Spores Illustrated - Spore Video Game Fansite

Over 1 Million Served and 25 Million Creations!

Emeryville, CA – September 24, 2008 –   Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) today announced that SporeTM has sold through more than one million copies at retail worldwide on the PC, Mac® and Nintendo DSTM, since shipping worldwide on September 7th.  Spore, developed by EA’s MaxisTM Studio, is also available on mobile phones including the iPhoneTM. To date, gamers have used the creativity tools in Spore to populate the universe with more than 25 million creatures, vehicles and buildings available to view in the SporepediaTM at www.spore.com/sporepedia.  Spore has been well received by game critics – with a Metacritic index of: 85.

“Spore is a hit,” said Frank Gibeau, president of the EA Games Label.  “Will Wright’s latest delivers an incredibly diverse game that appeals to casual gamers and the core alike.  We’re off to a great start moving into the holiday season and believe Spore will deliver a platform of creativity for gamers of all stripes for years to come.”

“We’re humbled by how quickly the community has taken to the creativity tools in Spore,” said Lucy Bradshaw, vice president of Maxis and Spore’s executive producer. “It’s amazing to see the sheer imagination represented in the hundreds of thousands of creatures, vehicles and buildings that have been uploaded around the clock since launch.”

Spore – rated E10+ — gives players their own personal universe in a box. Create and evolve life, establish tribes, build civilizations, sculpt entire worlds and explore a universe filled with creations made by other gamers. Spore gives players a wealth of creative tools to customize nearly every aspect of their universe: creatures, vehicles, buildings, and even spaceships.

To download a free trial of the SporeTM Creature Creator, please visit www.spore.com. For screen shots or more information about Spore, please visit our press web site at http://info.ea.com

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Spore Mac Patch Available

Mac players, just start your game and it will patch up automatically.

The focus of this patch is to fix some bugs that have been reported and to respond to feedback we’ve been seeing from the community about tuning and stability. We managed to squeak in a few fun things too; there’s a cool cheat that allows you to turn your creature into a blocky representation of themselves, a new “inspection” feature for the creature creator to browse the parts stats that you have applied to your creature, and the much-requested “evoadvantage” cheat – you’ll now be able to start a new creature game with a more evolved creature of your choice!

To get the patch, launch the EA Download Manager to download and install it. If you didn’t install the EADM when you installed Spore, you can get it from http://files.ea.com/downloads/eacore/eadm-installer.exe.

For MAC players, the patch can be obtained by simply starting your game.

Features

  • New Cheat: “evoadvantage”. Enter this cheat when are starting a new Creature game to choose any creature from the Sporepedia. Start a new game with one of your more evolved creatures!
  • Display part statistics when you are in Build mode. Rollover any part and hold down the ‘i’ key.
  • New Cheat: “blocksmode”. Turns creatures into their blocky representations.
  • More style filters. Open the cheat window and type: “stylefilter -microscope” or “stylefilter -norainbows” or “stylefilter -nextgen” to see the new styles
  • Added 70 new planet scripts with a low terraform score, especially of the “hot and high atmosphere” type

Graphics/Aesthetics

  • Animation improvements
  • Improved the planets fogging, blooming and lighting
  • Fixed animation issues with tool handling, hand walking and some of the more oddly shaped creatures

Tuning

  • Creature phase: Improved the pacing towards the end of the game, and increased the challenge in Normal and Hard modes.
  • Tribe phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
  • Civilization phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
  • Space phase: Made Empires in Easy and Normal modes demand reasonable amounts of money in exchange for peace and adjust the level of punishment if the player doesn’t pay
  • Space phase: Made disasters less likely to occur in Easy and Normal modes and increased the time between each attack from the enemy empire when the player is at war.

Miscellaneous

  • Creature phase: Improved the way posse members behave during threatening situations and fights.
  • Space phase: Made finding your home world and colonies easier in the Galactic view.
  • Tribe phase: Made it so that tribe members can travel on steep hills if they need to do so now, but their speed will be reduced a lot.
  • Fixed an issue with attacks not working on some bigger animals and larger animals not dying correctly
  • Fixed collect mission not completing correctly when all parts have been collected
  • Fixed problems with the “Rolling Thunder” and “Déjà Vu” achievements not being awarded as they should
  • Fixed floating parts not being deducted from the budget when loaded into creator
  • Fixed an issue with the rotation rings not resizing correctly when a part was resized and improved their look
  • Fixed an issue where the terraforming score of planet could differ when revisiting a solar system
  • Fixed the keyboard controls for zoom & pitch in the Colony Planner not working properly
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when watching an epic creature attack a city
  • Fixed some issues where the game would freeze when using the Creature Tweaker tool or when capturing a planet in solar view
  • Fixed an issue where not all tribe members would obey the raid order when a large group was ordered to raid
  • Fixed an issue where banning a creation from one of your other saved games would black out the main menu
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Sporn Lives

Ever since Will Wright said he found Sporn to be creative, it hasn’t seemed quite as naughty. I thought the Sporn days were basically a thing of the past but apparently not. Sporn Site sends word boasting the largest collection of Spore Sporn on the interdweeb, with daily gallery updates. The site itself is work safe as images and videos are tucked away on their own little pages, with no Penis Monsters popping out at you on the main site. I knew we’d see weiner shaped creatures, but never expected buildings and vehicles as well. /Shrug.

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New Spore Creator Tips

Check out the “creatorip” tagged ideas submitted by other Spore players on the official Spore site. Find out how to create organic looking tubes, triple blasters, and more!


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Spore Has A Court Date!

You have to love all the drama. Well not really. Well, sort of. I do enjoy my fair share of drama! Anyhoo. Blue’s has a bit on the class action lawsuit being brought against EA over Spore’s DRM system. Here’s a chunk from the court filing:

“What purchasers are not told is that, included in the purchase, installation, and operation of Spore is a second, undisclosed program. The name of the second program is SecuROM, which is a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) for computer game. Although consumers are told the game uses access control and copy protection technology, consumers are not told this technology is actually an entirely separate, stand-alone program which will download, install, and operate on their computers, along with the Spore download. Consumers are given no control, rights, or options over SecuROM. The program is uninstallable. Once installed it becomes a permanent part of the consumer’s software portfolio. Even if the consumer uninstalls Spore, and entirely deletes it from their computer, SecuROM remains a fixture in their computer unless and until the consumer completely wipes their hard drive through reformatting or replacement of the drive.

Actually, it sounds like you can get rid of SecuROM, and this Blue’s thread has some tips for doing so.

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US PC Best Sellers

September 7 to September 13, Spore takes top two spots according to NPD. [Source: IGN]

1. Spore
2. Spore Galactic Ed
3. The Sims 2 Apartment Life Expansion Pack
4. Spore Creature Creator
5. World of Warcraft: Battle Chest
6. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
7. World of Warcraft
8. World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack
9. Warcraft III Battle Chest
10. Crysis

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Spore (PC) Walkthroughs

IGN’s Reader Submitted Spore Walkthrough is starting to beef up, and Carl’s Spore Strategy Guide is movin’ and groovin’ as well. If you have any suggestions for Carl’s walkthrough I would be happy to pass them along to him!

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Spore On The Euro Charts

The Swedes and Germans are digging some Spore action! [Source: Edge]

Spain

01. Wii Fit (Wii)
02. Wii Play (Wii)
03. The Sims 2: Apartment Life (PC)
04. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
05. Spore (PC)
06. Cooking Guide: Can’t Decide What to Eat? (DS)
07. Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (PS3)
08. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
09. Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3)
10. Brain Training (DS)

Germany

01. Spore (PC)
02. Wii Fit (Wii)
03. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
04. Stalker: Clear Sky (PC)
05. The Sims 2: Apartment Life (PC)
06. Brain Training (DS)
07. The Settlers: Awakening of Cultures (PC)
08. Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 3 (PS2)
09. More Brain Training (DS)
10. Wii Play (Wii)

Sweden

01. Spore (PC)
02. NHL 09 (360)
03. The Sims 2: Apartment Life (PC)
04. Wii Fit (Wii)
05. World of Warcraft (PC)
06. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2)
07. World of Warcraft Battlechest (PC)
08. Counter-Strike 1: Anthology (PC)
09. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (PC)
10. SingStar Sweden Hits Schlager (PS2)

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UGO’s Top 50 Spore Creatures!

It’s no easy task to search the Sporepedia, but UGO has done their best to come up with their picks for Spore’s Top 50 Creatures! Some pretty nice ones in there, although The Black Widow is sure to give me nightmares, as will Alien Queen. Eeep. Fortunately there are plenty of cuties as well, so check out UGO’s Top 50 Spore Creatures!

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Spore’s Lead Designer On Spore’s Design

Rock, Paper, Shotgun talks Spore with Lead Designer, Alex Hutchinson. From high level decisions like the actual in-game effect of customisation to basic technical elements like the lack of autosave to the question of the sudden difficulty spike in Space (And the lack of difficulty elsewhere), he reveals Maxis’ thinking. Read the interview!

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