Spore Game Overview

Spore is the brainchild of Will Wright, creator of the best-selling PC-game of all time, The Sims. Like The Sims, Spore allows the user to "play god," controlling various aspects of their characters - or creatures, in this case - to create a gaming experience like no other. Players are given complete control to design and manipulate their characters' appearance and behavior as they take them through various stages of the evolutionary timeline. From the simplest molecular form to intergalactic space travel, Spore is really like several games in one with each "phase" having unique gameplay related to that stage.

The full version of the game is due to be released on September 5, 2008 in Europe, and September 7, 2008 in North America and other territories. Spore will also be available for direct download from Electronic Arts on September 7. It has now officially been confirmed that Spore will also be available on the Nintendo Wii.

Gameplay

Each phase of Spore represents a different evolutionary stage as players guide a species of their own making through different puzzles and challenges. In the earliest stages of the game, players engage in simple puzzle games to advance their molecular organisms to new evolutionary stages. Once the organism has become a creature, gameplay changes to resemble an action-RPG. Eventually, players will be able to command tribes, and then civilizations, of their species in gameplay that resembles its predecessors like SimCity and Civilization. Finally, players take their species into outerspace to interact with creatures from other galaxies.

The game developers intentionally differentiated each game phase to make them increasingly difficult and complex while maintaining its own identity. By allowing players to remain in a particular level for as long as they want, players can choose to hone their skills on a particular level, or continually take new creatures through the entire evolutionary process, experimenting with different game characteristics to see what works best.

Although the game may be played offline, a large component of the game is the ability of players to connect to each other online, thereby introducing their own species to other players' creations at different stages in evolutionary development, making gameplay more complex and interesting.