spore

I cut this straight out of a review from Computer and Video Games. It sounds like a pretty cool game.

We don't like The Sims, but we do like its creator Will Wright - a man whose undiluted creative vision cross-bred with the vast resources provided by his monolithic paymasters at EA has just been waiting to create something marvellous. And now the marvellous thing is happening, and it's called Spore. We've touched on it before, but having met with the man and heard it all first-hand, we're still reeling. He effectively has every one of us from the very moment he saunters into the presentation room and breaks the ice by handing out bits of meteorite from a large bowl.

"You start the game very small, with a single-cell creature living in a drop of water," begins Wright, as tiny organisms flitted around the screen behind him. "There are things that it can eat, and things that can eat it. If you click on it, you can modify it by, for example, adding a spike. That lets it attack things that it couldn't attack before. Over several generations, it gets larger, until it is 20mm in size or so. Then it scales up to a 3D creature living in the ocean.

"It then lives in a full 3D environment, with a whole ecosystem going on around it. When it lays an egg, you can go back to the editor, where you can design its skeletal structure. You can pull bits off, and sculpt your creature's body. The parts that you put on determine how your creature functions in this world. If, for example, you add legs to your creature and it no longer has fins, it cannot swim any more, so it will walk out onto land. All the animations are generated depending on the physics of the animal that you've designed."

LAND LUBBING
Now with the gigantic screen behind him showing his newly non-aquatic creatures, and with our furious nodding almost out of control, Wright smiles and dives further into his mysterious creation. "Out on land, the creature has to survive so it can, for example, hunt other creatures. The computer decides the best way to fight - in this example, my creature has a spiked tail so it uses the tail as the primary weapon," he says, gesticulating towards his on-screen lizard-things. "Here, a whole ecosystem is being simulated, populated by creatures coming from other players. As they play the game, their creatures are put in a database, while my game is requesting that database. Every bit of content is highly compressible - for example, a 3MB creature actually compresses to about 1KB." A game that's moulded by being online, when you're not actually playing online? Jaws start to hit the floor at the sheer ambition and audacity of the man.

"To get back to the editor in this phase, you have to reproduce, which involves finding a mate, so you get your animal to make a mating call," continues Mr Sims unabated. "In this way, I am indirectly controlling the evolution of my entire species - every creature born from it will have the modifications that I made. You can make weird, very very goofy creatures if you want. We studied things like Neopets and Pokémon, and think that players have a huge amount of empathy with things that they designed themselves. You can, should you want, make a creature with six legs, and girls can design creatures that look cute." We agree, roll our eyes at the ineptitude of the fairer sex and laugh in condescending ways like the lads we are.

SWEET MUSIC
Getting back on track, Wright moves onto his creatures' brains. "When you get to the highest level of brain, you leave the evolution game and go to the tribal game, in which you are controlling a whole tribe," he explains, bringing up a screen reminiscent of many an RTS. "Your tribe of creatures can communicate and you can, for example, buy them weapons. You can buy them campfires, or a drum, so that they discover music, which might make them more ritualistic in the future. And you can upgrade the tribe's hut, grow the tribe larger and earn a higher level of tools."

Then we're into the city section of the game, already feeling as if we've been shown three amazing games in the space of ten minutes. Other tribes of the same species, yet with different cultures, set up shop nearby for trade and/or opposition. "You control your tribe with the city editor, which uses the AI of the game to understand the player and personalise the game to you. We've tried to build the simplest possible editor, which is easy enough that Sims players can use it, but is powerful," continues Wright as he plays first with Dr Seuss-like, and then sci-fi colours and designs.

"The next level is the civilisation level, where you are trying to build a nation by conquering cities, which you can do economically or culturally. You can capture cities by force or diplomacy, and you can even start a revolution. As you build roads and chain routes, you get a bigger and bigger overview, until you can see the entire planet. Now you are building a global super-power." This is where most developers would wrap up the presentation and head towards the door, but Wright's still only unveiled the top inch of his iceberg. Before we have time to think, there's a spaceship on the screen behind him.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
"Here, I've unlocked a UFO, which can be used to beam up creatures," he explains. "Eventually, with your UFO, you can pull all the way out into space to see your solar system, in which each planet is a sandbox that you can sculpt. For example, the planet closest to the sun features a lot of lava." We look down and discover that the pool of drool at our feet is a centimetre deep.

"Let's fly to this craggy moon. The first thing you want to do is establish life on this planet. But if I drop a creature on it, the creature explodes, because it has no atmosphere. So we have to build an atmosphere. To do that, we initiate geological processes by, for example, going to the editor and dropping a volcano on the planet. That causes out-gassing - we're trying to use fairly realistic processes. The editor here is like a very expressive paint program - you can put bases on your planet enclosed in bubbles, or make a whole civilisation under water. Bear in mind there are cheap tools and expensive ones. The most expensive one at this stage is a terraform device, which works on a planet in under a minute," explains Wright, perhaps showing his appreciation of both Star Trek II and III. "Now you can bring plants and animals in, and start establishing a colony, which earns you money to upgrade your UFO.

"For example, you can fit it with an interstellar drive. Now, we're trying to take the Hubble telescope objects that you've seen and bring them to life - the cursor now is basically a radio-telescope. You can listen to stars for signs of life and fly to those stars. They could be entire worlds that other people have created, which you can do anything to, but you won't mess up players' original copies of what they've created," he adds, reinforcing the slightly online mentality of his creation.

"Now you find a whole diplomacy game. You have to establish a shared language before you can communicate, which you do with a Close Encounters-style mini-game. This colony is firing rockets - they aren't friendly. If I have enough money, I get access to the best weapon, which blows up entire planets." Bloody hell, and we have to wait till next autumn? Sign us up now.