The game enjoyed an ‘early’ release in Australia, I picked it up last week and had loads of fun! For those who do not know, Spore is the latest game from the genius game designer that is Will Wright. Here he has taken his Sim style of games, where you create more than you destroy, and expanded it more than ever.

Now you can create life from the cellular stage, modifying your creature through some really intuitive and powerful tools before you get to the tribal stage where the game turns into a little version of Populous. (Also created by a game design genius, in this case, Peter Molyneux)

The game is lot of fun and I would recommend it to everyone, however I do have some issues with the DRM the game uses to fight piracy. Electronic Arts decided to use Securom to ‘protect’ the game after a large amount of backlash came from their idea to have people activate every 10 days. Now the game activates upon installation, however there are a limited number of activations possible before you have to contact customer support to reset your counter. In my opinion this does more to hurt the legitimate consumer than it does the pirates, as the scheme has already been cracked.

Those issues aside, the game runs great and is lots of fun. On the technical side the game makes heavy use of procedural generation, for textures, models, music and animations. The use of procedural generation allows people to share their creations using a small file that weighs in at less than 100kb. (In most cases 20-30kb)

Maxis have also developed an innovative way of sharing the content. Inside your ‘My Documents\My Spore Creations’ folder, you will fine png files that are 128x128 and contain an image of the creation. This is actually all the data the game needs to generate the creature/ship/vehicle etc. To share this, you simply give the png to others and they put it in their folder, and it is ready for use. The bonus of this is that because it also contains the thumbnail, you can easily create a small gallery for people to browse.