From the mind of Will Wright comes the hype juggernaut Spore. We’ve been watching and waiting for this game for long enough to watch actual evolution take place, but was it worth the wait?

First off, I’m not taking any of the crazy DRM issues into account here, as this is a game review and not a review on EA’s licensing practices, so be sure to read the many other articles on the issue on this site here, here, here, and here. I’m going to focus on the game itself. With that little disclaimer aside, let’s discuss the game itself.

Spore tasks players with evolving a single-celled organism of pure cuteness on up through several stages until they become a galactic superpower of cuteness. From the mind of Will Wright, you can see the cartooniness that made him ass-tons of money from Sims expansion packs — it’s prevalent in this game while the seriousness of the game that made him famous (SimCity) has gone the way of the dodo.

There are five stages of the game, each a separate evolutionary stage that plays slightly different than the last. The cell stage is by far the shortest and plays quite similar to a little game called flOw. It could very easily be a flash game for free on some website somewhere. The main goal here is to eat and survive.

It’s here that what you eat for the rest of the game is determined, and it’s the only time in the game where you’ll be able to change from a herbivore mouth to a carnivore mouth, thus changing what you can eat. You can even put both on your cell and eat EVERYTHING. What you eat is tracked on a history graph, and at the end of the cell stage, wherever you are on the graph determines what your creature will eat for the rest of the game. Once you’ve eaten all you can, it’s time to grow some legs and crawl up to dry land.

Once on land, the game transforms into a watered-down third-person adventure game where you can either attack other creatures or make friends with them. Your main task is to get DNA and parts to evolve into a more efficient killing or dancing machine. You’ll also now have to contend with hunger, and your diet choices from the cell stage come into play here, determining what you’ll be able to eat.

Herbivores will eat fruit from trees while carnivores will be forced to either scavenge for dead bodies or make some creatures dead to eat some meat. Omnivores, of course, can eat whatever they want. The nice part is that this has no bearing on your attitude towards other creatures at all. You want to be a meat eater and still make friends? No problem there. I mean, you’ll obviously not be able to make friends with everyone, as you’ll starve to death, but there is nothing stopping you from being a very social meat eater.

It all comes down to the parts that you put on your creature. Certain parts give certain stats that directly determine what your creature will be good at. There are trade-offs, of course, so you can’t be great at everything, but mix and match enough, and you can probably tackle whatever comes your way.

One evolutionary step after another and you’ll gain the ability to bring along friends in your flock. This is a great way for socially focused creatures to survive — make friends with brutal slayers of animal kind to protect your goofy dancing ass and you’re set.

Once you’ve accumulated enough DNA, you’ll evolve to the tribal stage. The sad part of this is that it’s the end of customizing your creature. The most you can do in the tribal stage is play a little dress-up. It’s neat and all, but depending on what your creature looks like at this point, the dressing up may be a pain. It’s sort of hard to put a head on something that is covered with horns and eyeballs.

The game itself transforms into a very generic real-time strategy game, where food becomes the most important thing in the world to your race. Other tribes will pop up and you’ll have the choice to either make war with them or play sweet music for them till they fall in love with you and start sending you food. Once you either befriend or destroy the other tribes, it’s time to form a civilization.

Now that you’re civilized, you once again can custom build some stuff, namely your planes, tanks, and boats. The creation tools are again the highlight of the stage, though economic and religious vehicles tend to be a little too… goofy for my tastes. It’s hard to take a tank seriously when the weapon of choice is a giant pipe organ and some horns.

The actual gameplay here isn’t that different than the tribal stage — instead of ordering your creatures around, you’ll be building vehicles and sending the vehicles around… though you’ll still be doing basically the same as before. You won’t be able to win by allying with the other cities, though. You pretty much have to take them over, but how you go about it can be a little different.

You’ll start off either religious, economic, or militaristic. Again, this is determined by your actions in the previous stage. You can’t actually change your style, but if you take over a city with another focus, you can choose to keep the focus of that city. This can be a bit of a burden if you’re looking to change your overall focus from what you started with to something else.

Religious and military takeovers are basically the same, though religious takeovers don’t seem to actually cause a war. Either way, you still drive up to a city and try to take it over. Economic takeovers, however, require you to be friends with the other city, and then set up a trade route. Trade routes make you extra money, and once they get to a certain point, you can buy out the other nation’s city.

Once you get all the other cities flying the flag of your nation, your race builds a spaceship and you can take to the stars.

The space stage is sort of a strategy game, though it’s a pain in the ass to manage your empire as you are just a ship flying around doing stuff (more on that in a bit). The goal of the space stage is to expand your empire, with a little caveat that you should focus on getting to the center of the galaxy. This is the one overarching mission, and it can be completely ignored if you so choose. The space stage is really where the “simy” sandbox style play that made Will Wright famous finally comes through.

The problem with the space stage is that you go from a relatively simple game with a moderately… moderate difficulty to a freakish beast of complexity. Not that it’s overly complicated really, but for only having one ship to control, it’s insanely complex. Imagine trying to control a game of Civilization, only instead of the omniscient control, it’s feels like a third person shooter.

To tell your city to build a wall, you’ll have to run Link or Marcus or Snake or WHOMEVER over to the city and then say, “Hey, build a wall.” Meanwhile, some town four hundred miles away calls and says, “Yo! We’re being attacked over here!” Being that you are the sole military unit in this freaky game of civilization, you have to run the whole way back to that city to protect it. It has potential, but the size of the galaxy in Spore works against it here.

That’s not to say it’s all bad. You do get tools eventually that allow you to place better turrets and such things to reduce your need to go to these planets for every emergency, but you’ll still end up going there, as the only way to make money in the space game is to sell spice. The only way to get spice is to fly to one of your planets that is gathering the spice and pick it up, and then fly around finding people willing to pay top dollar to buy it. There is no automated way to just bring in money in the game.

It wouldn’t be too bad, I suppose, but the buyers of the spice have random prices for the stuff, so it’s not like you can just, say, pick up all your pink spice and take it to planet X to make a shit-ton of money. Just because planet X paid a hundred-thousand space bucks ten minutes ago doesn’t mean anything now.

It makes the whole thing a giant time sink that just feels like busy work. People who’ve played any number of MMO’s will feel at home with the system, as it feels like they’re just trying to keep you busy doing mundane work so you’ll keep giving them your money.

It’s sad that the space game has the most problems and it seems to be where the focus of the game is. You could very easily start up a cell and run to the space stage in less than an hour if you really wanted to, while the space stage potentially has no end. With a purported half a million stars and who knows how many planets, taking over the entire galaxy would be quite time consuming to say the least.

Overall, the game is fun, if a little bit of a pain. Each stage is basically a very generic version of other genres of games and this keeps things pretty fresh, but they are VERY generic. If you’re a hardcore gamer then it might be kind of a let down, but for the casual crowd it’ll probably be a learning experience.

My wife is a causal gamer, and it was amazing seeing her struggle with some of the stuff in the game. Like a lot of The Sims players, she’s never had even a slight interest in RTS games, so things that came second nature to me, or seemed overly simplified, were confusing and difficult for her.

The thing that both my wife and I gathered from the whole experience, though, was that the game is incredibly fun, even though most of the fun simply derives from the fact that you made these things. There is something that is just awesome about flying to some other planet and seeing something new or something that you’ve made yourself in another game.

The pollination system, or whatever they call it, keeps the game fresh and interesting no matter what, and I have yet to see any giant penises… though I did find an entire planet of walking Sylvester Stallone heads. There is also something frightening about the idea that someone right now could be playing the game and coming across some of my crappy creations.

All in all, I’d say it’s a pretty good game. Making creatures and vehicles is by far the most fun, but the fun carries over to the rest of the game simply when you use those creatures you’ve created to do other things. The learning curve is a little steep at times, and that’s further complicated by the fact that each stage plays like a completely different game than the last, making it more of a learning wave. The space stage is definitely flawed, but is still a lot of fun.

I’d say the biggest problem with the game is that it falls in some kind of neutral zone of gaming. Fans of The Sims (who this games seems to be marketed for) will find it a bit difficult, and the AI can be absolutely brutal at times, whereas fans of SimCity will find the game simply too simple. The potential is there, but it falls a bit short. Even so, the entire idea of the sharing of creatures, buildings, and vehicles keeps the space game fresh and new for a lot longer than you would think.

Is the PS3-slim looking closer to reality than we first thought? IBM have announced that they will soon be producing a smaller, cooler, and potentially cheaper version of the Cell BE, the processor which powers the PS3.

Currently, the Cell is produced using a 65nm process, meaning the smallest thing on the chip’s die is 65nm wide. The new high-k process will be able to shrink this down to 45nm. This will produce smaller transistors on the chip, which in turn will require less energy to operate, produce an overall energy savings of around 40 percent, and reduce the total physical size of the chip by 35 percent.

Although shrinking the physical size of the chip won’t help shrink the total size of the PS3, reducing a lot of the cooling requirements of the Cell could lead to the removal of several cooling components and shrink the remaining ones, as well as the total cost of the unit.

Blu-Ray players have also been dropping in size, with some more recent models being slim enough to fit inside laptops. Although not currently produced in large quantities, it shows clear potential for other ways the PS3 could lose some weight.

Don’t go expecting your PS3 to drop a couple of dress sizes just yet, however. With the PS3 struggling to make a profit for Sony, it would seem unlikely they would push for a new model to be released too soon, especially considering how early we are in the PS3’s predicted lifespan. The Slim PS2 was released 4 years after the original launch of the PS2, so following that model, pencil late 2010 into your diaries.

Source: ars technica

How many gaming facts can you get wrong in one article? The New York Times says five. Five relatively well known gaming facts were right muddled up governor! The New York Times needed to get things straight, and it took them a week to do so.

Last Friday the New York Times discussed “essential hardware”, which was fine until reaching the joy that was the gaming section of this piece. It was full to the brim with factual errors that’ll make you cringe.

First up is Gran Turismo 5. According to the New York Times this game has already been released and is a worldwide bestseller for the Playstation 3. If only it had been released, but GT5:Prologue is only just reaching those in Japan.

Moreover, the author wrote with vigour that the Playstation 3 was available for a low price of $299. We wish! Does this inaccuracy reflect on the position of the Playstation 3 in the US psyche? No, it just shows the Time’s disinterest in video games. A theory supported by their following errors.

Halo 3 is not the first Halo outing on the Xbox 360, according to the Times. Since the original Halo games are playable on the Xbox 360 through backwards compatibility, they are apparently Xbox 360 games. At least they knew the game was out, and could justify writing about it being a best seller.

But wait, the New York Times can top this all with the piece de resistance: the Xbox 360 is powered by Cell. Aye, Sony has joined with Microsoft to put Ken Kutaragi’s brain child into the Xbox 360. That’s one of the Playstation3’s selling points, no wonder the Xbox 360 is trouncing it in the US.

Here’s the New York Time’s full correction in all its innocent glory, posted on the 4th December:

An article in Business Day on Friday about favorite gadgets of executives referred incorrectly to the video game Gran Turismo 5. It has not yet been released, and thus is not a best-selling game. The article also referred imprecisely to the game Halo 3. It is the first game in the Halo series designed for the Xbox 360; the earlier games, though playable on the Xbox 360, were designed for the original Xbox. The chip in the Xbox 360 also was misidentified. It has a Xenon chip, not a Cell processor. And the article also misstated the price of the Sony PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 3 starts at $399, not $299.

Bless. I said it’s like your Grandmother attempting to talk about the Pussycat Dolls; it’s also reminiscent of the current Prime Minister of Great Britain name dropping the Arctic Monkeys. Cringe.

Security researcher Nick Breese has harnessed the power of the PS3’s cell processor to allow him to crack passwords with only a few hours work – despite formerly taking days to solve.

An Intel chip can go through 10-15 million cycles a second, whereas the PS3’s chip can get through 1.4 billion.

“Brute force” password cracking is a simple method of simply trying every possible combination of characters until the correct combination is found. Having multiple cores in the PS3 chip allows it to try several passwords at once, speeding up the work greatly.

Don’t panic though! You won’t have a PS3 breaking into your bank account any time soon, though, as these eight-character passwords are rudimentary when compared to the sophisticated encryption used to protect online transactions and similar transfers of important information.

Source: BBC Technology

It’s quite funny what rumors can start in gaming forums, all from the poor comprehension of the few. So now, here’s a good one. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, developed by Naugthy Dog for the Playstation 3, could be ported to the Xbox360. We like this. Just as moronic as PS3 fanboys screaming about Bioshock coming over to their little baby.

So it all starts in an innocent interview with Evan Wells, Naughty Dog’s co-president, at Eurogamer. The question in question is this one, “How hard would it be to port Uncharted to the Xbox 360?” I will cut down Evan’s response into manageable chunks, and we’ll see what we can discern from it.

Firstly, he says “I won’t say that it would be impossible, but it would be very difficult and we most certainly would have to make enough concessions that it would start to feel like a different game”. Naturally, of course it isn’t impossible, or at least it would be hard to say it’s impossible without actually attempting to port the game. And since Naughty Dog developed the game exclusively for the PS3, it would indeed be very difficult.

We’ve already seen how third party developers are struggling with porting to the PS3 from the Xbox360. Quite simply, porting is a bitch. However, it’d be even more difficult in this case. Naughty Dog have used the SPU’s (mini processors on the PS3’s Cell) in their animation system, calculating physics and more. They have perfected this so much, that at this moment, much of the game relies on the specific nature of Cell. For example, Christophe Balestra (Naughty Dog’s co-Vice President) states; “We developed a brand new animation system that took full advantage of the SPU’s. Nathan Drake’s final animation is made of different layers like running, breathing, reloading weapons, shooting, facial expression, etc; we end up decompressing and blending up to 30 animations every frame on the SPU’s.”

Whether this animation system will translate over to the Xbox360 is hard to say. It’s certainly not impossible, but since the game was made with Cell in mind, some concessions would need to be made. Furthermore, since Uncharted is the best looking PS3 game, Naughty Dog have had to work very close to the PS3’s hardware to get the visuals they have achieved, and would need to work just as hard to achieve them on the 360 – meaning a port might take over a year.

Evan then gives an example of what might be conceded in the port: “One thing that would be particularly difficult would be keeping the game load-free. The HDD really came in handy and allowed us to have pretty big open levels with lots of detail.” Yes Uncharted is one of the very few games that has zero loading throughout the whole game. The game is completely streamed, and this is only possible with the PS3’s Hard Drive, which not every Xbox360 has. Not game breaking perhaps, but it would make it a very different game, making it less of the movie experience that it is trying to achieve.

Furthermore, the game takes up 22GB of a Blu-ray disc, whereas an Xbox360 DVD is only 9GB. Lets not get into a fanboy war about the advantage of Blu-ray, since the Xbox has Mass Effect, a huge game, in fact far longer than Uncharted in game length. But that somewhat misses the point, could Naughty Dog have compressed the game to fit into 9gb? Perhaps. However, once again they would need to make a lot of concessions, and spend money doing so, removing resources from making the visuals and gameplay as good as they are. The high quality surround sound, the hundreds of minutes of HD cutscenes, and the high-res textures all take up space. As Christophe says, “To get such high-resolution textures and movies, a Blu-ray was indispensable to achieve the graphic quality of Uncharted. We fill the disc at 91 percent and it’s optimized, meaning we don’t duplicate any data. That includes all our game data, sounds, 7 spoken languages and 102 minutes of movie.”

Some how Evan’s reply drew this response from a particular gaming blog: “In order to have those huge levels, it has to be installed on the hard drive, because the Blu-Ray drive is far too slow to load quickly (which is why in many PlayStation 3 games have repeated content on the discs.)” No the game doesn’t have to be installed on to the hard drive because the Blu-ray drive is too slow. There is no loading in Uncharted, none, and the hard drive helps with this yes, but the game isn’t actually installed onto the PS3: “We’re only using the hard drive as a cache, the game doesn’t need to be installed, but the fact the hard drive is on every PlayStation 3 helped our streaming technology dramatically.”

Moreover, the PS3’s blu-ray drive is not slower than the Xbox360’s drive when the 360 is reading a double-layer DVD, and let’s face it, most if not all games are on a double-layer DVD. Read speeds are approximately equal. And no, many PS3 games do not have repeated content on the discs. Oblivion is said to do this, for unknown reasons, but I can assure you that the 22GB’s of Uncharted does not include any duplicated data, though of course much of it will be extras and HD cutscene movies.

And so, does Evan’s comment mean Uncharted could be ported to the Xbox360? I don’t bloody know! Both consoles have not hit the roof of their capabilities yet, they both have a long way to go with developers squeezing more and more out of them each year. What I do know, is that they are very different beasts, and if you develop exclusively for the PS3 you have to think very differently about your game engine. Using the SPU’s means you have to program to the specificity of the PS3 hardware and this can result in very specific things, like Nariko’s hair (Heavenly Sword) or Naughty Dog’s animation system. Porting this over to the Xbox360 might just be more trouble than its worth. Let alone Naughty Dog is owned by Sony and anything they make will only be on a Sony console…

So in celebration of this gloriously absurd rumor I present to you Nathan Drake dancing in this hilarious little video: