But it is his newest creation, that is looking to become, quite possibly one of the best games ever! Spore is a massively single player online game. So why am I writing about it here? Have I gone mad? Well not yet, But Spore does have me waiting in excitement for its release! You can find Spore’s homepage here http://www.spore.com/

Spore is a massive God simulation game, due for release in September 2008, in which players control the evolution of a species, from its very beginning as a single cell organism, through to a sapient land walking creature. Right up to the development of interstellar travel, I mean how cool is that? One of the things that have always let me down in simulation games, is the lack of repetitive game-play, you can only evolve so far, for example in Age of Empires: Gold Edition. You can only evolve your race from the Stone age to the Iron age, which limits the playability of the game.

But in Spore the game play is completely open-ended and it uses “procedural generation” meaning that you can create within the game world, which provides a seemingly endless scope for game-play, and character creation.

Wright has been quoted as saying that the “Game will consist of several long phases” with game-play styles ranging from strategy to life simulation. But unlike other Sim style games, the player is not forced to finish one phase before moving to the next. But rather can choose how long they play each phase.

The game opens with a comet crashing into a planet, leaving the seeds for life to begin. Which opens up into the first phase of existence, the Tide pool stage. Within which your little microbe swims, once you have looked after your microbe (prevented it from being eaten) And have managed to get it to eat several other microbes. You can edit it, by changing its appearance and giving it new abilities and defensive strengths.

Eventually you have the option of moving on to land, and this is where it gets interesting! Well more interesting. As your creature evolves, its evolution depends entirely on what you do with it, its strengths and weaknesses will be characterized by how you choose to evolve it, and the personalities of user created species are dependent entirely on how the user plays them.

In the creature editor, players are also able to create their own species, And this is where the multi-player part comes into its own, Because everything that a player creates, creatures, vehicles etc. are all automatically uploaded into Spore’s online database. And from this database other players of Spore can choose to play as your creature, and use your vehicles. Wright has also been stated as saying “that users will be given statistics on how their creatures fare in other peoples games, so for example stats on how many times a user created species has been played by another gamer.” How often a user created civilization has been destroyed or had an alliance made with it. And it is this right here that revolutionizes the god simulation. For the first time you can create a species and send it out into an online gaming universe, and see just how good you are at creating life. And lets face it, who doesn’t like to play God on occasion? All the content you see in the game is user created. The game will create a sound ecology in your game, by importing what it thinks your world needs from other players content.

The genius of this game is that Wright has created a game where almost everything is created by the players! From the simple stages in the ‘Tide pool’ to the more advanced civilization stages. Wright has effectively created a multiplayer game world, using a single player game. And its a bold experiment in gaming. One that looks as if it will be a huge success! Hopefully more game designers will take a page out of Wright’s book, and experiment more with creating games, and game worlds that incorporate things we have not see before. Instead on just creating carbon copies of other game styles. As any gamer will tell you, we all want to play something we never have before.

In my mind Will Wright is a genius, and I can’t wait for this game to come out, so I can create and share my Spore universe. And become God (did I say that out loud)?

You can find heaps of information about Will Wright here at Moby Games.

And its worth checking out this video of Spore too! Check it out here.

Way back in 1995, (yes, in the last millennium) I was reading a gaming magazine (yes, it was made out of paper) and it was touting a title named ‘Confirmed Kill’ that was set to revolutionize interactive and simulation gaming for the PC. The screenshots were enough to captivate me. The article wrote of battles fought between literally *dozens* of real life, real time players in a World War II simulated air-combat theatre. This, quite literally, blew my mind.

Check out the rest of my nostalgic rambling after the jump.

I had to see it for myself. Went out, picked up a Suncom F15 E Talon joystick, which in my opinion is still the best non-force-feedback stick out there if you can find one that still works. Mine does. Got me a set of CH Rudder Pedals, a shiny new Supra 28.8 (!!!!1) external modem, and took to the skies. Sort of.

That was one of the best points about Warbirds (Confirmed Kill when I first started in beta testing), was that there was a pretty steep learning curve. While the graphics were as good as they could be back then while still preserving playable packet latency, the physics were what set this game apart from everything else. All physics and plane models, even the cockpit artwork, were as accurate as possible to facilitate really rewarding, and sometimes very frustrating, game play. I think it took me about an hour to figure out how to get my F4U Corsair off the runway in one piece. Dogfighting was another issue altogether; that took years to master.

I played CK through it’s beta, and then when it went through some changes and became Warbirds, it really started evolving. These guys did a great job keeping the game playable while expanding the game’s universe through time. They always kept the servers up, even when the number of users logged on topped 150 plus. This, I’m sure, was truly a feat in the dial-up days of DOS front-end gaming. While not specifically a RPG, Warbirds was also huge on the social gaming front. It brought people together from across the real globe, and pitted them against each other in nice ANSI blue skies. There was real camaraderie there, I myself was in a squad called the 356th FG, as well as a small stint with an ‘elite’ group dubbed the Shadow Knights. We had lots of great times on Warbirds (I’m sure our webmaster Eric (callsign: ‘cube’) has lots to say about it too) and I spent years playing it. These are the qualities that people are discovering only now, in communities like Steam and XBox Live.

Warbirds was truly ahead of its time and welcomed a new genre of games to people on the PC platform. Warbirds, along with AirWarrior and other early online simulations, really changed the landscape of multiplayer gaming. And, apparently, people still play Warbirds today! I can’t seem to find much info about our glory beta days of this game, perhaps it was too long ago for the Internet to remember. It’s important to go back to your roots, my friends. Does anyone remember this game? Let us know in our Forums. I’d love re-live some of the first days of true MMO gaming.

Special thanks to tm-t AKA -meng- for the screenshot. This may be the only proof that I ever played this game (callsign: ‘wolf’).

Now, get off my lawn.

The detail is rendered from photos giving it a very realistic feel. Put this into the multiplayer mode and here you have battles with up to 16 other fighter jets. The list of planes is larger than most other flight games giving you enough options to keep busy for a while. It has also been reported that it has been downloaded over a million times.

There are three multiplayer modes, Battle Royale, Team Battle, and Siege Battle. The first, Battle Royale, is a free-for-all. Get 16 players to go every man for him-self in a very intense fight. Team Battle is set up in two teams. Each team earns points based on the planes they shoot down. Siege Battle is a offensive-defensive game. One team would be defending their ground and the other is attacking.

On top of it all, Xbox 360 has released a set of throttle controllers for more realistic play. So, go ahead and pick yourself up a new controller and the game and get out there and play. This game is great when you have played yourself dry with first-person shooters and sports games.