The spore (Will Wright's new game) creature creator demo comes out tomorrow, but some clever little devils on the internet managed to get their hands on it a couple of days ago and released it early. Since the demo is free anyways, and since I fully intend to purchase Spore (the full game)
come September, I felt little guilt as I booted up the demo a day early.
My impression? If I wasn't planning on buying Spore before hand, I certainly would be planning to do so now.
What the Spore team has managed to do with procedural animation (the game engine creating animations on the fly rather than some guy hand-crafting the animation before the game's release) is astounding. While the demo for the creature creator is fairly limited in its parts selection, I have seen a massive variety of creatures, and they all move wonderfully, or creepily, or majestically, etc...
Perhaps the most incredible feat is how creatures are shared between people. Since this isn't the official demo, the servers for the online (and in-game) creature trading system is down, but you can still trade creatures with someone else by saving your creature for transfer (done in-game with a single button click), and then you send the 100KB or so .png image to your friend and he adds it to his creatures folder. Done and done. No hacking, no opening the console, and I don't even have a clue how an image file saves every single detail of your creature, but it does.
With Spore just on the horizon, it's hard to even care about EA's announcement about The Sims 3.
P.S. The Sims opened up gaming to a lot of women, I hope that Spore can act as an even better gateway.
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Spore sounds awesome.
Its strange how much more progressive Bend is than Portland in terms of female gamers. From what Armand's friends have told me, they were nowhere in site whereas Bend was just bursting with nerd girls.
Most of my female friends got into games the same way I did: playing the NES or the SNES when they barely knew how to talk. Most of them played what a hip young parsons would call the "'splody ones". You know, like Halo, or Call of Duty, things that like.
But yeah, not to miss the entire point of your entry, being stuck on what sentence and what not.
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