Spore hands on

Hands on with Spore. It appears to be more actual playable game and less demo. I'm really looking forward to this. It looks fun and looks to have a lot of replay value.

Our guide told us that the build he would be demoing was complete enough that a player could start from the cellular level and work all the way through the point where the game’s creatures discover space travel. He even teased us by saying that we could probably even do it ourselves, with the only limitation being one of time. So, he took the controls and started the game. Rats.

Spore, if you don’t know, is the brainchild of Will Wright, the man behind the insanely popular SimCity and Sims games. With Spore, he takes on an even more ambitious concept, with a game that lets players guide an entire lifeform. Players will guide and nurture their budding creation from single-celled organisms to intelligent beings capable of exploring—or dominating, should you prefer—other planets across the galaxy. At the heart of the game is a set of easy-to-use creation tools that allow players to design their own creatures, buildings and vehicles.

In our demo, we skipped past the cellular stage and went right to the second phase of gameplay. If players were starting from scratch, we were told that it would take players about 30 minutes or so to evolve to this point.