What's Spore, you ask? You could call it the game version of the 'Powers of Ten' movie. It starts with you in control of a single-celled organism floating around, trying not to get eaten. If you survive long enough, you'll evolve your creature all the way up to sentience and the stars. At each stage in the evolution of your species, you'll be able to enter the 'creature editor', which lets you add or remove cilia, fins or legs, change the bone structure, attach defensive weapons or whatever else you want to do. Through all this, Spore aims to incorporate gameplay elements from PacMan, Diablo, Populous, Simcity, Civ-- and that's all before you manage to build your UFO and zoom around your planet, your solar system and galaxy.

This might sounds ludicrously ambitious, but that's not all the game promises: by generating your creature's model, textures and animations procedurally (on the fly), the code needed to reproduce your rampaging killing machine will take up a tiny space. This means that the game can populate yor universe from a massive pile of species either pre-made by Maxis or created by other players, choosing the ones that it thinks would best fit a world's ecosystem.

Another neat twist that the game will bring is that while the game will start out really goal-based, the farther you progress and the closer you get to being a 'galactic god', the more like a giant sandbox the game will become. Imagine diplomacy with other star-faring species, bloody interstellar conquest or Uplift/2001-style genetic meddling!

Oh, and if there's something about the game you were wondering about, you can always email Will Wright himself: WWright@maxis.com

Also, awesome video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...559198&q=spore , go to around 25:00 for astronomical stuff.