Okay. I admit it; I caved in and bought Spore. I know, I know; I said I wasn’t going to after that whole Creature Creator debacle but I figure that the broken Australian street date kinda makes up for it. A bit.
Okay, not really. But… okay, no excuses.
It was a tough decision, but ultimately my being pissed off at EA for being a bunch of corporate whorebags had to be weighed against my desire to reward Maxis for creating a fun game. It almost didn’t happen; we got the cracked leaked release of the game a couple of days ago and I played through the first four ages on Friday. I was summarily not impressed.
The first section of the game you’re running around as a microbe, and it kinda plays something like Asteroid or Snake, or that Flash game I currently forget the name of. You swim around on a two-dimensional plane, eating stuff and attacking and/or evading other microbes. Levelling is done primarily by eating. It’s kinda fun, but nothing revolutionary.
The second section you crawl out of the water and onto the land. The Creature Creator kicks into gear (you can design your microbe, but obviously the choices are a lot more rudimentary) and the game starts playing a bit like an RPG. You run your creature around, making friends and enemies, collecting new “parts” from carcasses on the ground or by “defeating” other alpha creatures. Defeat is a bit of a misnomer, since it counts both actual defeat (causing a species to go extinct) and forging alliances with others (which is done by singing, dancing, charming or posing at them). You begin to start accumulating a “pack” of allied creatures — including your own species — to go adventuring with you. This stage is, again, kinda fun, but nothing revolutionary or infinitely replayable, especially since the “kill/befriend x creatures” style questing is so familar from every MMORPG ever made.
After you’ve levelled through that, you design your “final” creature look and move into the tribal stage. This one plays a bit like an RTS, and it’s where the game starts to lag a lot. You collect food and build units, but there’s not a lot of micro or “hardcore” RTS-think, which is going to make it extremely frustrating to traditional gamers. The odd thing is the game also severely favours a peaceful resolution; it’s a lot easier to befriend tribes by playing them music than it is to outright attack them, and the rewards are the same. The design part of this stage is limited to adding costume pieces to your creature, each of which bestows abilities. This was my penultimate least favourite stage.
My least favourite stage was the civilisation stage which, unsurprisingly, plays like a poor man’s Civilisation. Here you’re designing vehicles and buildings (as well as updating your creature’s outfit, though it’s now purely cosmetic). City planning I found oddly simplistic, and the main point of this stage seems to be to teach you that “spice” is your Global Resource and that opposing cities can be dominated either by force or by creating trade routes and buying out the city when trade is high enough. This is the stage I felt was the weakest, primarily because there’s not enough planning and unit detail to sustain what is, let’s face it, its own genre. So I powered through, bought out all my opponents…
And hit the space age.
Oh. Right. Here’s where the game is. Those other four ages? They were the tutorial; the bit of the game that taught the skills and concepts that would be used later on. Like now.
This part of the game plays conceptually like Master of Orion, without the whole thing about only being able to expand into limited space. At this stage, Spore literally covers a whole galaxy (the spiral armed thing on the game’s logo and main screen; Wikipedia tells me there are 500,000 stars included, including ours), so there’s no need to skirmish with neighbours over planets (but you can; fuck you, Teal Empire, you’re gone, and you’re next, Yellow guys). There are plenty. Progression is achieved by collecting badges, which unlock abilities. Bagdes are awarded for almost everything; from making war to collecting artefacts to painting planets. (I’m currently a big fan of terraforming; all my planets have purple grass and teal seas.) And here’s the thing, because the more badges you unlock the more powers you get and the more the game turns from a linear space-based civ game into a sandbox, allowing the player to revisit various aspects of the previous ages.
And this is why I ended up swallowing my outrage and forking over the cash. Because, okay, we’ve seen this game before but never on this scale. And pirating it is all well and good but locks you out of the player content database and, well, fuck. Half a million planets filled with nothing but Maxis stuff is going to get kinda boring, kinda fast.
So. What’s the verdict? I dunno yet. I guess ultimately Spore will be judged on whether it can be the next Sims or not. The inherent weakness of its first four stages aside (and yes, if you’ve played them once you can skip them in the next game), I think the nature of the final stage and the multitude of editors — with more promised — and easy content sharing is going to keep people coming back. The Creature Creator itself and the physics behind it is still absolutely stunning and an idea I’d love to see in more games. I think, ultimately, that’s what Spore is; a stepping stone on the way to something… else. Games in general are moving further away from something linear and into a sandbox, and maybe if Spore only does one thing it’s to give future developers a bunch of conceptual tools to build on. And that’s… good. That’s really, really good.
Now, if only I could stop those stupid Pirates from stealing my Spice…
724 days ago
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