Kotaku: Robin Williams Spore One-Liners

[Trippy]

Some funny one liners from Robin Williams who gave a demo of Spore at the Wired party:

"This is a creature who when he deficates, he has to move very quickly."
"If this creature has two mouths, it has to have two assholes. What relationship doesn't?"
"I'm creating a creature that makes Darwin say I'm never taking acid again."
"Here's a creature that can kiss his own ass."
"Here's a creature that can smack his own ass."
"When you look at a paltapus, you have to realize there was an open bar in heaven."
"This is a creature that could do coke a mile away."
"Let's bring this creature to life and see how long before he's eaten."

[Source: Kotaku]

[Broughden]

Ive got to admit Spore looks really really fun. I heard the lead Dev discussing "other players" during the demo he was giving. Is it going to be an actual MMO? As either a SPG or MMO it looks like alot of fun!

[Trippy]

Ive got to admit Spore looks really really fun. I heard the lead Dev discussing "other players" during the demo he was giving. Is it going to be an actual MMO? As either a SPG or MMO it looks like alot of fun!

I don't know the reference you are referring to but during Will Wright's GDC presentation he said that your galaxy would be populated by the world's of other players analogous to the way you could download other players's neighborhoods in The Sims and visit them.

[Broughden]

Ive got to admit Spore looks really really fun. I heard the lead Dev discussing "other players" during the demo he was giving. Is it going to be an actual MMO? As either a SPG or MMO it looks like alot of fun!

I don't know the reference you are referring to but during Will Wright's GDC presentation he said that your galaxy would be populated by the world's of other players analogous to the way you could download other players's neighborhoods in The Sims and visit them.

I actually just got some more info on it. It seems you dont compete directly against other players, from my interpretation. But instead your universe (on your computer client side) is populated with creatures from other players games due to the cross-sporinization (their word) and hence the title "Spore". This gives your universe its ecological environment supposedly.

[Sky]

It's a cool mechanism. It tries to analyze your playstyle and find holes in the ecological niches in your worlds. It's just a code that Wright likened to DNA, a very small file, a KB or so, that will be fleshed out by your client into the full creature. Because it's so small the discs will have a ton on them for folks without internet access, probably a lot of the stuff we're seeing Wilco show off at the shows. Procedural ftw.

[Yoru]

I have to say I'm quite disappointed at the Spore presence here at E3. Lots of exclusives and behind-closed-door stuff, but for those of us that don't have a multinational behind us, we get nothing. There's a theater showing a video whose line has yet to diminish past the 30 minute mark.

I will, naturally, suffer for all of you and stand (agonizing, agonizing standing) around and watch this video sometime today or tomorrow.

[Samwise]

Shakycam bootleg plz.   :-D

[Broughden]

Shakycam bootleg plz.   :-D

Yes its a requirement. Unless its the one I have already seen.

[kaid]

http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/735/735340/vids_1.html

I was not that interested in spore until I saw the game play vid above. I think I will have to buy this when it comes out now.

[Sky]

I was hooked by the GDC05 video (focused on the procedural nature of the game), and every video since has made me more hyped. And I hate goddamned hype. But Wright is no Molyneux, so I'm allowing myself this bit of excitement over an unreleased title. I'm almost in the mode that I don't want to see anymore until it's released...but I'll download that video anyway...

[Yoru]

Got into the Spore demo yesterday after waiting in line like a common pleb for an hour. Both Llava and I were very impressed. Will Wright was demo'ing the creature editor, creature stage of the game and space stage of the game. I scribbed down a bunch of notes, but we didn't have video equipment on us. I'm fairly sure one of the larger organizations will put one out.

From memory, a few neat notes:

* There was apparently a bug that's now a feature - if you turn off your tractorbeam while the thing you're tractoring is in midair, you can throw stuff. Apparently it's possible to throw stuff into orbit.

* Large moons (which properly orbit gas giants and such) are colonizable.

* Certain goals appear at different stages of the game. For instance, the core of the creature phase is to survive, with the ultimate goal being to get 'egg points' and mate to produce a slightly-better generation. In the demonstration this was done by sneaking by another creature and munching on its eggs. When you mate and evolve, you start out as one of a small handful of creatures of the new generation, forcing you to build a social network (friends help you in combat, etc.) among your hatchmates and 'grow up' again before restarting the cycle.

The space phase apparently involves resources or something. It's not clear, but he did mention that a colony he dropped on a lava-covered shitball was 'expensive' but might be worth it if there's 'something rare' there. He also showed us alien artifacts, which apparently can confer bonuses (combat, trade, etc.).

The space phase also has diplomacy, where races you meet or attack will contact you, and you can apparently go to war or make various pacts, up to and including starfaring federations. There's a mission generation thing that automatically generates attack, defend and other sorts of missions for you to do in space.

[Riley]

Ive got to admit Spore looks really really fun. I heard the lead Dev discussing "other players" during the demo he was giving. Is it going to be an actual MMO? As either a SPG or MMO it looks like alot of fun!

They are calling it a "Massively single-player online game". 

Simultaneous multiplayer gaming is not a feature of Spore. The creatures, vehicles, and buildings the player can create will be uploaded automatically to a central database (or a peer-to-peer system), catalogued and rated for quality (based on how many users have downloaded the object or creature in question), and then re-distributed to populate other players' games. The data transmitted will be extremely small — only 1 kilobyte, according to Wright, who presented an analogy: think of it as sharing the DNA template of a creature while the game, like a womb, builds the "phenotypes" of the animal, which represent a few megabytes of texturing, animation, etc.

I don't fully get how all this will work, but essentially the players will be creating most of the "content" for the game, and everyone will basically have access to all this stuff.  They have also mentioned that the game would be available on "all platforms" but will be out on the PC first.  It will be interesting to see how they tie all this together in an online setting.  I also saw a quote where he mentioned that it would be extremely easy to turn Spore into an MMO down the road if that is something they felt like they wanted to do.

[Samwise]

In the original GDC demo, he mentioned that when you're buying premade buildings for your city, the selection you have comes from other players, and the computer presents you a subset of the available content that it thinks you might like.  I'd guess that when you buy your first building, it gives you a fairly diverse selection, and then selects future options based on their similarity to your recent choices.  You can then make your own buildings from scratch, or make modifications to buildings that you've bought pre-made, either of which go back into the central database for other people to take advatange of.

Interesting to see how it all pans out.  I'm sure every other building will look like a giant penis, but that's pretty much the nature of the beast.

[Sky]

I think it would suck as mmo, but be great for a decent sized private server.

Penis buildings...the cool thing is you could destroy that tard's creation utterly >:) Hell, one's entire mission could be to eradicate the scourge from the galaxy!

Didn't he say a half million star systems, with millions of planets?  The video kaid linked is the presentation Yoru is talking about, sounds like.

It's kinda fun becoming a fanboi after so many years of jaditude.

[NiX]

Here's a video of Robin Williams using the creature editor.

[Trippy]

Here's a video of Robin Williams using the creature editor.

[Sachant]

Ive got to admit Spore looks really really fun. I heard the lead Dev discussing "other players" during the demo he was giving. Is it going to be an actual MMO? As either a SPG or MMO it looks like alot of fun!

It's an AMMO.  An Almost MMO.  You can travel to other people's worlds etc because they are in the DB.  Your stuff you create goes to the DB for others to experience as well.  You almost interact but not quite but you still get to experience a part of them by experiencing what they've created.

It's my absolute most anticipated game I will be buying.  Watching Will Wright demo was fun and he had a lot of things he slipped in that had people laughing.  It looks like a truly fun game and I love these kinds of sandboxes.

[Broughden]

It's my absolute most anticipated game I will be buying.  Watching Will Wright demo was fun and he had a lot of things he slipped in that had people laughing.  It looks like a truly fun game and I love these kinds of sandboxes.

And the sandbox part of the character creation will keep people more entertained than the whole strategy conquering part will probably.

[Sachant]

Here's a video of Robin Williams using the creature editor.

I agree with the laughter.  It's a shame I didn't get to see that live. ;)  Too funny!

[NiX]

The visual cues for those one liners made them 10x more funny. As someone pointed out in the comments, Robin Williams quick comments are quite genius. On the flip side having him use it showed how easy and creative you could be without having much knowledge of the toolset. Can't wait for this game. It's this kind of stuff that keeps me loving my PC over my console.

[Sky]

The G4 idiots got WW time. That one kid who hosts some dumbshit show struggled with the editor, WW had to tell him several times to do things like give his creature hands and feet. Poor TechTV. G4 makes me staebby™.

[Sachant]