Spore

The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright shocked many in the game industry earlier this year when he decided to leave his long time development team at Electronic Arts to start an all new company with the terrific name Stupid Fun Club. VentureBeat chatted with Wright this week to get an update on what he's been up to and what he has planned for his new company.

Wright says that Stupid Fun Club has three projects in the works right now including one that might be released in the next year. However not all of the projects involve video or PC games. Wright states, "One of them is toy related. The others aren't. We are looking at a lot of different industries. There's the web. Toys. We're not restricted to one type of entertainment. We're kind of looking for ideas that cross a lot of different boundaries." However games are not far from his mind with Wright saying, "We are taking the games industry into other areas. We are expanding what we call the 'play industry.' Games are limited in some ways. Play can be applied to so many different kinds of experiences."

The latest game-to-movie deal is one that perhaps is not much of a surprise. Variety is reporting that EA's alien evolution sim Spore will be turned into a CGI feature film by Twentieth Century Fox. The movie itself will be created by Blue Sky Studios who created the popular Ice Age series of films. Indeed the director of the first Ice Age movie, Chris Wedge, is scheduled to direct the Spore film.

The script is being written by Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, who also wrote the script for the upcoming Disney 2D animated movie The Princess and the Frog. EA Maxis VP Lucy Bradshaw will be an executive director of the Spore movie. However there doesn't appear to be a similar credit for Spore's creator Will Wright, who left EA shortly after Spore shipped to stores last fall.

If you still haven't tried out Spore yet and don't feel like downloading the free version of the Spore Creature Creator, Electronic Arts has something planned for you. They are supposed to launch a Flash-based version of the creator in a 2D format on the spore2d.com web site. We say "supposed to" because at the moment the site doesn't appear to be working yet.

Once the site is operational, EA said you can use it to make any kind of creature you want or import any creature to the web from the Sporepedia site and even play with them in the Spore Creature Trainer mini-game. You can show off your 2D creature via email or your favorite social networking site as well.

Update: The spore2d.com site appears to be working now.

News of even more mass layoffs are hitting the game industry today. Electronic Arts has announced that it has cut back its work force at its EA Maxis studio in Emeryville, California, home to its Sims and Spore game brands. This news comes even as EA announced earlier this month that The Sims 3 has sold 3.7 million copies since its launch last June.

EA would not give any specifics on how many people are being laid off at their Maxis studios, saying only, "EA has taken action to reduce the workforce at Maxis as we focus the business and focus Maxis." Maxis' founder Will Wright left EA earlier this year to form a new company called Stupid Fun Club. EA's next major PC game from their Maxis studio is the expansion pack The Sims 3 World Adventures. Earlier this year EA said it was planning to lay off about 1,100 people from its total work force.

Last month's release of Spore Galactic Adventures was an attempt by the team at EA's Maxis studio to expand the amount of content in the original game by allowing folks to create their own space missions (as opposed to the main game which concentrates on making custom alien life forms and units).

Apparently the new feature in the expansion has proven to be popular. According to a new press release from EA, over 100,000 new adventures have been added to the Sporepedia since the expansion's release in mid-June. That number includes 10 new adventures created by the writers of the Robot Chicken TV show on Adult Swim. As you can see from the above screenshot, their new missions are certainly . . . different.

[Via email press release]

This patch updates Spore and Spore Galactic Adventures to v1.05. Includes numerous bug fixes and gameplay enhancements. A full list of changes is listed after the jump.

Download Spore v1.05 Patch (147 MB)
Check out all Spore downloads
Check out all Spore Galactic Adventures downloads

This patch updates Spore to v1.04. It addresses a number of gameplay issues and includes game enhancements. Additionally, there's a patch for the Spore Creature Creator, bringing it to v2.01. The Creature Creator demo can be downloaded here. Continue reading after the jump for a list of changes.

Download Spore v1.04 Patch (84 MB)
Download Spore Creature Creator v2.01 Patch (173 MB)
Download the Spore Creature Creator Demo (205 MB)
Check out all Spore downloads

After the last few weeks with only one or two new releases, this week has a bunch of PC game titles being released to stores. In addition we get the latest downloadable expansion to last year's big RPG release.

Overlord II: Developer Triumph Studios and publisher Codemasters put this sequel to the unusual action-strategy-RPF game to stores. As with the 2007 original you are playing the "bad guy" in a fantasy universe controlling his Minions to destroy and maim the members of a Roman Empire-like land. You can download a playable demo of the game right here at Big Download.

Believe it or not, it's still technically spring outside but in about a week that will change and the longest day of the year will spell the official start of the summer season. For some reason, the games industry in general and PC games in particular tends to be on the slow side in terms of new game releases to stores.

To be frank, it looks like history is repeating itself again as the game industry is prepping once again for the fall/holiday seasons to release a ton of major titles. However, there are a few PC games that are planning for a summer release and Big Download has picked them in order of their scheduled release date. Keep in mind that, as always, release dates for game titles can and do change so this list might not turn out to be accurate in terms of ship dates.

Click on the image above to read more of Big Download's top 10 most anticipated PC games of summer 2009

It was revealed a few days ago that the creators of Robot Chicken, an animated television show on Comedy Central's Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, would collaborate with the Spore: Galactic Adventures team to create some custom missions that players can enjoy for free. This documentary video reveals a bit about that creative process and highlights some of the missions that the Robot Chicken crew came up with. Spore: Galactic Adventures is scheduled to release on June 23rd. Visit the Spore WTF web site to learn more about the Robot Chicken missions.

Download HD Spore: Galactic Adventures Robot Chicken Video (63 MB)
Check out all Spore: Galactic Adventures downloads

A few days ago word leaked out that there was some kind of collaboration going one between the Spore development team and the team for Robot Chicken, the pop culture themed animation TV show on Adult Swim. Today publisher Electronic Arts finally revealed that the Robot Chicken team will be creating free downloadable scenarios for the upcoming Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack.

The expansion, which will allow Spore players to travel to planets and experience new adventures, will come with its own mission editor. The writing team at Robot Chicken (including the show's co-creator Seth Green) are apparently creating adventures for the expansion that include stuff like "planetary rest stops, man cannons, and banana monkey wars." You can also expect "exploding poo, angry yetis, ruler yielding librarians" and more. Well, that seems fun. Spore Galactic Adventures is due for release on June 23.

Update: The Spore WTF web site has been updated with lots of screenshots and YouTube videos from the Robot Chicken team working on their Spore Galactic Adventures missions.

[Via Joystiq]

We've been covering the whole digital rights management debate for PC games almost since Big Download launched a year ago. This week Gamasutra takes on the issue with a feature article that shows that perhaps some big publisher are starting to relax their stances on putting DRM set-ups in their PC game releases.

The story looks back to September 2008 when Electronic Arts released Spore with a particularly restrictive online activation system that used SecuROM. It didn't stop the game from becoming the most pirated PC title in 2008 and many believe the DRM set-up was part of the reason. The Entertainment Software Association's VP Ric Hirsch still believes DRM is needed for PC games, saying, "There is little doubt that piracy would be far more widespread without game publishers' use of DRM."

Others believe completely the opposite such as 2D Boy's Ron Carmel who co-created the hit downloadable puzzle game World of Goo with no DRM at all. He states, "Publishers aren't stupid. They know that DRM doesn't work against piracy. What they're trying to do is stop people from going to GameStop to buy $50 games for $35, none of which goes into the publishers' pockets. If DRM permits only a few installs, that minimizes the number of times a game can be resold." Even though World of Goo is in fact heavily pirated, Carmel states, "People who pirate the game are people who wouldn't have bought it anyway." Perhaps that's why EA has decided to to away with Spore-style DRM set-ups for both The Sims 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. Ubisoft also released the PC version of Prince of Persia with no DRM at all.

Some . . . thing is wrong at EA Maxis.

Yep, the normally stoic and serious folks behind the Spore game franchise are planning to do some . . . thing with Robot Chicken. Yes, that Robot Chicken, the Adult Swim 15 minute TV series that pretty much pokes fun at pop culture with action figures.

But just what are they planning to do together? All we know at this point is that it's happening on May 19 (that's next Tuesday) and the web site has the address www.spore.com/wtf.

Oh dear. We think we need to call in sick that day. Because putting the Robot Chicken crew together with Spore's creature design tools . . . well, we need to lie down just thinking about it.

While Will Wright has left the day-to-day development of the Spore franchise to others at Electronic Arts, the players of his 2008 alien evolution sim have been busy on their own creating custom creatures and content. Today EA sent over word that Spore players have now created 100 million bits of new content.

All of the content can be seen at the Sporpedia web site which includes 31,017,761 actual creature creations. According to EA , that number is19 times more than all the known species on Earth. You can bet even more creations will be made for the next PC expansion pack, Spore Galactic Adventures, when it's released this June.

Electronic Arts' alien evolution sim game Spore continues to stay in the top 10 best selling PC games list, showing that even a title that didn't live up to its considerable hype can still be a consistent seller. EA is prepping it's first major expansion to the game in Spore Galactic Adventures and this week the publisher did something a little . . .different to promote its upcoming release.

In short they have gotten together to make new panoramic screenshots from the game (Flash required). Simply take your mouse cursor over the shots and then click and drag to get the full 360 degree effect. We have one shot above and you can see another after the jump. By the way, Spore Galactic Adventures is due out on June 23.