Electronic Arts has brought its very popular Spore franchise to Facebook, with the launch of a new game called Spore Islands. The game, while thematically similar to the well known PC game that was released last year, has gameplay that’s entirely different. Rather than roaming around a 3D world, Spore for Facebook is more of a stategy game: you tweak your creature and then watch how it fares against the other beasts inhabiting your island.
I took the game for a spin last night and found it to be pretty fun, though there’s a bit of a learning curve. The game is effectively broken down into two main sections: the creature builder, where you can tweak both the appearance and the attributes of your character (things like speed, reproductive rate, and over a dozen others). Once you’ve fine tuned your creature to your satisfaction, you can go into ‘observation’ mode, where you watch miniature versions of the island’s animals fight over food, eat each other, and reproduce (by way of eggs hatching). The graphics in the simulation portion are pretty basic — everything is presented in a 2D, top-down view, but they’re charming and get the job done.
The game’s strategy lies in crafting the ideal creature that’s best suited to both your island’s enviroment (which can be impacted by the type of food available) and the other creatures living on the island with you (if you’re slow and another create is quicker to get to the food available, you’ll probably die of starvation). This can be harder than it sounds, because when you’re playing against your friends the variables will be constantly changing, as the game allows you to further tweak your creature’s attributes between rounds using DNA points, the game’s virtual currency.
As with most Facebook games, Spore includes a number of viral mechanisms that invite you to publish your accomplishments to your news feed and to invite friends to come play with you (the biggest draw will be the buttons to invite friends to join you on your island). To monetize, the game allows users to purchase extra DNA points for further customizing their creatures.
Can’t say it looks too good, though its a good thing the big companies are experimenting in the social game market as well.
“you tweak your creature and then watch how it fares against the other beasts inhabiting your island”
This is what Spore on the PC was. You started out swimming around, but once you reached the stage where your creature grew legs… you watched how it fared against the other beasts inhabiting an island with you.
I played the PC game. In that you control where you creature is going, can approach the bad guys when you choose, etc. In this you basically just throw your creature into the ring and cross your fingers.
“very popular” is an overstatement. The game crashed and burned because the original demo they shown 2 years before launch was infinity better than the PoS they released. The demo version everyone refers to “Science Spore” and had incredible depth, but EA turns around and strips out everything that made the demo cool and dumbed it down to the point of being insulting, all so they could sell more copies.
They lost ALOT of people when they did that. I would have gladly paid more and more money for expansions if they left the game like Will Wright originally envisioned it.
There have been rumors being whispered about EA buying Social Game Company PlayFish (estimated $250MM) for a few months now. I wonder if EA built this game in house, or if they contracted PlayFish to develop this game for them many months ago. No doubt, the combination if EA’s brands and PlayFish’s experience in the industry makes for a good match. I’d like to see the install base (MAU and DAU) that EA can build up on this Facebook title. Do you think it will be marketed only using the viral channels on Facebook, or do you think there is an ad-buy to purcahse installs to seed the audience?
Has anyone else actually gotten this to work? I keep getting stuck in a redirect loop and the support links all point to 404 errors. I generally dislike the games on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try them out.
Yeah the FB game doesn’t work for me either and many links are broken. I laugh at this given EA’s history with this game.
WOW what a great game! I already bought $5,000 in virtual spore points and invited 300 million of my friends! Thanks EA.
I wouldn’t actually call Spore a “franchise” just yet.
Seems to be down now.
Disclaimer: I’m one of the NaviSPORE developers
If you have a buck to spend and have an iPhone/iPod Touch, Apple has just approved NaviSPORE (http://www.navispore.com), the only iPhone app that lets you see your Creations in 3D. As described in the link, NaviSPORE is community-driven: if you want to see your Creation, send the COLLADA file and associated textures as a zip file (you make these files with the Spore COLLADA cheat) to us via mycreation@navispore.com and give it a name, one that hasn’t already been taken in our model bank.