Spore to finally appear later this week
More than a year late
ELECTRONIC ARTS' long awaited evolution title Spore is at last set to go on sale at the end of this week, about three and a half years after the game company began work on it.
The game is being released more than a year late. The company claims delays were caused by final polishing and the addition of peripheral features such as in-game social networking.
Spore has generated intense interest among gamers, as well as high expectations. During the summer, the company let people design creatures to populate players' virtual worlds. Gamers responded by creating over three million fanciful creatures with a vastly diverse range of different shapes and characteristics. The entire population of player designed creatures may be encountered by each individual player in their own virtual game world.
In Spore, players guide the "evolutionary" development of virtual creatures and constructs from tiny globs of proteins through primitive organisms and complex creatures to societies, planets and galaxies. Scientists caution that real evolution actually works in ways far more complicated than the simplistic mechanisms Spore depicts, but they welcome the thoughtful interest in evolution that the game is anticipated to generate among its players and critics.
The game Spore is the invention of accomplished game designer Will Wright, developer of the wildly successful Sims series game franchise that has taken in more than $1 billion in revenue since its launch in 1989. Analysts believe that EA has sunk $75 million into Spore.
Spore will be available at stores in Europe on Friday and in North America on Sunday. µ
See Also
Atheists
most miffed over religion in Spore
EA
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EA
Games banks on Spore
Spore
could be the greatest god game so far
Sims
man to develop evolution game
L'Inqs
Wall
Street Journal
New
York Times (subscription required)
Comments
I won't be buying this game
I won't be buying this game after I bought Mass Effect and had to dick around with EA after only one activation. They said you will have THREE activations before you have to contact them and more activations will be on a case by case basis. Well they lied. I will never buy another SecuROM online activation type game again. Instead I'll wait until they crack them and hit up Torrent. The only way to get rid of this type of DRM is to not buy it. The only way to play games with this activation after vowing not to buy them is to pirate them. Take that EA!Another sale lost due to DRM
Another sale here lost due to the pretty nasty DRM included with Spore. And I was actually planning on buying it until all the details began to emerge.Besides, everyone knows what will happen. The DRM will be cracked and it'll up on BitTorrent within a few days of the release. As usual.
in-game social networking
Right there they just lost me. I don't need social networking of any kind, I have real friends, thank you very much.And now that I read the comments, I learn about DRM and yet more online activation. And the cherry on the cake is that it has EA's buggy download service all over it. I've already lost BF2142 to their crap key management, I'll never buy any downloadable content from them again.
Yep, if I ever do try this game (not that it interests me, but one day it eventually could), it'll be the pirate version for sure.
Piracy may not be nice, but it's the only way to be sure you can play with a game from EA.
And it's a sad thing that it has to come to that.