Spore

GameDaily BIZ just got off the phone with legendary game designer Will Wright, who as you know recently left Electronic Arts to pursue his entertainment think tank, Stupid Fun Club (of which EA is a co-owner). Although Lucy Bradshaw, VP and General Manager at Maxis, reassured us when the news broke that Spore would be in good hands and that Wright's legacy and the culture he instilled at Maxis would help steer Spore's future, Wright today confirmed with us that he will actually still be providing feedback to EA on Spore and other projects.

Gamasutra writes: Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet leads the nominees for the ninth annual Game Developers Choice Awards with seven nominations, organizers have revealed. Number None's Braid follows closely with five nominations. Among the nominations for LittleBigPlanet is the coveted Game of the Year award. Other nominees for that category include Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead, each of which received a total of four award nominations; Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto IV, which earned a total of three nominations, and Lionhead Studios' Fable 2. Winners will be honored at an awards show taking place during the 2009 Game Developers Conference.

Both Spore and LittleBigPlanet are games that ride the user generated content train that seems to be so popular these days. Despite the fact that LittleBigPlanet benefited from its appealing central characters and PS3 exclusivity (which always guarantees press and fan attention), Maxis is confident that it still rules the user created content roost, and that LBP hasn't stolen its hype.

CVG: Spore senior producer Morgan Roarty has been weighing up the similarities between the Maxis game and Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet, as well as their relative strengths. Speaking to us at a recent EA event, Roarty contemplated whether LittleBigPlanet had stolen all of the hype surrounding user created game content in recent times.

CVG Writes: EA Maxis has confirmed plans to release four new Spore products in calendar year 2009. Speaking to us at a recent trip to EA's UK headquarters, Spore senior producer Morgan Roarty laid out the franchise's roadmap for the upcoming year. Maxis is developing the core game's first expansion pack, the LittleBigPlanet-esque Spore: Galactic Adventures. The expansion's targeting a deeper variety of gameplay based around Spore's space stage, and the overwhelming majority of its new content will be created by the Spore community using new editing tools that'll allow players to customise their own planets and create their own adventures to share with other gamers.

Today's news gathering has everything the TGR staff truly loves: boiling hate, Spore and Uwe Boll being publicly disgraced.

Gamerdeals.net writes: Well... what can we say... the week of Christmas is not the best time to release a new game apparently...

Kombo writes, It is a widely held belief that used game retailers are screwing game publishers and developers out of millions upon millions of dollars annually. While this may be the case, there have been some that have made the argument that the game industry would be in worse shape without these retailers selling games at discount prices. One such individual is Soren Johnson, a programmer on both the Civilization and Spore franchises. On his blog, Johnson spoke in the defense of GameStop saying...

Ripten: You know that saying about shit rolling downhill? Yeah, well you better believe it does. A few nights ago, we reported that a long time EA Command & Conquer community staff member had made a forum post informing members that the company would be linking bans on the forum to their line up of games as well ... We then ran a follow up yesterday featuring an official canned response from EA regarding the matter, and today, the C&C community manager issued a response via the forum addressing his previous comment...

Ripten: A recent post by an EA Community Staff member on the company's Command and Conquer message board outlines changes to their policy, stating their intent to link a gamers forum account to their EA gaming account. Why does this matter? Because EA is planning on banning those who get banned on their forum from their games as well. The post by the EA Community Staff member can be seen below: