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Electronic Arts and Maxis have announced that Spore, the anticipated new godsim from the creator of The Sims, has gone gold and will be available for the Mac and PC at retailers September 5 in Europe and September 7 in North America and Asia Pacific.

"We are so excited to finally get Spore into the hands of fans and players," said Lucy Bradshaw, executive producer of Spore at Maxis. "The Maxis studio has had an absolute blast creating Spore, but the fun is just beginning. The most engaging stories are truly the ones people create themselves, and we can't wait to see how players not only craft and explore the Spore universe, but hear what stories they have to tell as a result."

Spore gives players their own personal universe in a box, allowing fans to create and evolve life, establish tribes, build civilizations, sculpt entire worlds and explore a universe created by other gamers. Spore gives players a wealth of creative tools to customize nearly every aspect of their universe: creatures, vehicles, buildings, and even spaceships. Players can then seamlessly share their creations with the world via the Sporepedia™ and explore infinite new galaxies created by other gamers.

For all the latest Spore news, screens, videos community content, and to try out the trial version of the Spore Creature Creator, visit the page below.

Spore Store

Electronic Arts

TransGaming

Spore

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Everett Kaser Software has announced the Mac OS X debut of its logic and puzzle game products, previously only available for Windows users. Thanks in part to work by Brad Oliver all 24 titles are now available for Mac. The games include Solitile (a solitaire Mahjong type game), Sherlock (graphical logic puzzles), Knarly Mazes (Minefield inspired, with a few new twists), and Descartes Enigma & Descartes Rainbow (Nonograms, or Paint-By-Number puzzles).

Starting about six years ago, I wrote all of my new games in an "interpreted language" of my own devising, and also began rewriting all of my old games into that language.  The environment (the interpreter program) expects very little of the OS, just very basic output of a "screen bitmap" to the program's window, the input of various events (mouse, keyboard, timers), and file I/O.  Everything else (menus, dialogs, help, and of course, the game itself) are written in the interpreted language.  The interpreter program is a relatively simple C program, the source code to which I've been making available on my website since the beginning.  The point of this seemingly long paragraph :-) is that this past year, Brad Oliver ported the interpreter for me to the Mac platform.  I've spent the past couple of months "polishing it up" and making Mac builds of all of the games, and both the demo and licensed versions of the games are now available.  All 24 games are available for the Mac, and all future games of mine will be simultaneously released in PC and Mac versions.  Because the UI itself is written IN the interpreted language, the games' dialogs and menus will have a decidedly MS Windows 'flavor' to them, but that is a minor point of the games, and shouldn't interfere at all with Mac users enjoying the games.

Everett Kaser Software

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MTV Multiplayer's latest Diablo III article once again offers comments from the action RPG's lead designer, Jay Wilson. In this installment the developer answers questions about fan expectations, specifically addressing the difficult task of appealing to both casual players and hardcore Diablo fanatics.

in “Diablo III,” players will have to pick up health orbs after they’ve killed enemies, which will restore their health upon contact. Wilson saw on the forums that people were worried that this might make the game “ridiculously hard.” He said that fans shouldn’t worry.

“That’s only if we tuned it like ‘Diablo II,’” he said. “When the player has similar downsides, it means we can make a lot more interesting monsters. We don’t have to kill you to challenge you. We can make a monster that affects your mobility, we can make a monster that has different kinds of attacks that are dangerous to you and that you actually have to avoid. And so it makes the combat a lot more interesting.”

While Wilson said they’ll keep the game accessible, he knows “Diablo III” has to ultimately appease their hardcore fans. He assured me that the team has kept this in mind, and is making the game progressively harder.

“A lot of the choices we make are styled towards knowing the long term,” he said. “I think that hardcore players, long-term, will find a game that has lot more depth for them but we distinctly made the choice that in the first stage of difficulty, the game’s really easy. So it’s easy to get through, it’s fun to play and you can kind of spam with one skill. But as you get further and further into the game, you start having to go, ‘Okay now I’ve really got to use this ground stomp thing to stun some monsters and get some distance from them to recover.’ That’s something that we focus on more later in the game.”

Visit the sites below to read the rest of Wilson's comments and view the new media offerings.

MTV Multiplayer: Diablo III, Appealing To Fans & Others

Diablo III Screenshots

Diablo III Artwork

Diablo III Wallpaper

Blizzard Entertainment

Diablo III

Buy Diablo III

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A new forum topic on Basilisk Games site asks players to offer their suggestions for the content of the manual for Eschalon: Book II, the next installment in the company's RPG series. Book II will pick up the storyline where it ended in the previous game and feature more than 60 gameplay enhancements.

Okay, so the User's Manual for Book I just contained some essential info needed to get started. Given that this is an old-school RPG series we don't intend to fill the user's manual up with all the game's secrets (such as a complete monster guide) because we want some things to be discovered by the player during the course of the game. However, we admit there is room for improvement...

So the question is: what are some topics or information you would like to see added to Book II's manual that you felt were missing from Book I's manual?

Basilisk Forum: Book II User's Manual

Basilisk Games

Eschalon: Book II

Buy Eschalon: Book II

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