BUY

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I never jumped all over the Spore bandwagon. To me, Spore was just an alien version of the Sims with some more customization and the added bonus of exploring the galaxy. Not my taste, but for a lot of people, Spore was going to be the next big thing. Sadly, it suffered from people finishingthe game quickly and way too many people creating creatures not suitable for the Spore universe.

But this is not that game. In this game, you land on the planet as an egg stuck in a shiny blue meteor rock. These rocks are affecting the inhabitants, helping them evolve. However, there are other meteors which negatively interact with the planet being deployed by your nemesis. You must travel to all the areas available and locate pieces to add to the great idol statue, usually by battling a boss character and solving puzzles in order to reach hard to get areas. Once you pimp out the statue, an ancient god should descend from the heavens and save you all.

Learn the basics in Mushroom Valley

Plot seem a bit thin? Well, this is a game that I personally feel is geared more towards a younger crowd, hence the E10+ rating and the fact that it is on the Wii. The story is very linear: complete a quest, gain a new part (sometimes with an ability like swimming or flying), equip new part at nearest nest, access next quest, rinse, wash and repeat.

Customization is key in Spore Hero. It is a Spore title after all, and there are 327 parts for you to discover and edit your Sporeling with. You can morph body shape, add colour and texture, and equip and remove pieces as you need, maxing out or adding new abilities. Equipping parts depends on your blue meteor meter and DNA chain. Each part will cost you a certain amount of blue meteor to equip, however your equip limit depends on what level your Sporeling is currently at. There will be times when you may have to sacrifice one in order to use another. Not to worry though, seeing as nests are plentiful and you can edit as you wish.

Edit your Sporeling at a nest

You will find parts are easy to come by in Spore Hero. Whenever you locate a pile of bones, shaking the Wii remote will make your Sporeling dig, uncovering either a part for yourself or sometimes a part for the idol. Some bone piles are larger than others and will offer more parts. Keep digging until the bones disappear. Completing quests is another way to earn parts, as is battling other Sporelings and winning. In particular, you can take on the Combat Master in the Ancient Grounds. Defeating him in battle fifteen times will allow you to take away his title as well as gain one new part for each victory.

Ah yes, the battle system. I am going to be brutally honest here: I hate it! Sure, it seems simple enough when you fight your first battle. Simply shake to hit, B to bite and Z to block. Then they throw some more at you. Jump with A then shake to kick, etc. They continue to pile up fight combos, but when it comes time to use them in battle, half the time you can’t pull them off. The AI seems to recover way more quickly than you can from a hit, and they can also pull off an attack quicker, too. More than once I had to put down the controller and walk away for a while. Incredibly frustrating for me.

Fight to earn parts and respect

In addition to fighting, Spores like to sing and dance. Sing, you say? Yes. However no microphones are involved. When you are prompted to sing, its all about how your controller is angled and holding the A button during the appropriate times. Angled up, straight across or angled downward will cause your Sporeling to “sing” different melodies. Mimic the actions of the other Spore creature you are singing with and aim for 100%. If you do not reach 100% you will fail and have to retry. I did encounter a few instances when the Wii remote did not properly register the direction in which it was pointing had changed, so keep an eye out for that. Dancing works by shaking your remote, nunchuck or both in accordance to the instructions on the screen. Just like singing, you must get 100% in order to win. If you do not, you will have to retry the event.

Spore Hero seems a bit on the short side, too. I mean, yes, you can spend hours fine tuning your Sporeling to look however you want it to. But the fun in that only lasts so long. If you play more like I do, you can find yourself finishing the game in about thirteen hours or so, not incredibly long for a $50 game. That said, the game is still enjoyable. Yes, I hate the fighting control scheme and yes, I found it a bit short, but if I still have fun playing the game, then they obviously did something right.

Overall Opinion

Pick this one up if you find it new on the cheap – I’d say $35 and under is a good deal for the amount of play time you will get with it. There is a bit of reading but not too much, so if you buy this for a younger child or one with lower reading comprehension you may need to be nearby to give them a hand.

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RENT

When I first got this game, I thought it would be an interesting, easy game. I’ve always wanted to try a Spore game, so this one seemed like a good place to start. I like the concept of the creature creator, so that was a lot of fun. One thing that really bothered me was that you can’t tell by looking at the body/base of your creature if you’re facing the front or back. The only thing that will give it away is when you put the arms and legs on, which is after you give your creature a mouth and eyes. If there’s a way to change this, I didn’t find it. There is a lot of different things you can put on your creature, like bat wings and fronds. The variety is really cool and could easily consume a good bit of time trying to make the perfect creature.

After you finish making your Spore creation, you go through a little bit of opening story. Then your ship crashes. Great, right? Well, this leads you into a tutorial about food, what kind of food is for which kind of creature, and how to eat food. It also teaches you how to move your creature. You move with the touch screen and stylus. Holding left on the d-pad charges your creature, and pressing the A button will make your creature attack by swiping it’s claws/grabbers/whatever you chose to give it.

A little more story later and you’re off to learning about combat. The controls are pretty simple. Left or A is a slash attack. Right or Y is spit. Up or X is bite. Down or B is block. You can use either the d-pad or the letter buttons to attack/block, which is pretty nice if you need the touch screen to move. Another control that’s good to know is that Start is, like usual, your pause menu.

A nice thing about the combat is the Bio powers. There are three different types. Some of the Bio powers are a thunder-based attack that stuns all of the enemies on your screen, and a flamethrower-style move that you can use then spin around to hit all of the enemies you can see. You can activate these by pressing either the left or right trigger and using your stylus to tap the button of the power you want to use.

More exploring leads you to fixing your spaceship and getting a tour of the things that it can do, like giving you the option to edit your spore creature and going to other planets. Interplanetary travel is a big part of the game. By going to other worlds, you can fight other creatures and work on a 100% completion of red and blue fragments, body parts, and bio powers.

If you and some of your friends all have the game, you can use the built-in wifi network on the DS to play with up to three other people. You can fight it out with your own spore creatures and share creature designs. It’s a good way to practice or just have fun if you’re stuck or bored with the main storyline.

Overall, this was a decent game. The whole concept of it is to travel to all the various worlds, fight against AI opponents, fight bosses, and collect the fragments. If you’re not a fan of the Spore franchise and silly though sometimes challenging combat, don’t bother, but if you like the controls and the concept, this game is definitely worth renting and trying out.

Review product was provided by EA Games and does not affect the outcome of this review.

Maxis has announced a new way to get your Spore fun on. Spore Islands has just launched on Facebook and is an original game that allows friends to compete for the survival of the fittest.

“In Spore Islands, players get to invite friends in their social web to play on their island, so creating this game exclusively for Facebook was a natural choice for us since they are the largest and most popular social platform for games,” stated Caryl Shaw, Senior Producer, Spore Islands. “What sets Spore Islands apart from other social games is that it offers a different kind of social interactivity where a player’s gameplay experience is directly affected by the choices and decisions their friends make. It’s an ongoing game, so player’s creatures and islands will be active at all times, whether the player is logged into Facebook or not.”

Spore Islands was developed and published by Electronic Arts Inc. Users get to choose their own island to live on, create creatures and evolve them and invite friends to live on their island. There are also various leaderboards to compare your stats on.

Play Spore Islands here.

“Spore has proven to be a huge hit with tween and teen boys. We are so excited to release Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena– two new games that bring all of the action, adventure and fun that this audience loves,” said Lucy Bradshaw, VP and General Manager at Maxis. “Now, players will be able to take on the role of their own kind of hero, by creating it however they like using the Creature Creator, tackling challenging quests and battling friends in competitive multiplayer modes.”

Spore Hero delivers the unparalleled creative freedom of Spore in an action-adventure game created exclusively for the Wii. Set in a 3-D world, Spore Hero empowers the player to become the hero as they embark on an epic quest to save their creature’s home planet from destruction by the evil nemesis, Zarkhator. Along this journey, players engage in fun battles, solve puzzles, and explore to collect more than 250 cool new creature parts, all with unique abilities. These parts, which can be used to customize creatures in the revolutionary and award-winning Spore Creature Creator, can change the way creatures will play and fight in the world. Players can also utilize their brawling skills in a dynamic multiplayer mode, in which they battle their friends with their own customized creature to become the ‘baddest’ Spore hero around!

Spore Hero Arena catapults players into a galaxy filled with fun and intense arena-based combat. Featuring an all-new story set in the same universe as Spore Hero, Spore Hero Arena takes players on a quest to save planets in their galaxy from an evil force. Throughout the game, players create their own unique gladiator hero creature and guide it from planet to planet as they fight enemy creatures, collect new parts, gain upgrades and unlock special abilities that will benefit their hero. Developed with multiplayer capabilities in mind, Spore Hero Arena also allows players to battle with up to three friends locally or play with a friend over Wi-Fi and share creature creations over a Wireless network, taking the Spore gameplay experience to an entirely new and interactive level.

Available for $49.99 MSRP, Spore Hero is rated E10+ by the ESRB. Spore Hero Arena is available for $29.99 MSRP and is rated E by the ESRB.

To learn more about Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena, play minigames and download fun content, please visit www.sporehero.com.

Welcome to the Friday edition of 5@5! It’s back! Thank you for the wonderful responses from yesterday. When we meld down the exact format and I figure out how to add music to it, we’ll make it downloadable through iTunes so you can truely pick up the cast after work and listen on your ride home.

Today we go over news and Tom French’s hair. I just want to tackle hug him! Oh and a huge disappointment in gaming for me.

Enjoy the cast and please send me your opinions for next week!

Have a great weekend!
xoxo
Trina

[podcast]http://www.gamingangels.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/audio-recording-2.mp3[/podcast]

Spore will be getting animated. Twentieth Century Fox is teaming up with EA to make a CG-animated movie based on EA’s Spore title according to a Variety report.

Ice Age’s Chris Wedge is on deck to direct, with Blue Sky Studios doing the CG and EA’s Patrick O’Brien and Maxis’ Lucy Bradshow executive producing.

“From every perspective — visually, thematically and comedically — the world of Spore provides the potential to put something truly original on the screen, said Wedge.

“With more than 100 million unique creatures uploaded to our website, it’s clear that people are passionate about the game, and it will be exciting to offer a powerful medium like film in order to expand their experience with Spore,” said Bradshaw.

“Spore Creature Creator 2-D offers players a brand new way to express their creativity and share their creatures as it can be played by anyone with internet access. The clean art style and intuitive point-and-drag functionality makes it easy for creators of all ages to get in on the fun. It’ll be interesting to see how players use this new creative application.” Caryl Shaw, Sr. Producer of Spore Creature Creator 2-D.

Spore Creature Creator 2-D features the full suite of more than 250 body parts, including limbs, eyes, feet, heads, and fun accessories like antlers and wings. Once players create their ultimate creature, they can play with them in the Spore Creature Trainer mini-game. Once complete, players can easily send their friends an e-card of their creature from the spore2d website.

Maxis

A Twitter yesterday mentioned about job losses at EA Maxis studio, and now we have confirmation that there has been layoffs. EA’s Maxis studio is responsible for the Sims franchise and Spore.

“Often in the video game industry, the size of a studio fluctuates in response to business conditions,” Shacknews was told by Electronic Arts in a prepared statement.

“In this case, EA has taken action to reduce the workforce at Maxis as we focus the business and focus Maxis.”

We don’t know how many staff were cut. Our support goes out those that lost their jobs.

Spore Creatures

The images above are amazing for being made in the Spore Creature Creator. I didn’t have much patience myself with it. But people keep building as Maxis has announced that since June 2008, Spore fans have created and uploaded 100 million creations. That averages to 307,000 daily. Crazy huh!

“This is a staggering milestone to have met in less than one year from the launch of Spore Creature Creator,” said Lucy Bradshaw, VP and General Manager at Maxis. “We continue to be astounded by the outrageous creations and incredible creativity that Spore players have poured into the Sporepedia, from lifelike animals to fantastical creatures and futuristic spaceships. We can’t wait to see the ingenuity our players reveal through the missions they create in Spore Galactic Adventures!”

Spore will be expanding with Spore Galactic Adventures for the PC and Mac, Spore Hero for Wii and Spore Hero Arena for the DS. Spore Galactic Adventures will launch June 23. The Wii and DS games are set for Fall 2009.

In Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena, players will be a fully-customized hero trying to save its planet. I’m sure we’ll hear more at E3 about these titles.

Electronic Arts had a great booth tour setup at PAX where I got hands-on with many titles that I hadn’t seen yet. One of those titles was Spore. Oh heck yeah, I was finally going to get some time with the full game of Spore. I’ve been addicted to finding out news on Spore since my first exposure to it three years ago at E3. Sitting in a demo with Will Wright, I was amazed by the potential of creating your own universe.

Then we got the Creature Creator tools. Since I’m not a very creative person, I made a couple and then moved on. I really enjoyed seeing how inventive GamingAngels readers were in our Creature Creator Contest. So when our tour came to Spore, I was eager to jump on the controls and see what the meat of the game was about.

You start off an an amoeba which needs to feed on smaller things until you start growing. As I was guiding my little guy around chomping on food and staying away from bigger enemies, I started to hear an inner warning siren. My creature was moving too slow for me. I asked the EA rep if there was a boost control, any way to move a little bit faster, however there isn’t. I started to feel my heart sink as my little creature barely moved through the water. The slowness of the creature’s movements combined with the fact that all you could do was move around and eat, started to lose my attention. I quickly asked him to send us to the next stage.

At the creature stage you take your creature around and meet other creatures. You can decide if you want to be friends or be aggressive and eat them. If you want to be friends there is a small mini-game of a simon says type play to win them over. Being aggressive and eating them is much more fun though.

After a few minutes of that stage, I found myself bored again. Now, I do have Gamer ADD and the kiosk was at PAX. There was a panel coming up that I wanted to go to. In the end all the PAX stuff took my attention away from the game. I thanked the EA rep and went off to the panel.

First, remember this is my opinion of the game. Second, it was at attention stealing PAX. All the people, noise, etc was enough to take away anyone’s attention. I am worried that I felt bored with Spore so quickly. Perhaps in the comfort of my own home, on my laptop, the world of Spore will feel different. In the end, I think Spore would have benefited from a summer release when there is less vying for your attention.