Review of Spore
Steve Boxer (Next Generation) has a review of Will Wright’s Spore game in Business Week. That’s a long sentence. But you need to read Boxer’s review anyway.
[tease]
Will Wright does not do things by halves. That’s just as well, since with Spore, he will attempt to outdo The Sims, now officially the biggest-selling game of all time, having overtaken Myst and [shipped], in all its variants, in the vicinity of 60 million units.
Spore, undoubtedly, is his most ambitious project: It consists of five distinct phases, each pretty much a game in its own right, and mixes action-adventure, space-simulation, and RTS gameplay. But what will it be like to play?
[tease]
If you are feeling particularly vindictive toward a planet, you can hover above it and indulge in a spot of terraforming – such as submerging the main city under a lake. And you can acquire nuclear weapons that completely destroy planets, which is why Will Wright developed Spore’s database system, which sucks up and redistributes content created by other players (apparently, a fully compressed creature occupies a mere 3Kb).
Early indications suggest that Spore’s gameplay should live up to the hype – with the super-friendly yet powerful editors and the space phase offering particularly rich rewards.