Spore is good. It’s just not the Spore that Will Wright set out to make, and certainly not the one he promised us in 2005. It’s a great first try, much like The Sims was nowhere near as good as The Sims 2. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you about Darkspore.

“Darkspore” has been submitted for three different copyrights by EA, each covering multiple areas. These include “providing on-line computer games”, “motion picture film production”, “action figures”, “board games”, “playing cards”, “modeled plastic toy figurines”, and of course “computer game software” and “video game software”. This sounds like they’re ready to flood the gaming market with the Darkspore brand. EA’s recent financial statement lists “Spore Title TBA” under Q4 2011 for both PC and Console, which means that there’s another Spore product on the way. It’s very unlikely that this is another Spore Heroes-like product because it’s for both PC and Console, and it can’t be a port of the PC version for the same reasons. Coupled with the recent trademarking of “Darkspore”, it looks like there’s a full-fledged sequel on the way for both PC and console. This is great news for the game, which has so much it can improve upon. Rather than give you a laundry list of things off the top of my head that could be in the sequel…actually, I think I’ll do that:

• Aquatic stage
• Flora and Planet editors
• Parts editors; a utility to create parts for the editors
• Improved creature animations; the system right now is choppy and suffers at times from 3d mesh glitches when limbs overlap
• Quasi-realistic graphics, hearkening back to the GDC 2005 showing
• Co-operative multiplayer

But like I said, Spore isn’t the sum of its many parts. A truly good sequel worthy of the Spore name wouldn’t simply add more bullet points to the already large list, it would refine the game and tackle the real problem. The main issue with the game is that it’s spread too thin; it doesn’t offer enough depth or length in the earlier levels to make them meaningful. The space stage is deeper, but suffers from repetition. By imposing artificial limits on the stages, a finite beginning and end, it breaks the illusion that there is actually a meaningful progression from cell to space.

What the game needs to do to ultimately succeed in what it was meant to be is to eliminate the stages altogether. There needs to be no “Congratulations, you’ve advanced to the next stage!” interruption, but rather a seamless progression from bacterial to larger cell to small sea creature to larger sea creature and then optionally land-based, all the while growing in intelligence and sentience. Tribal and Civilization stages are achieved through progressively building up intelligence to the point where a social system is developed, and tools can be built. At any time, you can assume control of a creature at a stage lower than you and control the way that its development shapes out, so that the game is truly a “Sim” game worthy of Wright’s mark and not just a “simulation”. Fly to another planet, step into another creature’s story for a while, go back to your original species, and so on.

It may be a pipe dream, but I believe that this main design piece is required if Darkspore is to be what Spore was supposed to be. Then again, it could just be EA grabbing for cash. Lord knows it would be classic EA to minutely improve the game and sell it as “2.0″.

Sources:
investor.ea.com
1Up

Die rolling is the primary focus for now, but in the future I’d like to see such things as quick rules lookup and character sheet creation for common RPG systems (D&D, GURPS, etc) as well as voice control. Any suggestions you have can be emailed to me or posted in the comments.

Updates of Note

TaCOS has shifted to software-only. The TaCOS and Car OS projects will combine, and the TaCOS personality will now run my car audio functions via netbook interface. I’ll post more details on this soon.

I’m going to try my hand at Song Fu, and see how that goes. Song Fu is a song production contest similar in nature to Iron Chef, for those of you who don’t know.

I have a few new software items that I’m working on sporadically. These include a dictionary generator, dice roller (Helpful for GMs and DMs), and a networked tile-based RPG.

I may be starting an actual website soon, in addition to this project blog. Stay tuned for more details!

Just now, my Hotmail inbox went out. Out, as in gone. It’s not there. My account exists, but my inbox has been totally obliterated. I first found out about this from my friend, and it turns out that not only his inbox, but two friends and one family member have also lost theirs. It’s either a very specific error targeting my family and friends, (some of whom are on opposite ends of the country) or it’s a really large hack/system malfunction. Is this happening to anyone? As far as I can tell, I’m the first one to post about this. I’m glad I switched to Gmail, but there was roughly 5 years worth of email on my Hotmail account.

After the jump, see the Mock II image for TaCOS, with a slightly better but still pretty lame doctored-up image to try and show how the actual toaster should look.

Wrong toaster model, slightly wrong colors, and the screen is all messed up (wrong proportions, the frame probably won’t be there in the final version), but it’s still more white than my original mockup:

If Mock I were glossy white instead of metallic silver, you’ve got yourself a winner for overall actual LOOK…but did I mention the glossy white? 

Here are a few of the more notable features that you’ll have to empty your wallet and sacrifice a small animal for:

Copy and Paste
The most expected feature on the list, but one of the most useful ones at the same time. No longer will you have to use a pencil and paper to remember long strings of alphanumeric garble! You can also copy and paste photos, which means sending more than one picture at once in an email.

“Spotlight” (File Search)
Jailbroken iPods/iPhones can get something like this already, but in this case I’d probably say first-party is better.

Landscape Keyboard (in more stock apps)
Another annoyance of mine fixed.

Push Notification
Finally! Or, will it really come?

MMS
iPhone-only, of course. Multimedia Messaging is cool, probably. I guess. If I had an iPhone and not an iPod Touch.

Automatic Login in Safari
Now my iPod will log into my school networks automatically, hopefully. Knowing them, they’ll probably have some sort of mobile device detection installed right as soon as this is released to negate the purpose.

And the kicker is the aforementioned $10 that Apple seems to think is a good idea to charge the iPod Touch crowd. We’re getting less than the iPhone adopters in this upgrade, yet we’re the ones having to pay for it. What gives, Apple?

Last, but unfortunately not least, is the

App Nickel-and-diming
Developers will now be able to release additional content to their software for a price. I can see how this would be a good idea if there weren’t so much crap in the store right now. This will just give the n00b developers even more ways to be stupid. Furthermore, they can offer subscriptions. I assume this means like a magazine subscription or an MMO subscription that you have to pay a monthly/yearly fee for. That is totally bogus (pardon the lame) in my humble opinion.

At first, I thought the good outweighed the bad. After reading all of the new and exciting features, I’m not so sure.

Update: It looks like the iPod Touch G2 will be getting bluetooth functionality unlocked with the new update. More points for, but still MANY against.

(Source: Gizmodo)