The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Among gaming geeks, Will Wright is something of a legend. This is the man who is responsible for many of the most popular games ever produced. Beginning back with the Civilization series, when games were first hitting the personal computer market, and extending up through the SimCity and SimEarth phase to the Sims, the most popular video game of all time, Will Wright has covered a lot of ground. Now heÕs back with Spore, a game that has been coming for several years and which is completely different from anything that has been released before. Wright calls Spore a Massively Single Player Online Game. This is different from games such as World of Warcraft or Everquest, which are called Massively Multi Player Online Games. In these games, you sign in to a space online and collaborate with possibly hundreds of players all over the globe to complete quests and tasks. Working at the advanced levels, many things can only be accomplished by working together. Spore is different. Spore is a game where players begin with a single-celled organism that they control. Swimming around, this bacteria simply needs to eat things that are smaller than it and avoid being eaten. But as this organism gets stronger and larger, it eventually moves out of the water onto the land. Once there, players begin evolving their creatures, choosing from a library of hundreds of different body parts, shapes, and traits. Longer legs may give them a speed advantage while a sharper beak might give other creatures help in other ways. As your creatures progress, they eventually build a civilization of buildings and transportation that is fit for them. This is where the game changes over to a one similar to SimCity. Players must build up their economy and gain strength so that they acquire new technologies. This is where the massively single player part comes in. Using your Internet connection, players can not only build their own creatures, buildings, and technologies, but they can browse through a database of things that have been built by all other players and borrow things from them. While you never actually interact with the other players, you can use their creativity and ideas in your own game. Once your civilization has advanced far enough, you enter the next stage of the game: space exploration. Your little creatures can build spacecraft when they have advanced far enough and set off to explore hundreds of other planets which your computer will populate with the creatures of civilizations that are stored in its database and which have been created by other players. Wright isnÕt telling whatÕs there, but the ultimate goal of the game is to reach the centre of the galaxy. Games like this are simulations. They are like science experiments inside of your computer as they allow players to try something out, see the results, and then go back and change it if they are not happy with what happened. While Wright has emphasized that this game is different from others that came before, he also says that it is meant for casual gamers as well as the dedicated hardcore group. ([email protected])
