![]() ![]() Third party businesses have also been staging formal contests, including Yahoo Games and. Playing with Spore's Creature Creator this weekend was a little surreal. We've seen the feature demonstrated many times before, but actually getting some quality time to play at home was a welcome experience. ![]() Maxis and EA arranged for a variety of press and celebrities to take the creator for a spin this weekend, and we got our chance to submit a creature to the early Sporepedia. The Creator itself, which will be hitting the public soon, is impressively flexible. All of the pieces you place on your creature have various manipulation points which you can click, drag, and turn to mold your digital putty into something unique. ![]() You can alter how many spinal columns it has, how many limbs it sports, whether it has eyes sticking out of its head or recessed into its body-the options really are pretty vast. Wings, beaks, claws, horns, and more are all available. The slick interface makes it easy to play around: you can click and drag almost everything, and little arrows act as intuitive direction points that you can manipulate to sculpt the creature and all its bits. Together with the game's strong interface, the tight integration of social media is welcome. The Sporepedia already has a pretty substantial catalog of creatures-these press sneak-peaks work into EA's plan of populating the game with content prior to its release. There are some cool social networking features, as well. Within moments of putting our creature on the site, a comment from one of our friends came in. Sharing our creature, and downloading others, is a snap. Browsing was fun and there are already some cool designs in the Sporepedia. The question here is whether this taste test is worth $10. It's hard to say, really, as your mileage will inevitably vary. For the creative, the Creature Creator may be all one really needs from the Spore experience. But aside from making a character, uploading it, and playing around with it in a limited sandbox area, there's not a whole lot to do other than fawn over your creations. Regardless, we're looking forward to seeing how this pans out once the full game is released. But for now, it's just too much fun to create these little creatures.For the final touches, I attached some hooves, grasping claws and a forked stinger to add a bit of menace to my pudgy mole monster. Color was a no-brainer: I picked the orange and green of the most recent issue of Wired. And I went with scales, for no particular reason. * *The Creature Creator's procedural scripts determine how, exactly, the textures will wrap around your creature's body, and in my case provided satisfying results. Oh, and his name is Trunk.Įlapsed time, from pickle to. end result? About five minutes, which includes picking up the wondrously simple interface for the very first time. I cranked out Sparky (seen below, dancing with his kids) just a few minutes later, again with ease. This is the type of game your parents should've warned you about: I can already see meals skipped and engagements missed as players sit in front of screens churning out simple, bizarre creations to populate Spore's worlds, or maybe even taking the time to craft a beast that's a bit more complex. ![]() Spore, starting with the Creature Creator, blurs the line between social networking and videogames. Strange bedfellows, sure, but an exciting prospect, particularly for a game whose content will spawn primarily from a rabid user-base. (There will be official offerings from Maxis Software, of course.) Every player (upon registering their game) is given their own page on the Spore community site, with RSS feeds tracking events in the game, their creatures' ratings based on community votes (Trunk: hot or not?) and other in-game news. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |