Four More Spore Games Coming in 2009

Spore was a disappointment to many, a sleeping hit to others. The new intellectual property created by Will Wright and the team at Maxis, under the rallying cry of “Sim everything!” managed to do well at retail but the way the various stages worked was very different from what the players and critics envisaged. The Tribal and Civilization stages were particularly annoying, while the Space stage was huge and really involved some repetitive elements that limited the quality of the experience.

Now, Maxis has officially announced plans to release four new Spore labeled games in 2009. The news was broken to CVG by Morgan Roarty, who is a senior producer on the franchise. The only game the public already knows about is the Galactic Adventures expansion that aims to make the Space gameplay more diverse and interesting. It's a weird choice for the first expansion considering that other stages need more love than the Space one.

Maxis is also set to create Spore: Creature Keeper, a PC game that will be stand alone and will try to attract a younger demographic with gameplay “like a mini-Sims,” where creatures with “Sims motives like energy and bladder” can be cared for by the player. We may safely assume that this will be Tamagotchi with Spore creatures on a whole new level of complexity.

The series is also set to debut on the Nintendo Wii with a title called Spore: Hero, which is, oddly, an adventure game focused on an avatar creature that explores a “a beautiful new world,” while the Nintendo DS should also receive a game, called Spore: Arena, where you will probably get to fight other people's avatars created on the Wii.

There are also some prospects that ports of the original Spore could arrive on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, but nothing is sure at the moment.