If you have an hour to blow you need to watch this video of Will Wright showing off Maxis's (the gaming-gods responsible for the entire sim genre) long in development game Spore. In spore you control the development of an organism from the cellular level game (a 2d arcade style game where you grab up food and avoid predators game(a 3d game where you wander around, eat, don't get eaten, and mate in order to upgrade your organism) to sentient village level game(where you manage a group of your organisms in a RTS/sims fashion and buy them technological upgrades) to city level game(where you manage the city's development in a sim-city style and upgrade structures and advanced technology) to a civilization style game (where you compete with other cities on your planet through war or diplomacy) to a colonization game (where you move on to other planets and build colonies and teraform planets with your mutlitool/UFO capable of earning more abilities as you do more) to a galaxy wide God's sandbox game (where you find other life in other solar systems, initiate first contact in warlike or peaceful manner and pretty much do whatever you want from the previous games). Sound huge? It is. And that run-on sentence doesn't touch on the incredible manipulation you can do with the creature/vehicle/building editor or the fact that all other creatures and civilizations you meet are based on other players creations on other computers that you automatically download when online.
This game looks absolutely amazing, and it is due to complex algorhthyms with a minimum of data. Rather then having pre-created creature designs (as most charecter editors in games do) they created a system where you can basically do what you want through stretching and molding. There is no need for presaved models when it is all generated on the spot. Plus, by allowing you to sync up with other player's creations automatically (completely bypassing the need for a browser when accessing player created content) ensures a large number of unique and constantly updating content. I have not been this impressed by a game in a long time.
-Brandon
