Will Wright's Spore DS and mobile get release date
Evolution will begin on September 5th. But there's so much more to tell you
There are people who have been waiting a long time for this announcement – and after getting to play through the DS and mobile versions of Spore this week, we've added ourselves to that group of individuals.
EA has finally divulged a release date for Will Wright's hugely ambitious evolution game Spore. As reported in an interview here, Lucy Bradshaw the game's executive producer has stated the game will turn up on September 5th (September 7th in the US). That's across all formats: DS, mobile, Mac and PC.
Of particular interest to us, she's also revealed a fair bit of information about the DS and mobile games.
The DS version of the game isn't simply a port from PC (which would be a bit ambitious for the ickle DS). Instead it focuses on the 'creature' phase of the game, enabling you to create a creature then embark on a quest to find new evolutionary paths and save your home world. Along the way you interact with other creatures, make friends and fight enemies and species encountered are collected in your Spore Species guide.
Visually the game is inspired by Japanese flat rod puppets and shadow box art – so flat, like a Paper Mario game. Your created creatures can be saved and shared, traded or just shown to friends locally or over wi-fi. If you share a creature with someone, their creature will turn up in your game and then you can either choose to befriend them or duff them up a bit for the hell of it. Once they're traded, creatures will spread to other players as they connect and trade, too.
Instead of using the Creature phase, Spore on mobile phone revolves around the Cell phase. You start out in the attractive sounding primordial ooze and work your way up the food chain while avoiding being eaten yourself. The game also includes a creature editor so you can add parts such as tails and eyes and change the size, shape of colour of your beastie in millions of different ways.
These will be tradeable and you can take your creature online using a network connection or by trading numeric codes manually, then battle other creatures from your handset.
We'll have full previews on both the DS and mobile Spore games very soon so check back to find out how Spore is shaping up to play.
