer to buy the city.

Space

The final stage of the game allows you to construct a UFO, which grants you many abilities to help you explore and possibly conquer the galaxy. Hundreds and hundreds of solar systems are available to be explored, and with the use of the many tools that your UFO will gain you will be able to manipulate planets, scan for intelligent life, interbreed creatures, and even obliterate a planet entirely, which in turn may cause a new asteroid belt to form. During your encounters with other intelligent species, you may choose to once again settle things peacefully or start an intergalactic war.

Controversy

SecuRom DRM

EA has limited each copy of Spore to five individual installs by the user at any given time; Also the game will re-authenticate any time you add new downloaded content from the Sporepedia. If the user surpasses the five install limit they will receive an error message that will ask the user to verify the registration code and to reinstall the game. Any further issues may be forwarded to EA's support service.

Religion in Spore
In an interview with Eurogamer posted August 11, 2008, Will Wright claimed that most of the "religiously" oriented criticism of the game has come from what Wright called "Militant Atheists", instead of the expected religious audience.

Anti-Spore.com

A newly launched website called antispore.com which claims Spore is teaching kids evolution. Also the website claims to want the E rating pulled and made into a M Rated game. The website was later revealed to be a hoax following references to the often implausible nature of content posted on the internet and Poe's Law.

System Requirements

Minimum System Requirements

Windows XP:
Processor: Pentium 4 @ 2 GHz or Athlon Equivalent
Memory: 512 MB
Hard Drive: 6 GB Free
Video Memory: 128 MB with Pixel Shader 2.0 Support
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c
Keyboard & Mouse
DVD Rom Drive

Windows Vista:
Processor: Pentium 4 @ 2 GHz or Equivalent
Memory: 768 MB
Hard Drive: 6 GB Free
Video Memory: 128 MB with Pixel Shader 2.0 Support
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c
Keyboard & Mouse
DVD Rom Drive

For Computers with Built-In Graphic Chipsets
Processor: Intel Pentium D @ 2.6 GHz or Intel Core 2 DUO @ 1.8 GHz or Equivalent
Memory: 768 MB
Hard Drive: 6 GB Free
Video Memory: Intel Integrated Chipset, 945GM or above
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c
Keyboard & Mouse
DVD Rom Drive

Supported Video Cards

ATI Radeon series
9500, 9600, 9800 X300, X600, X700, X800, X850 X1300, X1600, X1800, X1900, X1950 2400, 2600, 2900, 3650, 3850

NVIDIA GeForce series
FX 5900, FX 5950 6200, 6500, 6600, 6800, 7200, 7300, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950 8400, 8500, 8600, 8800

Intel Extreme Graphics
GMA 950, GMA X3000, GMA X3100

Mac System Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
Intel Core Duo Processor
1024 MB RAM
ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
At least 4.7GB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for creations.

The game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac).

For (Mac) computers using built-in graphics chipsets
Intel Integrated Chipset GMA X3100
Dual 2.0GHz CPUs, or 1.7GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent

Supported Video Cards

ATI Radeon(TM) series
X1600, X1900, HD 2400, HD 2600

NVIDIA GeForce series
7300, 7600, 8600, 8800
Intel(R) Extreme Graphics
GMA X3100
Spore will not run on the GMA 950 class of integrated video cards.

Graphics Problems

Spore does not support anti-aliasing and is limited to 30 frames per second at all times. Also, by not being displayed at the standard LCD monitor refresh rates of 60 fps, you will notice screen tearing, which can be very distracting during the later parts of the game. Unfortunately, there is currently no patch to fix these issues. Graphics driver software, however, such as nvidia forceware, can be used to enable anti-aliasing, texture filtering, and vertical sync.

Limited Edition

Spore's limited edition is called "Galactic Edition" and will include the following bonus content:

Galactic Edition

The Making of Spore DVD
How To Make a Better Being DVD (a 50 minutes documentary by National Geographic Channel)
The Art of Spore (a 128-page hardback book with Spore artwork)
100-page Galactic Handbook
Spore poster
Exclusive packaging

Expansions and Patches

Creep and Cute

The Creepy and Cute expansion pack adds 60 new creature parts to the editor, 24 new preview animations, 2 new test drive backgrounds and 48 new paint scripts (split evenly into base, coat and detail layers and 12 complete styles).

New Content Patch

In the third expansion pack for Spore, Maxis added 24 new limbs to the creature creator, free of charge.

1.01 Patch

New Cheat: "evoadvantage". Enter this cheat when are starting a new Creature game to choose any creature from the Sporepedia. Start a new game with one of your more evolved creatures!
Display part statistics when you are in Build mode. Rollover any part and hold down the 'i' key.
New Cheat: "blocksmode". Turns creatures into their blocky representations.
More style filters. Open the cheat window and type: "stylefilter -microscope" or "stylefilter -norainbows" or "stylefilter -nextgen" to see the new styles
Added 70 new planet scripts with a low terraform score, especially of the "hot and high atmosphere" type

Animation improvements
Improved the planets fogging, blooming and lighting
Fixed animation issues with tool handling, hand walking and some of the more oddly shaped creatures

Creature phase: Improved the pacing towards the end of the game, and increased the challenge in Normal and Hard modes.
Tribe phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
Civilization phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
Space phase: Made Empires in Easy and Normal modes demand reasonable amounts of money in exchange for peace and adjust the level of punishment if the player doesn't pay
Space phase: Made disasters less likely to occur in Easy and Normal modes and increased the time between each attack from the enemy empire when the player is at war.

Creature phase: Improved the way posse members behave during threatening situations and fights.
Space phase: Made finding your home world and colonies easier in the Galactic view.
Tribe phase: Made it so that tribe members can travel on steep hills if they need to do so now, but their speed will be reduced a lot.
Fixed an issue with attacks not working on some bigger animals and larger animals not dying correctly
Fixed collect mission not completing correctly when all parts have been collected
Fixed problems with the "Rolling Thunder" and "Déjà Vu" achievements not being awarded as they should
Fixed floating parts not being deducted from the budget when loaded into creator
Fixed an issue with the rotation rings not resizing correctly when a part was resized and improved their look
Fixed an issue where the terraforming score of planet could differ when revisiting a solar system
Fixed the keyboard controls for zoom & pitch in the Colony Planner not working properly
Fixed a crash that could occur when watching an epic creature attack a city
Fixed some issues where the game would freeze when using the Creature Tweaker tool or when capturing a planet in solar view
Fixed an issue where not all tribe members would obey the raid order when a large group was ordered to raid
Fixed an issue where banning a creation from one of your other saved games would black out the main menu

Bombcast

Giant Bombcast Spore Edition

General Information Edit

Game Name	Spore
Platform(s)	Mac PC
Publisher(s)	Electronic Arts EA Games
Developer(s)	Maxis Software
Genres	Add a new genre Real-Time Strategy Role-Playing (RPG) Simulation Strategy
Themes	Add a new theme Sci-Fi Comedy Management
Original US Release	Sept. 7, 2008 need a fuzzy date?
Original US Release	know the real date?
Aliases