Will Wright's Masterpiece: Spore!

Spore is, quite simply, the biggest single game ever created. If you think at previous Maxis games, like the Sims or Simcity, they a quite large scope and they were "open ended games".

Spore is more innovative, because you're going to create and play a civilization... starting from an unicellular being!

Yes, the game will feature 5 different phases of play:
1) The Tide pool phase: you are a micro organism like oceanic plancton and you need to grow and evolve eating smaller beings and avoiding predators. Think of it as an updated version of "Pacman" that meet "Aliens". You are shaping the rest of the games starting from this phase, because as you grow, you get to add features to your "Avatar".
The features cost "dna points" that is your ingame money.
2) The Creature phase: Once you reach the land, you begin exploring a tridimensional environment. You task during this phase is to evolve and reach "sapience". Of Course you need to eat, evolve, mate and defend your litters.
3) The Tribe phase : As soon as you are smart enough, your race will start creating a small society and your task will be to help them reproduce and survive the environments. You will probably taste the first conflicts here... even with members of the same race but of different creed. As soon as you have 20 living members you begin fase 4..
4) The Civilization phase: you need to conquer your planet and in order to do so, you build cities and armies. During this phase you can build an immense array of vehicles using an editor. As soon as you have conquered of allied with all the factions, you begin the last phase....
5) The Space phase: during this open ended phase you explore a galaxy of 500 THOUSAND STARS, colonize, terraform and make contacts with other species. A very interesting approach is that the game will download real races played by other players and will adapt them to your game (if they were played aggressively, they will be also aggressive during your game).

Each phase will feature some editors that will allow you to customize your creature, tribe, vehicles. Some of this will be sent to the central Maxis server, rated and distributed to other players!
So a part of my vision will be shared by remote players somewhere in the world!

That will make the game more interesting and durable as the time passes!

Spore Game Development

The full game is currently being developed for windows and Macosx (Yippeee!).
Some version for Nintendo DS, Mobile phones and Wii are also being developed, but will probably focus on only one of the phases of game.

There's no real game to play in Creature Creator. You're presented with a blob, which you can manipulate into a shape, pulling its spinal cord in every direction possible, before adding a head, limbs and various optional extras, as if designing a new car. The basic model might be fine, but the luxury model includes extra armour for added safety. It's all incredibly simple, completely mouse driven and lots of fun.

You can throw together a collection of limbs and create something in less than a minute, but you won't be able to leave it there. Each limb can be subtly altered at each joint and moved around the body until you're completely happy - minor changes can completely alter the way your creature walks. Once you name something it's essentially a real virtual creature, and it's all too easy to spend upwards of 30 minutes tweaking minor details.

Little problems aside, Spore: Creature Creator is something everyone with a capable PC or Mac should try out. The demo is available for free and is the same as the full retail product but with far fewer body parts to choose from. For £5 though, which also goes towards the final cost of Spore when it's released in September, the full Creature Creator is well worth owning.

Download the demo!