Once the biggest video game conference in America, last week's Electronic Entertainment Expo ,was criticized for being tame and somewhat boring. (Do a quick Google search and you'll hear about its pre-whitewashed history of near-naked "booth babes" and open bars on the show floor. We won't bother to link here.) To be truthful, LA's premier video game show was overall pretty flat. It was, in a sense, the perfect year to debut iPhone gaming.
The star of the show was EA's Spore, which adapted pretty damn well to the iPhone. Debuting in September simultaneously with the other editions on a dozen other platforms, iPhone Spore takes the very first level of the console version of Spore and expands it into a fun, addictive game.
In regular Spore, you play a one-cell organism which must eat smaller creatures to grow. Some creatures are too large to eat and, in fact, may kill you. As you grow, however, the once large creatures shrink to scale and you can eat them, too. As a Darwinian fantasy, you eventually keep eating until you get large enough to grow legs, roam the earth and, indeed, explore the universe.
The iPhone version stops at the cell level, so the game is spent floating, eating and getting larger to do bigger floating and eating. It is actually more fun than it sounds.
A water-based game, tilting the iPhone moves your little monster to and fro. It is simple and intuitive. Spore is split up into level breaks where you can upgrade your creature with different physical attributes like claws and big eyes.
The visuals are crisp and effective. The sound wasn't on - as if one could hear it in the loud E3 booths anyway - but the EA rep says that an "ultra-cool ambient soundtrack" will be in the final game. Excellent.
Spore should be out in mid-September for around $9.99.
