Developer: Maxis    Publisher: EA
Platforms: PC    Genre: Transends Bounderies
Release: Q1 2007    Rating: Pending
Players: 1    MSRP: $49.99
Website: www.Spore.com

Will Wright has the reputation of being a developer of sandboxes, rather than games. Sandboxes where we may control entire cityscapes, survive from the perspective of a lowly ant, or simply play out the mundane acts of our day-to-day life. He packages these "experiences" and calls them games.  There are no guns or killing. You can find no puzzles, riddles, adventure or action, yet record numbers of people buy these games and enjoy every minute of them.  He gives us the ability to experience the ordinary, and somehow makes it fun.


Will Wright is now poised to open up a new section of sandbox for us to play in (Or pee in, depending on your mentality) with his new game, Spore. What exactly is Spore?  Well, Spore isn't as much a game as it is a simulation of creation itself, ironically making Will's title as a Gaming God increasingly more apt. This new title happens to inject everything into his sim formula that was absent before; from guns to adventure, these additions open up the genre for a whole new spectrum of players.


The game is played in a total of six phases. Starting with the Tidepool phase, you play as a single-celled organism trying to survive in a simple 2D environment.  As you eat and grow stronger, you begin to evolve and change.  Eventually you progress not only in form, but in location as the world transforms into a 3D aquatic environment.  Your critter eventually ventures out on land, where you can begin the Creature phase.  As the evolutionary process continues, your creature hunts for food, reproduces, and tries to eek out an existence.  As it continues to evolve, you are able to influence and change its development via the creature editor.  With this editor, the sky's the limit; anything you can imagine, you can create for your creature.  You can mold and craft it in any image you like and the game will animate it on the fly, dictating how it moves, acts, and survives.  The more adaptable your creature is, the better chance it has of surviving.  Natural selection can be seen in full swing, present and accounted for. 


Next is the Tribal stage, where your creatures form a crude society with shelter and the use of simple tools.  They begin to develop their own unique culture and customs, such as tribal dances. After this comes the City phase, in which your creature's society begins to flourish with advances in industry and technology. With your city built and society established, the Civilization phase begins with your creatures reaching out and interacting with other life forms on the planet. This can occur in the form of peaceful co-existence or all out war; you can send out diplomats to neighboring societies, or create machines of war (these are made with the same tools as your creatures and will be procedurally animated as well) to crush your enemies. Your objective, if such a thing can exist in a sandbox game, is to unify and control the planet.


Once the world is under your control, the time for the Space phase comes.  Your creatures develop spacecraft, and it is at this time that the true scope of the game presents itself.  You can travel to any planet in your native solar system and, with the proper upgrades, explore other star systems and eventually the entire galaxy.  The zooming system demonstrates the scale of the game; you can scale down to a single blade of grass, or all the way out to the entire galaxy; watching it slowly swirl, stars twinkling.  You can do any number of things at this point.  You can simply travel around exploring worlds, populating them, dominating them, terraforming uninhabitable worlds (or if you want to be cruel, already inhabited ones). If you find a hostile world (or just want to be a jerk), you can obliterate entire planets from orbit. So that things don't get old, gamers are also given the option of missions in which to participate in this phase.


There are many incidental features that really make the game stand out.  For example, each time you start up Spore it will connect to Maxis servers and collect data on creatures other players have created, inserting them into your own game galaxy so that planets will be peppered by real player-created ecologies. One problem may arise from this; as a friend so eloquently put, "I'm just afraid of the day that I start up the game only to come across an 'Apenislol'."  You also have access to the Sporepedia: a database that is continuously updated, cataloging info on each creature, its origin, and the universe at large. What you get is essentially a big encyclopedia, for you to read as you please and learn about your game world.

Will Wright has done it again, and this time he has outdone himself like never before by literally laying out all of creation before us and saying "Go ahead.. play."  Have fun in the sandbox, because I know I will. Just look out for the occasional spot of pee...

Spaniard Has a few words with Will Wright.
E3 Trailer
E3 Gameplay 1
E3 Gameplay 2
Bonus
Robin Williams plays Spore

this would make for a really crazy mmo, although, it would be kind of mean if you were  at the point of blowing up planets and you happened upon somebody that was just starting out.  ZAP BOOM GAME OVER.