All Games You Need: Spore - DVD - Full

Spore Single-Celled
Spore is Will Wright's (Sim City, The Sims) new masterpiece. Spore starts a player out as a single-cell organism swimming around in a primordial soup. As Will Wright explains it, this stage of the game is essentially like Pac-Man, and you basically devour microbes smaller than you while avoiding those that are larger. You can upgrade your cell by adding cilia, flagella, and other defense mechanisms in order to gain any advantage possible for a single cell. From there you'll move on to the "water world" phase of evolution. Your single-cell organism becomes a multi-cell organism. At this point, the gameplay switches from 2d to 3d but is still essentially the same: devouring the less fortunate and avoiding the bullies.Economical

Egg Hatchling
As time passes, you will be able to lay an egg and evolve further; rid yourself of fins and acquire legs. Once on land (should you choose to emerge from the sea), you'll find yourself a part of a rich world inhabited by other player-created creatures. Unlike traditional massively-multiplayer on-line games, you won't be squaring off against other players in real time competition. Instead, when a player creates a new creature it is saved to a master on-line server. Your world will be populated by creatures that will help bring balance to your ecosystem. In this way, you will experience the off-the-wall creations of other players without having to worry about being bullied.

Oh Behave Yourself
As Wright demonstrated at E3, you'll be able to teach your creature new behaviors by combining preexisting ones. A creature that knows how to eat can pick up food in it's mouth and drag it to another location, for example. The possibilities presented to the player in terms of creation are truly remarkable. To continue evolving, you must find a mate by emitting a mating call. What follows is romantic R&B music highlighting sweet love making.

Moldy City
You creatures will begin to band together once their brain has evolved far enough. At this stage of the game, the player must manage a tribe of the creature they created. Players can upgrade huts and add items to camps such as a campfire. Still, this is just the beginning of Spore. Before long, your mere tribe will be a full-fledge thriving city. With these upgrades in technology, players may customize their creatures further by adding additional upgrades. The cities themselves can be tweaked in almost any way imaginable. Players at this level of the game can build military machines and attack other cities if they should choose to.

UFO Spotting
Finally, the player's creature creation will reach a point in technology where they can create a UFO. With the UFO, the player can cruise around their planet "abducting content" such as other creatures or plant life. The UFO can also zoom out into outer space. Initial impressions of the game indicate that this is where the real fun begins. With the UFO, players can literally visit millions of other planets full of other player's creations. From the sounds of it, Spore is going to be a monumental game that empowers the average gamer with one heck of a creative tool.

Windows XP:

2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
512 MB RAM
A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
At least 6 GB of hard drive space

Windows Vista:

2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
768 MB RAM
A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
At least 6 GB of hard drive space

Mac:

Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
Intel Core Duo Processor
1024 MB RAM
ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
At least 4.7GB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for creations.
This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac).