This DVD-ROM will cause the type of people who love The Sims to say "Wow!"
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICHspore video game 88 224(photo credit: Courtesy)
Creative and innovative computer games are quite rare these days, and Will Wright - who developed the best-selling PC game of all time, The Sims - is the mastermind behind the pathfinding Spore. Not that it is perfect, but the DVD-ROM will cause the type of people who love The Sims to say "Wow!"
Instead of inviting gamers to create a community of interacting virtual people in a variety of environments, Wright explodes a star, creating sea life that begins as an imaginary one-celled creature constantly feeding on small prey to develop and grow. It's a microscopic dog-eat-dog world, but you may choose to be either an aggressive carnivore or a more sociable herbivore.
Your creature "mates" - depicted as an encounter with a similarly shaped creature releasing pink hearts - and using "DNA points," your "Creature Creator" designs your newly evolved and slightly more developed creature sitting a tiny step higher on the evolutionary ladder. Just click on different mouths, arms, wings, tails and other organs and appendages.
After about 10 actual hours and billions of Spore years of evolving, your creature will have virtually moved up from the Cell Phase to the on-land Creature Phase, the Tribal Phase and the Civilization Phase (with its stress on moneymaking and military might). Finally, you may build your own spacecraft and zoom off to inhabit other parts of the universe.
If you want to see what kinds of critters thousands of denizens of cyberspace have created, go into a Web site and download them; in fact, you can't play Spore without first registering on-line. Although the game comes with a 66-page thick and detailed Hebrew-language user's manual, no one needs to read it. By following the in-game instructions, you can swim through the eons on your own. For those who tire quickly of mouse-clicking, the lower stages - during which you catch and chomp on floating pieces of food - may be boring. While the "wardrobe" of creature parts is amazingly detailed, the environmental graphics are sometimes not very exciting.
And from all that gorging, you may develop a serious case of the munchies, in which you want to swallow all the junk food in your kitchen cabinets.
Spore, a DVD-ROM in English by Maxis for EA, distributed by Atari-Israel, requires Windows XP and up and a Pentium 4 PC or higher, for ages 12 through adult, NIS 219.
Rating: ****
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