Duck and Cover

if you have an hour to spare: http://www.pqhp.com/cmp/gdctv/

the registration isn't that bad just use mailinator or something. peter molyeunxnx room game looks fun to.

Resume Mr. Megaton.

I was excited about this game until seeing more screenshots and hearing it's being developed for Xbox. Fuck em. The last good Will Wright game was Sim City 2000. Spore could have been the spiritual successor to Sim Ant, but they're gonna gimp it for console.

And Peter Mölyneix is full of shit, ditto.

Mad Max RW wrote:I was excited about this game until seeing more screenshots and hearing it's being developed for Xbox. Fuck em. The last good Will Wright game was Sim City 2000. Spore could have been the spiritual successor to Sim Ant, but they're gonna gimp it for console.

link? I don't think xbox has the technology to run a game that uses so much procedural shit, does it? And even it did come out on the xbox, so what.

Isn't it for the Next, ? and not the the old xbox?...

anyway, though the idea sounds cool I think it'll be pure bollocks.

http://gr.bolt.com/previews/featured/pc/spore/spore.htm

GR puts it in the PC section.

For now...dun dun dun.

Max was refering to xbox360.

dun dun dun, mebbe they will only port it to xbox360

I just watched the long demo Will Wright gave and figured out what's really going on. Spore is the new Designosaurus. I bet nobody remembers that one. You create a dinosaur or some kind of creature by giving it different parts such as wings, big teeth, a tail, and decide if it's a meat/plant eater. Then drop your creation in a world where you survive by eating other dinosaurs (or plants), drink water, and lay eggs to further your species. Sound familiar? That's the first few stages of Spore. If you can find it, try Designosaurus 2. It came out in the 80's if I remember correctly.

Now I'm more eager to see how the advanced cities and galaxy stages work.

I saw The Room thing quite a while ago. Advanced, fun gaming enviroment, surelly, "This will never be released! EVER EVER EVER!", surelly - so I don't know.

EDIT: Just watched the Spore thing as well, and while a great concept, my personal opinion is that it'll be shit ( for me ). Self-design, mass-genre mixing and all that; fantastic, but it keeps pointing towards advancement in the world, which is something that floats into the "Main Goal of the Game" area very easily. The stuff around it is time consumption, ofcourse, but as with all games that have upgrades and that sort of shit, you know there's something beyond the bacteria setting, and you want to get there. Fishy wants to walk on land, landthing wants to go into space, and as with most games ( probably ) the roll will hit a wall at some point and just stop - pow! - you've done it all! You are complete! And thats anticlimax, really.

Excusable, maybe, is that you can redo this process with alot of different variable settings; make a fat crab one time, and Mick Jagger another time, but the core still stays; limit -> pow -> start again, and after a while it just feels pointless. So you try to find meaning, maybe, and slaughter everything, or continue colonizing the whole universe, I don't know, but a winning screen "YOU WON MAN!" or stat-screen "20000 urinals" hardly justifies shit, and a never-ending game is an insane prospect.

If it was up to me, I'd limit the player ability in the world, and run creature personality more on random calculus, ( the body-deform can stay, that can't hurt ) but the advancement stuff; fuck that. If you eat oysters for 20 years you get HAMMERS FOR HANDS, thats what happens. Catch alot of eels? Evolve hooks out of your face! No one knows which is better, its just what you do and who you are, and there is no 'standard' to talk about. The grotesque hammer-hand, hook-face monster surfaces, gets smart when its time comes ( depending on what the hell you make it do, you don't buy a brain for the sake of evolution ) and it builds things the way it would want to build it ( in its own image ), it might not even invent fire or music, and instead invent plastic surgery and artificial limbs.

When the rts part kicks in, you'd get some military strategy to handle, and some diplomacy, thats it. Wether you're god or the leader of a civilization, you don't get to move individuals around or tell them how to do everything. Mark something a hot-zone, add some grand attack routes, tell them where you need more outposts and troups, and piss off another species, maybe direct military science, I don't know. After a few battles they should have everything figured out, no need to touch the bastards until something urgent comes up, like the first nuclear war.

By the time you reach colonization of space there would likely be one semi-weak agressor, trade and the rest politics, because anything else would be weird; even if there was a species that didn't waste their resources on war ( the other leaders would be pissed as hell even by that ) and saved up for a spacecraft before anyone else could, they'd be dead the second they launched it. To be outside an alliance, first into space, colonizing other planets and all that, thats not a good way to make friends.

What am I talking about anyway?

Ultra EDIT: Anyone remember that game for the snes? Platformer-evolution thing, something with either gaia or evol in the name.

St. Toxic wrote:and a never-ending game is an insane prospect.

Does "The Sims" ring a bell?

Yeah, thats why I go "What the fuck is the point of all this?" after 30 minutes and rather play dx-ball or pong. Its great from the start, don't get me wrong; "Ohohoh! I will build the villa of my dreams! Black wallpaper! BLACK LIKE MY SOUL!" and then after that it just kind of goes to shit, the owners of the Darkspire Villa complain about everything, and I know there's no advancing beyond that point.

Sounds strangely like parent hood, give them what they want then they complain there as ass about something else, and you dont advance with them one bit

I got the impression he was just saying the initial parts of the game were a training area for the UFO part. Then you can fly to strange new worlds and seek out civilizations and make them into giant hand monsters that eat everything. A bit like 'Destroy All Humans' but it's 'Destroy all life in the Universe or at least Mutate them Horribly'.

I think of it more as a gta game than a sims game. You can create an intergalactic empire and then fuck shit up for fun. It'd get boring eventually, but you'd still return to it to make block creatures or turn all your buildings into giant dicks. Imagine blowing up a planet with your dick shaped UFO! The possibilities for turning things into dicks and boobs are endless. Perhaps put a giant cock-shaped monolith down on a planet for some tribe only to revisit it later and discover and entire culture that worships a crudely modelled cock monolith.

It also mixes genres, a bit like GTA. It might not do them as well as the games it's trying to emulate, but it makes for a fun overall game perhaps. Though it'll probably end up not being fun for some reason just remember your hopes and dreams of the cock empire.

I think he said the room might be released as a demo later on. Which is nice.

Hear hear on both St. Toxic's and Megatron's most fine replies

So is it going to be kinda like a Massive online multiplayer type game? Or does content just come into each persons own game? I didn't watch the whole thing but till the part where he ended the game demo and started to talk more.

I dont really understand what the games about.

Well if I've understood the stuff I've read, it's not really a massive multiplayer online game at all, but the content of the single player comes from other players... Every character you create is squeezed into a small package and sent to the Spore server, where in return you recieve the packages from other players. And then, every alien you encounter on your journey towards galactic superiority has been created by other players all around the world.

That's in theory, at least. Because, umm, what about if I want to play the game on my laptop? Or I wouldn't have internet access? Empty game? No game at all?

He said something about that as well, as in "ship with a billion different designs" so thats not exactly the biggest problem. Hell, they could code a random generator to it, no big deal, and I think he said they had; creatures in the world were given random properties, guided by your initial design, or something like that. Thats all fine and dandy, but what if its all boring?

At least that question bugs me.

Mystic EDIT: Multiplayer would be fun doh, beyond statistics and all that. If everything takes so little space, surelly mp games could hold a massive amount of players, without any latency. With a whole universe to populate, this could be somewhat interesting.

Yeah. High hopes.

The game might survive a couple of play-throughs, until you've conquered the galaxy or built the village of your dreams, maybe? I don't know, Sims is fairly entertaining when you have nothing else to do...It's fun for a surprisingly long time before it gets boring and you lose all your motivation to play it further because it leads nowhere.