This doesn't really seem to belong in this forum since it's a game instead of tech talk XD
But you have GOT to check this out:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=...98&q=spore
The video is 35 minutes long (Eeps) but it's worth watching, I'm amazed - in a word "Sim Everything". I would try sum it up in in a few paragraphs here, but it'd be a sizeable essay, the video says it better - and it's late XD
The techs here though'll appreciate the procedural based systems, as a modeller I'm amazed by how the animation system works.
Mm. Seen the Game Developers Conference presentation. The brief tangent he made onto carebears was rather amusing.
The summisations I've seen of it are basically "Sim Everything", or "A game where you take a species of amoeba and evolve them into a galactic god, via sim-city lite, civ-lite, fluidic pac-man and ecosystems, all with a single user interface and the ability to create your own content and evolve your own creature" One of the impressive things about it is the fact that it's one single engine that does everything from the 2d esque aemebae world all the way to the space stuff. Also the status as "Massively Singleplayer Online Game" (as opposed to massively multiplayer) is fairly impressive, basically how it will work is that your creatures get uploaded to a server, it automatically downloads creatures, buildings, etc from the server to your desktop, settings dependent, as it feels they're needed, and based upon your preferences. They're also all around 1-5k, iirc.
Weather or not it succeeds commercially can't be predicted from that, however, but by all rights it should do fabulous. The official (rather sparce, but the newsletter might eventually give some info of some sort) site for it is at
http://spore.ea.com, but you'll get more info about it from that video (which as far as I can tell is the same video as I saw, only via a different transfer method and eddited to just the stuff where the video is from within the game)
And it's tech talk if we start talking about proceedural content generation vs hardcoded graphics, etc, which is a possable area of discussion caused by that game.
I've heard alot about Spore and how awesome it's going to be, and if everything we've been told is actually in the game it can be nothing short of awesome, and an impressive technical feat. It might even be the game to drag me away from my exclusive combination of Oblivion and DOD: Source! :wink:
Regardless of the quality of this it's not going to be as popular as The Sims 2 Exapansion Pack #3267