Spore Origins (iPhone)

Subtitled Origins, Spore for the iPhone is a casual game to the core. If you’ve played Feeding Frenzy on the PC or on Xbox Live Arcade, you know how to play Spore. You must direct your spore over smaller creatures, gobbling them up to harvest DNA. Once you fill out a DNA strand, you move on to the next stage. You can increase your DNA bounties by racking up quick bite combos. Swimming into a field of food and then bouncing around the tiny meals like a pinball is the best way to maximize your intake and speed the evolutionary process. There is often extra food inside air bubbles that can be popped with spikes or by pushing them into creatures with spikes and pincers.

IGN – Spore Origins iPhone Review

Spore Origins, as a single-player experience in any case, evolved the same way, dealing a superior spot to the Spore Origins iPhone incarnation while other iterations fall to the side. Energetic gameplay combined with simple controls and a slick set of features command respect for the definitive single-player portable version of this evolutionary game.

There’s one feature missing, of course. Spore Origins on iPhone has no multiplayer, the importance of which will depend on what it is about the franchise that appeals to you. Nevertheless, even without the option to play with your friends this is an immaculate game.

PocketGamer – Spore Origins iPhone review

Game play itself is pretty simple. You eat creatures to fill the DNA bar on the left and increase health on the right. Increasing health makes your creature grow larger, allowing it to eat bigger creatures. You can also boost your score by performing “combo” moves, which is really just catching a cluster of prey at one time for a multiplier bonus. The downside of this is you lose control of your creature during such a feeding frenzy, which might result in damage from collisions with predators. Damage from attacks by other predators causes your creature to shrink until it becomes extinct. Completing most levels takes only a few minutes, and that should make it clear Spore Origins is strictly a casual game, but there is an element of casual strategy too.

ARS Technica – Spore Origins reviewed

In the first few levels, you only need to chase down enough tadpole-like snacks to fill up a meter at the top of the screen, so there’s no real need for tricky maneuvers or evasive action. The game adds new challenges at a steady pace, however, starting with simple predators that will chomp you to extinction if you get too close to their business end. Your creature has a five-heart health meter that fills up when you eat, and drops when you get eaten or injured. Every time you fill up a heart, you gain a “size level,” meaning that you become capable of eating larger critters, including some former predators. You must be careful, though; they can still damage you if you approach them from the wrong direction, or at the wrong time, and if you take enough damage, you’ll shrink back to square one. Edible bad guys give off a blue signal, making it easy to tell what you should approach and what you shouldn’t. You may be able to damage or kill non-edible baddies, depending on your equipment, but doing so won’t give you points or health. You can also pick up power-ups that grant you temporary powers, like a shield, a speed boost, or the ability to poison your enemies.

Slide2Play – Spore Origins review

Where this game really shines is in your creature customizing. You can color your little guy however you see fit, and as the game progresses, you can add “performance” pieces to him such as spikes, shields and mandibles, all of which make your organism a more effective eating machine. The customization kind of reminds of a good racing game like Forza 2, where you can really customize your look, as well performance. It was absolutely the customization that kept me wanting to play just one more level.

TouchGen – Spore Origins review

In the Electronic Arts booth here at E3, nestled in among the raucous noises of various first-person shooters, is a completely white room with a few cell phones on tables. This is the EA Mobile space, and it was here that we got to play Spore Origins, the iPhone version of Will Wright’s sure-to-be masterpiece.

Like the EA Mobile space, Spore Origins is pretty simple and clean, and stands out as a fairly calm experience among the racket of a lot of other iPhone games. Spore takes you through a civilization from ameoba to space travel, but Spore Origins sticks with just the ameoba stage. You play a creature of your own creation and float through the microbial ether, eating things that are smaller than you, and running away from things that are larger.

TUAW – Hands on with Spore Origins

Starting in the primordial ooze, you guide a microorganism through the prehistorical goop using the accelerometer. Tilts of the phone instruct your creature to move in the respective direction. In the first level, tilting the phone in the general direction of food is all you need to do. A meter in the left corner informs you of your progress through the level, which is naturally determined by how many miniature creatures you’ve swallowed.

The moment you’ve engulfed enough food to fill the progress bar, the level ends and your creature evolves. Before moving to the next level, you’ve given an opportunity to customize your life form from an array of additions. New coloring, appendages, and other organic odds and ends let you personalize your being. One cool feature even allows you to pull pictures from your phone and paste them over specific parts of your creature. Bizarre, but entertaining nonetheless. Finish evolving, save the animal, and then its off to the next level.

PocketGamer – Spore Origins hands-on preview

As we saw at E3 and WWDC, the iPhone version of Spore is Spore Origins, which is limited to the “primordial ooze” stage you see here, with a limited version of the Creature Creator thrown in for tweaking your bug cosmetically. On the plus side, it’s simple and a quick diversion, and it’s fun combo-ing your way through 35 increasingly difficult levels of munching little floaties. You can also import photos from your iPhone camera to texture-map on your creatures (Benny’s Michigan Fab 5 tee).

But on the downside, the game suffers from the same control awkwardness that all of the accelerometer-only games do—as you can see in our video, the camera had a tough time keeping focus because you’re always dramatically moving the phone to try to reign in your creature. A training stage featured a level-like bubble for each axis that showed you when you were at the zero-point, which was incredibly helpful—too bad it disappeared after training.

Gizmodo – Spore Origins hands on

Why not go back to basics for your next project, and make it a 500KB Java game for mobile phones?

Will Wright laughs, leans forward, and – get this – actually considers it. For a couple of seconds.

“Um…”

Suffice to say, the man behind Spore, and before that The Sims, isn’t quite ready to follow peers like John Carmack into mobile development.

“I know a lot of developers who’ve gone into mobile for reasons like having a smaller team, and projects that last four to six months,” he says. “But y’know, I’m not attracted to things because they’re easy! That’s not to say there aren’t challenges in developing for the mobile platform – there are plenty. But my main criteria isn’t figuring out games that are easier to do.”

Ah well, it was worth a try. As the only mobile media to sit down with Wright during today’s Spore event in London, we thought we should try to bring him into the fold.

PocketGamer – Interview with Will Wright with Spore on iPhone & DS

The release of Spore Origins last week marked an important evolution for iPhone. In the face of competition from mobile, Nintendo DS, and even an iPod version of Spore, it was the iPhone iteration that proved fittest. It’s a surprising revelation – for the first time, we’re witnessing an iPhone game emerge superior to all of its handheld rivals.

Obviously, this places Apple’s handset on the map in terms of being a viable and compelling platform. We’ve known for several weeks now that there’s money to be made on the App Store. Sega has been rolling in the dough with hundreds of thousands downloading Super Monkey Ball and other publishers including Gameloft and Publisher X are also reaping rewards.

PocketGamer – Spore Origins and the iPhone’s growing domination of handheld gaming

So, the iPhone version of Spore Origins is available on the App Store, and if you read our earlier story, you’ll know it has a nifty feature letting you import images from your iPhone to use as a texture for your Spore.

While someone else gets on with the serious business of reviewing the game, I’ve been having a play with this picture feature, with suitably juvenile (but occasionally creative) results.

Accessed via the in-game creature editor, there are two ways to use the photo feature. You can use one of your own iPhone snaps, or you can import any image that’s saved in your handset’s photo library.

Meaning, in other words, that you can search for a photo of, say, Steve Jobs using the iPhone Safari browser, save it, and then import it into Spore…

PocketGamer – How we turned Steve Jobs into an iPhone Spore

Spore is an incredible game, and the minds at EA have decided to port a version of the “Cell Stage” of the game to the iPhone – they call it Spore Origins. As such, it was one of the first games to integrate fully interactive accelerometer controls and great graphics. The game is rather fun to play (at least in controlled doses), so we’ve compiled a few recommendations on how to best go about beating the game.

I know it sounds funny, considering that essentially all you do is tilt the iPhone around and around until you finally manage to consume enough creatures to get your bar up to the next evolutionary upgrade, but there are a few strategies that can really help you make it to the end of the game with less frustration. The following three tips are the best ways to effectively make it to the end of the game:

1. Don’t Barrel into Enemies – Plan out how an attack will work

In my time with the game, I’ve found that without proper offensive methods, barreling into enemies in the hopes that food will magically appear is not worth your time. Better yet, just wait for the opportunity to attack, typically luring a predator away from a larger group will give you the necessary edge to defeat him while he’s alone and therefore weak. Use symbiotes and the exploding cells to your advantage. Anger a predator by first hitting him with the symbiote, then lure him towards an exploding cell to finish the job and get a large amount of food. Played correctly, you should be able to take out most bigger predators early on in the game, even without having evolved the offensive mechanisms.

2. You’re Only as Strong as Your Mandibles

As early on in the game as you can, upgrade your offensive mechanisms in order to be more effective at eliminating your prey. Mandibles will come in handy almost every time, and you can worry about defense further on down the line – if you play the game smartly, your defense will come as a natural part of your evasion tactics. However, it’s important to eventually also upgrade defense, so don’t forget to do that. Optimize your creature so that it has several offensive orifices – the more, the merrier. Also, don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Who says a creature can only have one mouth?

3. Quickly Run through the Caves

When in-between zones, your DNA progress bar disappears – this is for a reason. During those cave sections in between zones, you won’t evolve if you eat food, so my advice to you is to go through those areas as quickly as possible. Because the food doesn’t matter, just try to wound predators so they don’t come after you. Or better yet, give yourself mandibles on your backside. This way, as you flee, you’ll be wounding the predators coming after you. Successfully make it through the cavern quickly and you will be rewarded by not having a decreased health bar.

From BrightHub