The first planet that we visited was completely barren and needed development before life could inhabit it. Before you can start exploring and colonising other worlds, your final task on your home planet is to colour it purple, although we couldn't quite understand why. The result: You have to eradicate the surrounding colonies with your onboard laser, using the left mouse button to fire. However, there's a downside to your scientific experimentation, and in our demo we managed to introduce a rogue infection to our city by collecting bug-ridden creatures. Spore has a very dry sense of humour, and it calls on you to collect creatures for your own nefarious ends. Not all your spaceships need look like bathroom fittings. Equipped with a tractor beam, you can click on unsuspecting creatures and pull them into your ship with the left mouse button. You select weapons and tools by clicking icons at the bottom of the screen. You use either the WASD keys or a right-click of the mouse to move around, and the mouse wheel to ascend or descend. Controlling the ship in the air was simple. The game holds your hand with a tutorial on the basic controls and abilities of your ship, both those needed for flying low over planets and abducting creatures, and for interplanetary travel. When it came down to playing the game, our hastily designed creation was no match for the toilet-shaped vessel that had already been designed by the Spore team. Although there was no way that an advanced civilisation would be caught dead in such a monstrosity, it's clear that the tools will let players create pretty much anything they can imagine. We chose to use a flying-saucer-shaped vessel as a template, and from there we altered the proportions, applied different colours and patterns, and adorned our creation with various cannons and lasers. As with the creature-creation tools, you can customise your spaceship to a highly advanced degree. Spore will offer five evolutionary stages in its duration, and given that we've covered the early parts of the game in other previews, we decided to jump forward and check out space exploration. Jumping straight onto one of EA's demo PCs, we wasted no time in getting a hands-on with the game. Life can get scary at the cellular level. It was also a good opportunity for us to put our questions to the development team about Spore's many community features, and to take a look at the Nintendo DS version of the game. With the game now in fully playable form, we got to see the life sim as its gameplay progresses from single-cell organisms to intergalactic warfare and everything in between. The game itself is looking much more complete now, although it has been six months since its last showing at Leipzig in August 2007. Thankfully for both immigration officers and the gaming public at large, Spore is now "pretty much finished" according to EA, and a worldwide release date of September 7 was recently announced. That's exactly what the developers of Spore were met with when they entered the UK for the London demonstration of their game. It's a sign of the anticipation surrounding a game when you're a developer visiting a foreign country and passport control asks you about its release date.
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