For the first time in history, the Penny Arcade Convention has completely sold out. Before 2009, there have been tickets for sale at the door, but this time, many video game enthusiasts and geeks alike will be left out in the cold (and possibly rain) in Downtown Seattle.

Craigslist wanted ads for PAX ‘09 tickets have been popping up almost by the hour to try to snatch up leftover tickets from buyers that are unable to attend, or have extra tickets. One ad was entitled “Will trade first born for PAX ‘09 tickets!” while others are offering to pay any (monetary) price asked by a seller.

With this news, I can say without any argument, that the Penny Arcade Convention’s sellout is a glimpse of the bright future for the video game industry, gamers, and the convention itself. PAX began in ‘04 and oddly enough sold 1337 pre-order tickets, which should have given us some kind of idea of what we’re dealing with here in Seattle. Last year, PAX ‘08 sold over 50,000 tickets, and this year’s number has not yet been released but I would imagine it to be closer to 100,000.

Since the downfall of E3 to the real gamer community when it officially became closed to the public and was turned into a strict media event, PAX has become a diamond in the rough, and immensely valuable to the west coast (and international) gamer.

Good luck to those of you that have tickets, and for those of you that don’t… well, looks like you’re shit out ofluck. But either way, I will be there and will plan on documenting PAX ‘09 and posting about it here. And yes, I will be in full ninja garb once again.

Will Wright, a man after my own heart, (in reference to the Sims games that I believe are only primitively paving the way for future games) has created a fantastic game… that no one will ever get to play.

What? A game from EA that we will never play!? Yeah and that game is called Spore.

In 2005 Will Wright demonstrated Spore to an audience of media personnel at the video game convention called E3. He went through the stages of Spore that were in place at the time, and showed the world what they had been waiting for in regards to an industry revolutionizing game. For the first time we had the opportunity to see the world of spore, the options, the actions, and the choices that we were soon to have when the game was released. But over time this game has changed, and in an opinion that myself and many other have – Spore devolved since the unveiling.

How do you ask? This is how:

For the rest of this article I reference the actual video footage taken at E3 that can be found here. It is an hour long demonstration and speech by Will Wright in 2005 about Spore at the time.

Will Wright begins the Spore demonstration at the beginning. The cell phase was quite similiar to that of the current Spore game found at your local game store. When we enter the creature creator through, we an idea of what the gaming experience was supposed to be like.

This here is what the original creature creator looked like in general. The pieces were less organized and there were not as many as we have now. But then again, take a good look at the internal structure of this organism. There is a serious emphasis on the creature’s bone structure that is very interesting. This exists in the current version of Spore, but at a cartoon level. Ah, cartoony graphics. You’ve only got me started.

Here you can see that our creature, previously a cell, has evolved into a sea creature. The underwater phase was completely left out of the entire game. Watching this part of the video was fascinating though, in the way that the creature moved and what kinds of other creatures lived in the water. Still I want you to take note of the type of graphics that you see here to reference later.

When the underwater stage is over, the user places legs on the creature and then it walks up on land. Something really interesting that Will Wright demos in this part of the game is attacking and eating another creature. Yes, this can be done in the current Spore, but have you ever seen a puddle of blood from a creature that you just ripped apart? Wright also continued to drag this dead creature around the area trying to keep it away from another very large creature.

Will Wright continues to go through the demonstration’s stages, which were highly less developed at the time. There wasn’t anything that really stood out from the tribal and civilization stages except for creature personality. When he bought a campfire for his tribe of creatures, or built a building for them in civilization they danced and cheered because apparently they have personality. Maybe I just have had deadbeat creatures, but I don’t recall them interacting or caring more so than other creatures I have created. Personality-wise, my creatures all did the same things behaviorally as any others regardless of their culture, their diets, and their traits.

Another more sadistic aspect to the game that was left out was death of a creature on a planet that could not support it due to the terraforming score being too low. This here is a picture of what happens when you drop off a creature on a desolate plane with no atmosphere – it explodes. Those are its actual body parts that you see there.

Graphics wise, I think that EA made a wrong turn over all. The photos above look like they are from a serious game that was intended for teenagers and adults to play and create some wicked creatures and cities. What I see now when I boot up Spore is something more like a children’s games. Everything is bright and curvy like they are actually balloons inflated and then painted tie-dye. Just take a look at my Spore review article, and you can see all the bright curvy lines everywhere. I bought this game to wreck havoc on other civilizations, to create and mold things, and essentially to play the game that Will Wright showed me in 2005. What I got is a mystery to all gamerkind.

You can love it or you can hate it. It disappointed me. Even more so because everything that is missing from our 2008 version that was in the 3 years older version will most likely be coming out in expansion packs just like Will Wright did with the Sims. And thats fine… I have no problem with that because I understand it makes money. It just isn’t the same because I know that there is this version of spore that exists somewhere.

But… I will ask one more time. Where can I buy THAT version of Spore, and return the one I bought a couple weeks ago?