Too bad we wont see it until 2008...

SPORE: the game that is scheduled for release in spring 2006! No wait: Fall 2006! Errm, spring 2007. Fall 2007? Perhaps sometime in 2008?!

In one of the press conferences one of the designers said that they had a system that could make very realistic creatures, but when they went to animate them, their movements were disturbingly unrealistic. Hence the system allows cartoony characters to be made whose movements seem believable because we have nothing to compare them to. They could probably make everything realistic, but it would require overhauling the procedural generation system and incorporating far too many variables and details into the generator. I wouldn't put it past some dedicated modders, however, to build some realistic creatures for us to use or study.

The cartoony structures look better in my opinion anyways, it keeps a sense of humor about the game, plus it is probably a lot easier on the graphics engine.

The cartoonish style seems about right to me for some reason...

I heard that this game might also come out on the Wii or the DS, I might be wrong but I would love that.

Naah please NOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo do not sully a game that should play to all the benefits of the PC Just so they can get more $$$ From console Kiddies.

Sorry but please prove me wrong and show me a PC game made to be cross platform to a console that wasnt compromised for the limitations of the consoles.

IMO GFames like this should be a reason to pay Minimum £500 > £1k for a PC as it allows for fluidity and modification

I dunno, maybe Halo, but I don't own Halo so I can't vouch for that. The reason I would be excited for that is my PC is old and defunct and I don't have the finances to do a major upgrade, I had to bother my Dad for months to get him to upgrade it from 256 MB Ram to a Gig. If it came out for DS I could just play it. But I don't know the requirements for Spore so I should probably reserve my judgement until then.

Spore looks like a good game, but I have a hunch ground and space battles won't be fun. Maybe if they did the ground battles like Rise of Nations and Space battles like Home World or Sins of a Solar Empire. When you get to the UFO, there is no more fighting, you win.

Also, the graphics look kind of cartoony. It isn't a bad thing, but personally I would like realistic graphics more.

I’m very excited about Spore, I should add the cartoon graphics don’t bother me at all and fit the game very well for a number of reasons;

1. It is not possible to simulate a realistically sized planet with a realistic population in any detail on any PC today. For this reason they’ve had to go for tiny “Little Prince” type planets if they had a realistic art style it would clash with these caricatured scaled down planets.
2.
3. As has been indicated making realistic looking creatures move realistically would require much more complex procedural animation algorithms which would need to model the physical properties of the creature much more precisely, that would be extremely hard to accomplish and would make all sorts of creatures you can create with the system now non-viable. Hence cartoon like physics and animation require similar graphics to look right and cartoon physics enable you to create a wider variety of creatures.

Spore is not however a hardcore strategy game so isn’t that similar to GCII.

Wow. And year and a half ago I posted this. >.> And screwed up that original post beyond all means of my understanding. But yeah, people, this sucker comes rolling in on September 7th, 2008 for us Americans. Two days earliers for those in Europe.

And actually you CAN make realistic looking creatures if you try REALLY hard. It's been done, look through some screenshots and you'll find a bad-ass grasshopper guy. Most of what we see is cartoony due to demo time constraints.

Darn time constraints....

And an interesting note is that through the extensive testing the development team has concluded they have seen and done less than ONE PERCENT of the possibilties in Spore. We are going to find Meta-Features in this thing that no one knew were possible.

For those who don't know a Meta-Feature is a possibility in a game that wasn't programmed in explicitly. Like throwing creatures into orbit. >.>