Spore Revolution

Buy Spore!!

Spore is available for sale today, you should be able to buy them at any gaming store and online.  Click below to buy from Amazon!  You can also download the game from the EA Store.

Games

• Spore, $49.99 USD from Amazon.
• Spore Creatures for Nintendo DS, $29.99 USD from Amazon.
• Spore Galactic Edition, $79.99 USD from Amazon.
• Spore Creature Creator, $9.99 USD from Amazon.
• Try the FREE trial Spore Creature Creator from EA.

Books

• Spore: Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Official Game Guides), $13.59 USD from Amazon.
• Spore Limited Edition Bundle: Prima Official Game Guide, $23.09 USD from Amazon.

I have found a Wired internet article called Review: Ten Things I Learned From Spore, written by Chris Kohler on September 7th 2008.  Its a fun read and seems like a fair and honest review to me.

Happy Gaming!!

Spore Prototypes

The Spore team at Maxis made a lot of different prototypes to help them design systems for the game Spore. Some of the early prototypes are available for download on the Spore website. They are not tested, supported, or easily explained.  If you're looking for something to do and can't wait for Spore to be released you really should go see. 

The prototypes are:
Cell Culture: a SimCity-like simulation of the spread of life and culture across a planetary surface.
City Maze: an agent-based city simulation prototype.  The player controls a city of sim creatures.
BIOME: a programmable cellular automata simulator that allows users to develop simple "SimCity-like" grid simulations.
ParticleMan: simulates gravitational attraction between particles in a cloud. This system was used to study such gravitational dynamics as orbits, nebula formation, star formation and particle streams from sources like pulsars and black holes.

Spore in the News

In the last couple months Spore has been in the news a whole lot especially with this year's E3. With its release date coming up real quick, Spore is getting even more hype.  The hard part is to read through all these articles that mostly say the same things, particularly when you have too many projects going on at once. lol  Here's a list of interesting articles I've come across:

Most criticism of religion in Spore is from "militant atheists", claims Wright written on August 11th by Johnny Minkley for Eurogamer.

Wright hints at Spore MMO written on August 11th by Johnny Minkley for Eurogamer.

Video game's user content spawns naughty web 'Sporn' last updated July 31st by Mallory Simon for CNN.

EA man wants to charge for Spore content published on July 30th by Ellie Gibson for Eurogamer.

Riccitiello: "Quality of EA Games Up Sharply" published on July 29th by Joe Martin for Bit-Tech.net.

Spore Creatures Could Challenge Copyright Holders published on July 23rd 2008 by Chris Nuttall for FT.com.

Wright: Spore has More Species than Earth published on July 15th 2008 by Oli Welsh for GamingIndustry.biz.

Spore is Made of the Wright Stuff written on July 14th by Chris Nuttal for FT.com.

Spore Origins for your Cell

Spore is available for your cell phone! You will be able to battle with your primordial creature in the battle arena as well as on your websites. Its exclusively for AT&T until September 4th, but will be available for more devices and more phones soon.  Visit the official Spore Origins website for more information!

Spore System Requirements

Copied right from the EA Store Website, here are the official Spore System Requirements:

FOR WINDOWS XP

• 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
• 512 MB RAM
• A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
• At least 6 GB of hard drive space

FOR WINDOWS VISTA

• 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
• 768 MB RAM
• A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
• At least 6 GB of hard drive space

When launching the game, some Microsoft Vista users may receive a warning about running out of address space along with a link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base. If you see this message, it is recommended that you follow the instructions and go to the website listed in the message to update your system.
For computers using built-in graphics chipsets, the game requires at least:

• Intel Integrated Chipset, 945GM or above.
• 2.6 GHz Pentium D CPU, or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent.
• 768 MB RAM

Supported Video Cards
ATI Radeon(TM) series

• 9500, 9600, 9800
• X300, X600, X700, X800, X850
• X1300, X1600, X1800, X1900, X1950
• 2400, 2600, 2900,
• 3650, 3850

NVIDIA GeForce series

• FX 5900, FX 5950
• 6200, 6500, 6600, 6800,
• 7200, 7300, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950
• 8400, 8500, 8600, 8800

Intel(R) Extreme Graphics

• GMA 950, GMA X3000, GMA X3100

Laptop versions of these chipsets may work, but may run comparatively slowly. Standalone cards that are installed in vanilla PCI slots (not PCIe or PCIx or AGP), such as some GeForce FX variants, will perform poorly. Intel integrated chipsets featuring underclocked parts, such as the 945GU, GML, and GMS, will not perform adequately.

Integrated chipsets such as the ATI Xpress and the NVIDIA TurboCache variants will have low settings selected, but should run satisfactorily.

Please note that attempting to play the game using video hardware that isn’t listed above may result in reduced performance, graphical issues or cause the game to not run at all.

The NVIDIA GeForce FX series is unsupported under Vista.

Pre-Order Spore!

Here is a list of all Spore things I was able to find for sale on Amazon. As much as I'd love to send you to the EA Store, they don't have an affiliate program. All pre-orders should be shipped on September 7th 2008.

Games

• Pre-Order Spore, $49.99 USD from Amazon.
• Pre-Order Spore Creatures for Nintendo DS, $29.99 USD from Amazon.
• Pre-Order Spore Galactic Edition, $79.99 USD from Amazon.
• Spore Creature Creator, $9.99 USD from Amazon.
• Try the FREE trial Spore Creature Creator from EA.

Books

• Spore: Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Official Game Guides), $13.59 USD from Amazon.
• Spore Limited Edition Bundle: Prima Official Game Guide, $23.09 USD from Amazon.

Spore Creature Creator

Yes I know I'm way behind. Here is Lizza and her two babies.. :D  I've been busy with other projects but this blog wouldn't be complete without it! By now you've quite possibly seen hundreds (ok maybe just a couple) of creature videos.  As soon as the creature creator was released tons of people uploaded their creations to YouTube and such.  In fact, someone commented to this blog about SporeTube, a video site just for spore creations.

You can download the FREE trial Spore Creature Creator from the Spore website . You could also pay the $9.95 for the non trial version with many more unlocked parts. The game's release date continues to be September 7th, and the game will also be available as a Direct Download from the EA Store! Buy the Spore Creature Creator, $9.99 USD from Amazon.

Spore Community Day Invitation

I received an invitation to Maxis this week!  The event is on Friday August 22nd from 10am to 6pm.  Unfortunately I won't be able to make it.  Here is part of the e-mail they sent me:

"We're hosting a Spore Community Day for key North American members of the Spore Community. Since we can't invite all of our fans, we'd like to invite a group of Spore fansite owners and staff members to come out for a visit, get a sneak peek at the game and our studio, and share their experiences with their own communities. This is also our way of saying "Thanks" for your contributions to the community and interest in our project."

"At the event you’ll have an opportunity to play the game before it’s released,  meet and interview some of our top developers, and find out what a day with the makers of Spore is like."

Airfare and hotel room is provided, but I can't go and can't send anyone in my place... Drat!  I'll update on the 23rd whether other spore fansites have posted new stuff. The fact that they invited members of the community at all is really great.  With the economy headed like it is most businesses are finding ways to cut down costs, but EA has shown to us that it knows the importance of having a strong community to back up their product and are even willing to put some money on it. 

OMG! A Release Date!

The official release date has finally been set September 7th, 2008. Hurray!!  It was first announced in their very orange newsletter on February 12th 2008, so sign up now to get some good stuff from them!  I'm looking forward to seeing what they are giving out with their fan site kit. Below is the teaser video with the office release date announced.

Leipzig Press Video

This video has a great narration and takes you through the different phases. It has some new video footage as well.  There are a lot of videos out there now and the new ones are becoming more difficult to find because of this, and a lot of them are repeats. You don't really learn or see anything new from them other than see different creatures. If I wanted to introduce people to Spore, this is definitely a great video to start them off with.