9. Project Spark
Details on Project Spark are still pretty sparse, while an E3 showing impressively demonstrated the core of the experience, it was also poorly staged and scripted. At the core of Project Spark is a pure Sandbox, with easy controls and the freedom to create, you can randomly generate a world, then terraform it to your hearts desire. So far it doesn't sound too dissimilar to Minecraft's creative mode. Yet Spark allows you to go a little deeper than simply making a pretty cartoon world. We saw in the E3 demo how you can change the behaviours of objects in the world, from setting up basic AI routines at a button press, to bringing to life inanimate objects. So far the limits of what we can do here have not yet been explored - we've seen that we can create a small-scale RPG on the fly, setting up goblin hordes to attack our idyllic island, but can we turn this into a entire world? A fully featured gaming experience in its own right that we can share with our friends? These are questions we don't yet have the answers to, yet there are hints of brilliance already in the design. For instance, you can use the Kinect camera to create custom motion-captured animations, translating your finest dance moves into taunts or war-cries for the characters on-screen. At worst Project Spark looks like it could be Microsoft's answer to Little Big Planet. At best it could take the finest elements of Little Big Planet, Minecraft and Gary's Mod, blending them into something entirely new.