Space Oddity’s Spore Blog

If you are interested in simgames and a member of facebook you maybe interested in applying for a closed beta test of a new Facebook game. The makers of Spore’s Facebook sister game Spore Islands posted a request on the forum a while ago. If you want you can still apply. I have and I am really liking the game so-far.

As you might have noticed, this site has experienced some downtime the last couple of days, I am sorry for any inconvience. I am glad to be back!

By the way, visitors looking for the Spore app advertised on Spore.com you can click the “APPS” tab on the main menu above, or click this link.

There already is a website for Civ V and some neat screenshots (twitter is great!).

Simprograms has a list of web snippets about another presentation Will Wright did recently for the Games for Learning Institute. It is always worth reading about the talk and the reaction of the writers.

Gamasutra has exiting news for all us Civilization fans out there: Firaxis annouced Civ V for PC today. One of the surprising new elements are hexagonal tiles on the maps. Keep checking back here for screenshots, I’ll be posting them as soon as they pop up on the ‘net.

Yesterday Will Wright presented a keynote at the Engage! Expo aka Toy Fair 2010. Gearlog was so kind not only to write about it, but to add a few videos as well. The sound is not too good, but when you listen carefully you can still pick up some of what he’s talking about.

edit: Kotaku also has a nice post about it and talked to Wright afterwards.

Terminal Gamer has browsed through EA’s list for new games in the fiscal year 2011 and saw a listing of “Spore Title TBA” for the PC and for consoles. As always I’ll keep you posted on any news I find.

Pictures of small life can be very beautiful, even those of bacteria. Eshel Ben-Jacob uses petri dishes as his canvas. His site is full of interesting examples like the one below. If you’re interested in this form of art, be sure to visit Microbial Art as well for many more beautiful pictures in different styles.

Surfing the web I found the following amazing article: mind readers. It describes scientific research that will ultimately make it possible to decode neural activity, or in other words view what someone is seeing!

Japanese Mind Reading Technology
by NTDWorldNews

A guy named Roy Prol made this interesting video of what Earth would look like if it had rings like Saturn. Cool idea and a pretty neat execution too.