Here's hoping it and other publishers see mobile as an increasingly viable way to do this too. EA is one publisher clearly waking up to the general idea of an application that comes out before a main game. And while Spore Creature Creator itself looks too technically and graphically complex to squeeze into a mobile app, many of the examples I listed earlier (cars, sport kits, scouting) could easily work. Connectivity has been one stumbling block something that's gradually being solved with the wider proliferation of flat-rate data tariffs and handsets designed for, well, data connectivity. Several years ago, EA's mobile boss at the time was floating the idea of downloading a FIFA player to your phone to train up using a mini-game, before re-importing them into the console version. It seems such a logical thing to do, yet nobody's done it. Who knows, a clever bit of 'Try More Games' marketing within such an application might even get them to, well, try some mobile games too. What's more, this would finally give the hardcore players who sneer at mobile a reason to do something game-related on their phones. Meanwhile, us gamers get something to do in the long weeks leading up to a hot new game on another platform. Do it.) The publisher gets a nifty way to build / capitalise on anticipation for the console game, or even generate some extra revenues. (Memo to Sega: I would happily pay a fiver for a full nerdtastic Football Manager app that lets me spend the month leading up to the PC release combing through lower-league players and free agents to build a shortlist. You'd do this in a mobile app, then upload the results to the publisher's server, ready to download to your console or PC when the main game comes out. You could be building monsters, creating an RPG party, tuning a car, scouting footballers, or designing a tennis kit even more retina-shredding than the lime-green effort Rafa Nadal wore at Queens last week. But it got me thinking, why aren't mobile phones being used more for this kind of thing? Pre-release type applications that prepare you for a console or PC game's release, I mean. What's that? It's an app that EA is releasing in advance of Spore itself, which will allow people to design all manner of beasties ready to use in the main game later this year. The Spore Creature Creator is a software that allows players to create their own creatures with a standalone version of the Creature Editor from Spore the software was one of the first aspects of the game to receive focused development, and underwent ten rewrites since the start of development. No, the game itself hasn't slipped again, but the Spore Creature Creator application, which was due to launch today, is now coming out tomorrow. There was bad news this morning for gamers eagerly awaiting the release of EA's super-ambitious Spore.
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