While scouring the net for Spore an article popped up that, though published a few months ago, completely missed our razor sharp genetically engineered eyes. Business Week Online got the opportunity, like many others lately, to test drive Spore under supervision by Will Wright. The creature editor is discussed, along with the tribal phase and space phase.

…to lift off a planet, you do a big, Powers Of 10-style zoom-out until you are hovering in orbit around your planet. Zoom out further and you begin to see other planets, which you can move to by clicking on them; zoom out further, and you can pick a different galaxy to explore.

Don’t miss that we’ve added a whopping 36 new concept art images to the gallery.

Spore made a debut in Europe at the 2006 Leipzig Games Convention in Germany a couple of week ago. GameSpot was fortunate enough to get their hands on the creature editor and fiddle around with it a bit.

IGN on the other was even more fotunate and got a complete walk-through at the hands of Designer Alex Hutchinson. Lots of good meat in that article.

While Spore has no real final goal per se, the game’s ultimate ambition is to encourage exploration. Since each of the millions of planets in the universe will represent the work of a real-life player in the game, Spore promises to be a nearly limitless sandbox to play in.

A sandbox full of toys and goodies. But wait! What about Will, wasn’t he there? Of course, and he got around doing a little presenting of himself, IGN got it covered as well.

E3 stuff just keeps pouring in. But who are we to complain? GameSpot is next up with their batch of Spore items. First there’s a Spore Creature Editor Hands-On, which is pretty much self-explanatory what that’s about. Secondly they have an updated impression called Conquering the Universe.

Spore continues to look even more promising and intriguing, and the fact that we were able to actually see so much more of last year’s hinted-at content for ourselves has gone a long way in quelling our natural skepticism. In fact, if the game actually supports just half of what Wright and his team aspire to create, it could be absolutely groundbreaking. Spore is scheduled for release in 2007.

Both of these are based on a 17 minutes long video released at both GameSpot and IGN (better quality) showing pretty much most of the important aspects of the game. Be sure not to miss the new screenshots as well. Check back tomorrow for more exciting things!

In the upcoming June issue of Computer Gaming World there’s a big first look on Spore. In stores May 16th the preview is supposed to be around 10 pages long.

News about Spore have begin to show up in the most unlikely places. The latest article comes from Kansas, US based newspaper Wichita Eagle that reports about the strong buzz around the game. Will Wright, lead designer, expects the game to be so large that, I quote:

I figure, assuming we sell 1 million copies and you spend one hour in every world before going to the next one, it would take something like 20 years (to explore it all) without stopping or sleeping.

In similar news a missed preview has come to ur attention at CVG. Check it out, though not much new is revealed.

With 64% asking what Spore is in our previous citizen survey it might be a good idea to explain what this latest Will Wright game really is. Here are some informative links to help you on the way:

- Our try at it
- GameSpy takes a shot at it
- 1UP.COM gives it a try
- Gaming Steve tries to explain (Podcast preview)

Hopefully this enlightens you enough to give you a general idea of this exciting game idea. Stay tuned for Spore news when we hear about them!