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Sep. 13th, 2008 09:42 pmI torrented Spore to check it out.
Meh.
Technically, part of the reason I did that was that just trying out the Creature Creator gave me a string of primly horrified messages that my graphics were simply not up to snuff, and when dealing with something like that it's a good idea to find out if it's even possible for the game to run. I was entertaining ideas of playing the game, liking it, and then buying the "full" version (the one you can connect to the internet with, without fear of policemen showing up at your door to hang you as a pirate) once it proved it could actually run.
Anyway -
I thought it was pretty cool at first. I started at the beginning as a little cell, chasing food around. It was harder than it should have been since I assumed that parts would stack, but pretty manageable. It did start to get a bit repetitive by the tenth or so size stage, but eh. And then I moved on to the next stage, on land.
The creature creator - adorable. The little thing chirps and coos and stares at the new additions to its body, and you can so some pretty cool stuff. About the only quibble would be this weird taffy effect where legs that are too close to the body/themselves have a stretchy membrane when they move. But in general, the whole creature design thing is really well done.
Thirty minutes later you realize that this is mostly cosmetic when it comes to the game, and when it isn't it's annoying (a matter of sacrificing your preferred look for what gives a higher point value). I was trying to make a carnivore, which means that while you can, in theory, make friends with other creatures, in practice you have to do it as a suicide run as you can't just stop off for some fish. (And creatures get raptured after you kill a certain number, so you can't leave a few weak species to chow on.) Once I just started killing everything in sight, I finished the section up quite quickly. On top of that, design's limited - as far as I could tell there was no way to get multiple types of mouths, and even without those, the number of parts you do need to unlock is ridiculous. I even delayed advancing to go slaughter half the map and I still had plenty of empty slots.
Then - well, then my cute creature moved from cute coos to demented caveman babble, and its form gets locked. Next section is a matter of building buildings and clicking on places to tell the creatures to go smack them a while. (And, for some reason, my predatory creatures could not harvest the dead of other tribes, which meant every time I attacked one, I ended up almost out of food by the time I finished, and had to spend some time telling them to go attack animals and collect food. Repeat, repeat, repeat.)
Next stage didn't even have cute creatures. It was just a matter of building cities and vehicles and blowing up other cities and vehicles. (There were other manners of winning, but this seemed to work pretty fast.) By this point there aren't even other species around.
And then it was on to the space stage, which is just one long, boring, fiddly fetch quest. (Theoretically one could argue that the legitimate game could connect up to get planets filled with creatures made by other people, but, again, it's really all cosmetic.
I finished the game in somewhere around six hours, and several of those hours felt like work. This game retails for fifty bucks and can't be resold.
I'd go back and just focus on the creature section, but - well, stuff doesn't stack. Duplicate something for the look: waste of points. Extra set of legs: waste of points. Two different things that both affect a stat: waste of points. A longer spine just ups complexity and brings you closer to maxing out, without any benefit either, so any fun things you do there are at the cost of gameplay. And the AI is - well, it can't even be described as an AI.
It's basically a really brilliant, adaptive design system that, ten minutes before launch, someone remembered was supposed to include gameplay. There might actually be some potential for user-modified fixes here, except that this game had crazy levels of copy protection (you can see how well that worked) and so it's really unlikely they'd be allowing any modifications of the game's actual code to be passed around. Possibly some later game can take the design system and make something of it. (Truly awesome would be to combine the graphics system with an AI system like Creatures, and then just let them run about.)
Meh.
Technically, part of the reason I did that was that just trying out the Creature Creator gave me a string of primly horrified messages that my graphics were simply not up to snuff, and when dealing with something like that it's a good idea to find out if it's even possible for the game to run. I was entertaining ideas of playing the game, liking it, and then buying the "full" version (the one you can connect to the internet with, without fear of policemen showing up at your door to hang you as a pirate) once it proved it could actually run.
Anyway -
I thought it was pretty cool at first. I started at the beginning as a little cell, chasing food around. It was harder than it should have been since I assumed that parts would stack, but pretty manageable. It did start to get a bit repetitive by the tenth or so size stage, but eh. And then I moved on to the next stage, on land.
The creature creator - adorable. The little thing chirps and coos and stares at the new additions to its body, and you can so some pretty cool stuff. About the only quibble would be this weird taffy effect where legs that are too close to the body/themselves have a stretchy membrane when they move. But in general, the whole creature design thing is really well done.
Thirty minutes later you realize that this is mostly cosmetic when it comes to the game, and when it isn't it's annoying (a matter of sacrificing your preferred look for what gives a higher point value). I was trying to make a carnivore, which means that while you can, in theory, make friends with other creatures, in practice you have to do it as a suicide run as you can't just stop off for some fish. (And creatures get raptured after you kill a certain number, so you can't leave a few weak species to chow on.) Once I just started killing everything in sight, I finished the section up quite quickly. On top of that, design's limited - as far as I could tell there was no way to get multiple types of mouths, and even without those, the number of parts you do need to unlock is ridiculous. I even delayed advancing to go slaughter half the map and I still had plenty of empty slots.
Then - well, then my cute creature moved from cute coos to demented caveman babble, and its form gets locked. Next section is a matter of building buildings and clicking on places to tell the creatures to go smack them a while. (And, for some reason, my predatory creatures could not harvest the dead of other tribes, which meant every time I attacked one, I ended up almost out of food by the time I finished, and had to spend some time telling them to go attack animals and collect food. Repeat, repeat, repeat.)
Next stage didn't even have cute creatures. It was just a matter of building cities and vehicles and blowing up other cities and vehicles. (There were other manners of winning, but this seemed to work pretty fast.) By this point there aren't even other species around.
And then it was on to the space stage, which is just one long, boring, fiddly fetch quest. (Theoretically one could argue that the legitimate game could connect up to get planets filled with creatures made by other people, but, again, it's really all cosmetic.
I finished the game in somewhere around six hours, and several of those hours felt like work. This game retails for fifty bucks and can't be resold.
I'd go back and just focus on the creature section, but - well, stuff doesn't stack. Duplicate something for the look: waste of points. Extra set of legs: waste of points. Two different things that both affect a stat: waste of points. A longer spine just ups complexity and brings you closer to maxing out, without any benefit either, so any fun things you do there are at the cost of gameplay. And the AI is - well, it can't even be described as an AI.
It's basically a really brilliant, adaptive design system that, ten minutes before launch, someone remembered was supposed to include gameplay. There might actually be some potential for user-modified fixes here, except that this game had crazy levels of copy protection (you can see how well that worked) and so it's really unlikely they'd be allowing any modifications of the game's actual code to be passed around. Possibly some later game can take the design system and make something of it. (Truly awesome would be to combine the graphics system with an AI system like Creatures, and then just let them run about.)
