EA launches new Spore Facebook game

EA's Maxis studio has announced the launch of an exclusive new Spore title onto Facebook.

Spore Islands will allow users to compete against one another; building up an island and evolving species on it, while simultaneously sending their creatures to friends' islands in order to dominate them.

"In Spore Islands, players get to invite friends in their social web to play on their island, so creating this game exclusively for Facebook was a natural choice for us since they are the largest and most popular social platform for games," said Caryl Shaw, the game's senior producer.

"What sets Spore Islands apart from other social games is that it offers a different kind of social interactivity where a player's gameplay experience is directly affected by the choices and decisions their friends make. It's an ongoing game, so player's creatures and islands will be active at all times, whether the player is logged into Facebook or not."

"Games are one of the most popular activities on Facebook, with more than 100 million unique active users in the top ten games alone. We are excited to see Spore Islands as one of the latest games on Facebook for our 300 million users to connect, share and play with friends," added Facebook platform manager Gareth Davis.

The game's release follows the announcement from Sid Meier that he is to develop a new version of strategy classic Civilization for the Facebook platform.

"Ever since we finished Civilization Revolution last year, I've been looking at ways of expanding the Civ gameplay experience to include solo, competitive and cooperative play to take advantage of the uniqueness of social networks," Meier said.