In this video, Will Wright demonstrates his upcoming game Spore and shows why he’s the coolest game developer ever.
And in this thread, we talked about it a few weeks ago. 
Ugly bastard, though. I guess computer game award-winning genius and attractiveness don’t go hand in hand.
I’m really looking forward to this. I started with the original SimCity (I had the version with the codes on a red sheet of paper) and played every version thereafter. I used to spend hours and hours building my cities and tweaking them, although I didn’t enjoy the last version of the game as much as the previous ones.
I heard a rumor that he was working on a version that would let you scale from viewing the city as a whole to viewing the life of an individual sim going about his or her life. The story was that they decided that this would have been too complex for the average PC of the day, so they cancelled it. But I was, and am, such a SimCity fan that I’d have spent several thousand on a new PC if the game required it.
I think some of the technology that resulted was used to create The Sims. Weirdly, though, I was bored by that game. I just didn’t find the idea of building an individual household as interesting as building a city.
So I’m hoping that Spore has more of the appeal of SimCity. If so, I may be computer shopping when the game is released.
:smack: How could I have missed that thread?
I believe this game was planned to come out after “The Sims” was released - “Simsville” was the name, I think. It would have allowed you to do both the city-mayor thing as well as manage some individuals within the city with a “Sims” style interface. They cancelled it because it got to be too complex, and put some of the features into SimCity 4.
At any rate, Spore looks beyond awesome - although I can’t help but wonder how they could possibly top it. I mean, where do you go from Sim-Everything?
John Romero considers himself a looker.
…probably.
Gotta have it. When will it be available?
This fall is the current rumor, but you know how these things go.
EA has released more screenshots and a trailer. I’m really looking forward to this game…
I found the Sims interesting for about a week or two. After that it just got boring. Simcity 4 was by far my favorite of those games simply because of the huge cities you could make. I would be nice though in the next version if you could actually follow individual Sims around their day to day.
The “Rush Hour” expansion let you do this. That feature was kind of boring, though, as all the sim ever did was go to work and go home. The expansion was still worth getting for its other improvements to gameplay.
So doesn’t that just prove the rule?
I have Rush Hour too. I liked being able to drive around my city.
There’s a lot of great user created work on sites like Simtropolis.com too. The problem with the user created buildings and such is that it requires a bit of hacking using special tools and editors. Because user created work was never really seamlessly integrated into SC$, I never trusted that it didn’t introduce gameplay imbalances or instabilities. At the very least, some of it visually didn’t integrate if it was out of scale or used color pallet that didn’t quite match.
What I would like to see in a Simcity 5 is something similar to what Wright did in Spore. Users can create content as part of the game. The game would force content to conform to the physical laws of the game. For example you design a building of a certain height, it can hold a certain number of residents.
Like Dewey Finn, I’ve been a major nutcase fan of every Sim City since the one with the annoying codes on the red sheet. When The Sims came out I was very excited about it, played it for a while, bought a bunch of the Expansion Packs (I still have two I never even opened… can we see where this is going? :D), and decided it was a dumb and boring game.
Then I started reading about The Sims 2, and since I’m a glutton for punishment, I thought I’d give it a try. As it turns out, just about everything I detested about The Original Sims was tweaked in TS2… like aging, days off from the job, and so on. It quickly became my new game addiction, and instead of spending untold hours building cities, I now build neighborhoods.
TS2 Nightlife only leaves the CD drive when I want to move some computer files onto a CD, and on the now VERY rare occasion, play something else.
Anyway, the reason for this missive is just to mention that if you’ve never tried The Sims 2, you might want to. Then again, you can be like the rest of us, and save up for the next new computer we’ll all need for Spore
This game is literally the reason for life itself, as far as I can tell.
GameSpot has a new gameplay movie for Spore from E3:
Nothing we haven’t seen before, but I still had to wipe the drool off my chin.
Stupid Question: When is this coming out?
Things that make life worth living: Piano sonatas by Beethoven. Movies by Bergman. Sculptures by Michelangelo. The Mythbusters. Boobs. Frozen pizza. But first and foremost: games by Will Wright.
Seriously, this looks absolutely amazing. I’m sitting here gaping like a numbskull and drooling all over myself. If it doesn’t come out soon, I will seriously explode. However, it looks like we’ll have to wait until some time in the first quarter of 2007.
Just in case anyone was interested (duh! 
), Computer Gaming World got an exclusive inteview / preview of Spore in this month’s (June '06) issue. There’s not a whole lot new beyond what’s already been shown at E3, but the interview with Will Wright was interesting.
It looks like they’ve got some stuff on their web site, which is slightly different from the article, but overlaps a bit.