Spore: Your little universe on a gaming computer

on 9/21/08
    Will Wright has been on a 4 year hiatus since the release of the Sims 2 in 2004.  His latest masterpiece has been around a decade in the making.  Originally Spore was to be called Sim Spore.  The developers (luckily) felt Spore would be a better name.  Spore's box is sleek and shiny, there is really no other way to put it.
      This game on the flip side is very memory intensive.  It takes 12 gigabytes (that's 12,000 megabytes) of memory and an ATI/Nvidea video card.  The only computer I can run this on is my brand new Imac.
     Overall, though this is an amazing game.  The graphics are cartoony and smooths.  Animation is also very fluid, apart from the little "strands" that come from the armpits of your creatures.  The gameplay is also fairly solid, all of the stages are basically stripped down versions of other games made by Maxis. (ex.Civilization series, The Sims, Simcity, etc.)
    The stages get progressively harder but are still fun for a casual gamer on Easy.  The Sporepedia is an online reference table for creatures and creations.  It take about a minute to load something on but other than that it is fairly fast.  You can also sign up for a Spore Online account to share your creations and get medals for achievements.  The one disadvantage of this is there is not chat system to talk with your "spore friends" so you'll have to open aim to chat about your new creature.  So overall I give Spore a 9/10

Google Chrome, the "all in one mentality"

on 9/2/08
Yesterday Google released its new browser, Chrome.  They set out to create a simple and easy to use browser.  There are large buttons and a simple intuitive interface.  Also, instead of having the web language drivers as one "string" they are each seperate "devices".  They only two downsides are no search box and few add-ons.