Best to get the hyperbole out of the way early: Spore, the new computer game from Sims creator Will Wright, rolls the past, present and future of interactive entertainment - not to mention life as we know it - into an absorbing ball of fun and big ideas. No matter what you think of video games, it is something everyone, young and old, should see and experience.
In other words, it has been a really good week.
Spore, rated Everyone age 10 and up, was developed for Windows and Mac systems by Maxis, Wright's studio, and released Sunday in North America by publisher Electronic Arts. It represents an evolutionary next step for Wright, who is known for making software that simulates human interactions. He had players design and maintain large-scale urban centres in the SimCity series and then virtual individuals, with needs, relationships and houses to manage, in The Sims.
Bits and pieces of Spore have been previewed and demonstrated for a while now, including a set of creature creation tools that became a hit earlier this summer, and we knew that its timeline stretched for billions of virtual years, rewinding to the earliest forms of life and then eventually fast-forwarding to a galaxy-spanning empire.
The only question was whether it would fit together into a coherent whole, and that was answered soon after I completed the pain-free installation process, when a menu came up with three options: Play, create and share. In every way, from its structure to the messages players take away, Spore is summed up by those three words, making them good road signs for this introductory tour.
To play Spore, you start off in a two-dimensional landscape, a watery primordial sludge filled with single-cell life forms. Each of the five stages of the game represent an interactive genre and this cellular launching pad is a nod to early arcade games: It is Pac-Man in a petri dish. The controls are simple - point and click - and so are the goals: Eat enough to live and find parts, in the form of DNA, to add new abilities.
Spore then advances the player through the history of video games with each evolutionary step up the food chain. The next level, the creature stage, is a 3-D role-playing game that adds new buttons to press and more complex targets for your growing individual. The tribal stage is a simplified real-time strategy game, with multiple creatures to control and more multitasking. The civilization stage is a world-size strategy game with cities and vehicles at your command, and the final space level is a sprawling empire-linking challenge that puts micromanagement on a galaxy-sized scale. By its conclusion, after many hours, Spore is a fully operational 4X game, a genre named for its four interconnecting strategies: explore, exploit, expand and exterminate.
The progression through these five segments allows gaming newcomers, especially young players, an opportunity to sample three decades of game development, but Spore would just be a clever software compilation without the extensive creative side of its brain.
You create the beings and objects that populate and animate Spore in two ways. The first involves editing tools that combine virtual clay with digital building blocks. You make the early cells and creatures by shaping their malleable bodies and limbs, sticking on mouths and eyes and all manner of crazy biological additions. Later, this function expands to buildings and vehicles, from cars to spaceships, and even planets.
Everything is done with a mouse, pulling, pushing, painting and texturing body parts, shapes and contraptions selected from the game's library of creatively assembled components, like the "Cowbell" shape that sits next to "More Cowbell" shape.
