Happyblox

Play God: Create A Life Form With Spore's Creature Creator.

Spore is an EA game launching September 12th. Check it out here. Basically it is a massive single player online game. I am not 100% sure what that means but my educated guess would be that you will not be interacting with live players but their inventions and creations. That is to say it will still be a game that credits the sharing of things with keeping it interesting. Better than all that is the mere premise. Get this, you start as a single cell life form and have to survive and thrive. The game progresses as your life form evolves and surpasses other life forms on your planet in intelligence..... or I guess strength, numbers or a myriad of other variables. Cool right? It gets better. It doesn't stop the action once you become the dominant creature on your little island, pissing you off and making players wonder why they invested so much time and emotion into it like Civilization 1 through 3. You get to take over your whole planet. Then, when you have conquered all there is to conquer there, you evolve enough to take to space and find other planets to take over! WICKED! We have finally created a game that makes some philosophers very nervous I would imagine. Who's game are we? More importantly, are we winning?

Their Creature Creator program demo was made available today and is worth an install. (video demo here) You get to create a life form in a sort of Sims way but a lot more intricate. More like the Eve-Online character creator but in a mature cartoon animation style. It is a lot of fun and below are a few creatures I have already created. You get to check out how they function as often as you like so you can see how each change effects certain attributes in the creatures movement. This is of course just the basic demo and you can see how many empty slots there are for all sorts of fun selections in the full version. There were something like 55,000 creatures uploaded today to Spore's servers. That's a good sign. So if you ever had the desire to rule the universe with your very own army of mutant insect space monkeys, now is maybe your very first time to do so. I would guess it will not be your last however. What are you waiting for? Go play God. I got my beard growing in as we speak.

Praise The Video Game Gods: Trinity Is Almost Here.

TWO MORE DAYS!!! Okay so if your not a total space nerd like I am you probably don't play Eve-Online but if you are a gamer the latest patch may be a reason to start. (see what I mean with the video trailer "Trinity" which shows off it's new fancy shmancy graphics engine but check out the Revelations II video for a better idea of the spirit of the game) Eve-Online has always been known for it's depth and it's graphics but unless you were pre said space nerd that was it's downfall. People who were not into space in one way or another found it too time consuming with too many options for your character to choose from causing waisted time or loss of valuable in game assets. So basically more like life. Funny how we have reached such a pinnacle in game development that people are actually complaining about too many options in their games. And I'm not talking about your characters pants size I'm talking about actual paths you take resulting in glory or devastation or for the mentally uninterested in learning, a life of Sims type boredom. There have been many patches in the 3 years I have been patrolling the universe but this one looks to be the best so far. They are going with a new graphics system with all new skins for the ships. (among other things) This from a game that has already won many awards for it's looks. It's not just a facial and a waxing though, there are many many changes to game play as well. For starters how about NEW SHIPS! Every space game needs cool ships and Eve definitely has the coolest ships in any game ever, hands down. Well now they have more of them. 5 for each race (20) including Marauders, "heavy battleships focusing primarily on attrition and deployment for longer periods of time." How cool is that? Also improvments to bandwith issues and loading times. The full list of improvements and upgrades can be found here.

*SIMULTANEOUS UPDATE*
To show you how cool the old engine was, Here is my alliance recruitment video on YouTube. Over 3000 views! WOOT!

Proximity Of Smart Monkeys.

According to CNN.com monkeys are smarter than Humans on short term memory skills. Read it here or watch it here. Of course they mention later that it's 5 year old Humans pitted against 5 year old monkeys which I would guess, taking the shorter life span, would give the monkeys an advantage, but regardless it has baffled scientists. "One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers." Maybe that just makes them better at Arabic. Maybe we should use them to translate in the war on terror. Some would argue to teach them English then. Thats another subject.

So here, play this game. It's called Proximity and I have been addicted to it for about 3 years now. I play it about 5 times in a row every other day. It's all about superior numbers so to speak, so take a break (at break.com) and get playing.