Post by Max "Lone" Raine on Sept 10, 2008 17:05:54 GMT -5
Lone here with a game review of Spore
Ever since I first tried out the Spore Creature Creator Trial that Maxis put up online in the middle of June I've been very interested in trying out Maxis new, in their eyes, awesome game concept that they hope will blow everyone's minds and beat The Sims in popularity. Now I have and here's what I have to say about it.
In Spore you start out choosing one of several planets on which your species is supposed to evolve. You then get to choose if your creature are to start out as a herbivore or a carnivore. Which of the two you choose basically determines what path in life your creature will take. If you choose the herbivore your creature will start it's life in the ocean as the pray of all the carnivores, looking for green stuff to eat to grow and evolve. You start out completelly defenseless and has to flee all battles. Soon enough though you'll find your first additional creature part, which is a spiky thing that you can use to ward of attackers. All you have to do after obtaining it, along with 10 DNA-points, if call for a mate and produce your first offspring, which you can shape and colorize more to your own liking. The Cell-phase is actually very easy, it doesn't matter how many times you die, and finding food is easy, so you'll soon grow your first brain, and with it your first legs, and up on land you go.
The second phase of Spore, the Creature-phase, is slightly more difficult than the Cell-phase. Now you have to make contact with other brain'd creatures that has crawled on to land. If you play the kind herbivore your goal will be to make friends with everyone. To do this you have to travel to their nests and impress them. To impress other creatures you have to evolve new parts that give you the four abilities Sing, Dance, Charm and Pose. When you walk up to another creature with the intention to impress them they'll start it of by doing one of these moves, you are then to copy it and do it either as good or better. There are five levels of each skill and for each additional pack member in yours or the other creatures pack the skills are added together, meaning two creatures with dance level 3 will beat one creature with dance level 5. From the start you have to do it alone though but as your brain grows you can get up to three pack members. If you play the carnivore you will have to kill other species for food. And if you play Omnivore you will have the choice to clear the Creature-phase either way you choose or by doing a bit of both.
After the Creature-phase your evolved creature learns to use tools and make fire and thus enter the Tribal-phase. To me this is the by far easiest phase, no matter which path of live you've chosen. The game now turns into an RTS-ish game where you have to gather food to build helpful buildings and give birth to new tribe members. You no longer control a specific creature. You now have the choice of making allies with other tribes or to remove them from your planet. To make them your allies you have to take your chieftain and some other tribe members equipped with instruments and go perform for them. Your audience will request a certain instrument to be played during the performance and hopefully you will have someone playing it with you. Tribes who initially hate you can be swayed with gifts. The other way is of course to equip yourself with weapons and go beat the crap out of the other tribes. This is the quickest phase and is usually over in no time.
The next phase, the City-phase, takes the RTS element and expand it to building profitable cities, gather natural resources (Spices) and conquering all other towns. Depending on if you've played Herb-, Carni- or Omnivore you start with one of three types of towns. Religious town for herbs, in which you build religious vehicles that conquer other towns by blasting them with religious propaganda and shutting down their entertainment. That is the most fun way in my opinion as a several hundred feet version of your creature is projected in the sky and a hilarious religious speech in a simolian-ish language is being broadcast loudly =P
The Omnivores are economically set and can open trade routes to other towns and in the end buy them from their rulers. Also fun and in my opinion the easiest way.
The carnivores are militaristic and conquer the world with firepower and big bombs. Depending on the computer AI (based on game difficulty settings) this can be either very easy or quite hard.
After you have converted, bought or crushed the entire world you develop a spaceship and thus begins the Space-phase, the final phase. This phase is crazy... completely out of bounds crazy... You now have to find new, uninhabited, solar systems and colonize them to harvest spices. But it isn't as easy as to just buy a colony tool and place a colony on the planet. No, you have to make the planet habitable as well. This you do by changing the planets temperature and atmosphere using a set of different tools, which you have to buy, with very limited funds. But that isn't all. You also have to stabilize the biosphere by placing different sized plants and two kinds of herbivores and a carnivore on the planet. During your travels, in a very confusing universe, you'll also run into other space faring civilizations that expand at several times your pace. You can trade your spices with them to earn the very needed cash but to find a planet that will buy your goods for reasonable prices is almost impossible... and memorizing that star among hundreds it was that was willing to pay 20000 spore-bucks instead of the usual 200-ish for your red spices is, at least for me, nigh impossible. To spread your galactic empire you can either make war with the other species or set up trade routes until you can buy their entire star systems from them. Zooming around space like a confused fly, multitasking picking up harvested spices, terraforming planets, making alliances, shooting down space pirates that plunder your colonies, fighting off plagues in the biospheres of your planets to keep them stabilized, doing missions for your own and other's species etc. etc. and so on, is crazy. The game went from being child friendly in the first four phases to being insane in the final one. But it might just be that I'm too daft to grasp the idea of the final phase =/
Another thing that the makers of Spore are so proud about is, of course, the online side. You always have the option to share all your creations (Creature, buildings vehicles) with all other Spore players in the world. You can choose to download hundreds of thousands of creations from the net that might then turn up in your game. They also work alongside Google and YouTube so that anything you record in the game can be instantly uploaded to your YT profile. I have not tried out any of these features though as my copy is legally impaired and I don't want to connect it to my Spore account.
To summarize, the game is fun. It's very repetitive though, the only change in the game is what other creatures you meet. Though the first time I played it I picked it up around 3pm and when I finally snapped out of it it was almost 10pm... It's been ages since a game last had that effect on me... subsequent plays haven't had quite the same effect though, but I guess that's because it's not as new anymore =P
I give the game 3,5 galaxies out of 5. It's fun but not really a competitor to The Sims, that is when The Sims was new. Now that hopefully a lot of people (I really hope most) have grown tired of the "profitfest" that is The Sims and it's endless add-ons, people might find this a nice change =P In the end I'm glad I didn't buy the game as I had planned, so I recommend you try the game before buying it.
For more info on the game check out the Official site here: www.spore.com/ftl
Ever since I first tried out the Spore Creature Creator Trial that Maxis put up online in the middle of June I've been very interested in trying out Maxis new, in their eyes, awesome game concept that they hope will blow everyone's minds and beat The Sims in popularity. Now I have and here's what I have to say about it.
In Spore you start out choosing one of several planets on which your species is supposed to evolve. You then get to choose if your creature are to start out as a herbivore or a carnivore. Which of the two you choose basically determines what path in life your creature will take. If you choose the herbivore your creature will start it's life in the ocean as the pray of all the carnivores, looking for green stuff to eat to grow and evolve. You start out completelly defenseless and has to flee all battles. Soon enough though you'll find your first additional creature part, which is a spiky thing that you can use to ward of attackers. All you have to do after obtaining it, along with 10 DNA-points, if call for a mate and produce your first offspring, which you can shape and colorize more to your own liking. The Cell-phase is actually very easy, it doesn't matter how many times you die, and finding food is easy, so you'll soon grow your first brain, and with it your first legs, and up on land you go.
The second phase of Spore, the Creature-phase, is slightly more difficult than the Cell-phase. Now you have to make contact with other brain'd creatures that has crawled on to land. If you play the kind herbivore your goal will be to make friends with everyone. To do this you have to travel to their nests and impress them. To impress other creatures you have to evolve new parts that give you the four abilities Sing, Dance, Charm and Pose. When you walk up to another creature with the intention to impress them they'll start it of by doing one of these moves, you are then to copy it and do it either as good or better. There are five levels of each skill and for each additional pack member in yours or the other creatures pack the skills are added together, meaning two creatures with dance level 3 will beat one creature with dance level 5. From the start you have to do it alone though but as your brain grows you can get up to three pack members. If you play the carnivore you will have to kill other species for food. And if you play Omnivore you will have the choice to clear the Creature-phase either way you choose or by doing a bit of both.
After the Creature-phase your evolved creature learns to use tools and make fire and thus enter the Tribal-phase. To me this is the by far easiest phase, no matter which path of live you've chosen. The game now turns into an RTS-ish game where you have to gather food to build helpful buildings and give birth to new tribe members. You no longer control a specific creature. You now have the choice of making allies with other tribes or to remove them from your planet. To make them your allies you have to take your chieftain and some other tribe members equipped with instruments and go perform for them. Your audience will request a certain instrument to be played during the performance and hopefully you will have someone playing it with you. Tribes who initially hate you can be swayed with gifts. The other way is of course to equip yourself with weapons and go beat the crap out of the other tribes. This is the quickest phase and is usually over in no time.
The next phase, the City-phase, takes the RTS element and expand it to building profitable cities, gather natural resources (Spices) and conquering all other towns. Depending on if you've played Herb-, Carni- or Omnivore you start with one of three types of towns. Religious town for herbs, in which you build religious vehicles that conquer other towns by blasting them with religious propaganda and shutting down their entertainment. That is the most fun way in my opinion as a several hundred feet version of your creature is projected in the sky and a hilarious religious speech in a simolian-ish language is being broadcast loudly =P
The Omnivores are economically set and can open trade routes to other towns and in the end buy them from their rulers. Also fun and in my opinion the easiest way.
The carnivores are militaristic and conquer the world with firepower and big bombs. Depending on the computer AI (based on game difficulty settings) this can be either very easy or quite hard.
After you have converted, bought or crushed the entire world you develop a spaceship and thus begins the Space-phase, the final phase. This phase is crazy... completely out of bounds crazy... You now have to find new, uninhabited, solar systems and colonize them to harvest spices. But it isn't as easy as to just buy a colony tool and place a colony on the planet. No, you have to make the planet habitable as well. This you do by changing the planets temperature and atmosphere using a set of different tools, which you have to buy, with very limited funds. But that isn't all. You also have to stabilize the biosphere by placing different sized plants and two kinds of herbivores and a carnivore on the planet. During your travels, in a very confusing universe, you'll also run into other space faring civilizations that expand at several times your pace. You can trade your spices with them to earn the very needed cash but to find a planet that will buy your goods for reasonable prices is almost impossible... and memorizing that star among hundreds it was that was willing to pay 20000 spore-bucks instead of the usual 200-ish for your red spices is, at least for me, nigh impossible. To spread your galactic empire you can either make war with the other species or set up trade routes until you can buy their entire star systems from them. Zooming around space like a confused fly, multitasking picking up harvested spices, terraforming planets, making alliances, shooting down space pirates that plunder your colonies, fighting off plagues in the biospheres of your planets to keep them stabilized, doing missions for your own and other's species etc. etc. and so on, is crazy. The game went from being child friendly in the first four phases to being insane in the final one. But it might just be that I'm too daft to grasp the idea of the final phase =/
Another thing that the makers of Spore are so proud about is, of course, the online side. You always have the option to share all your creations (Creature, buildings vehicles) with all other Spore players in the world. You can choose to download hundreds of thousands of creations from the net that might then turn up in your game. They also work alongside Google and YouTube so that anything you record in the game can be instantly uploaded to your YT profile. I have not tried out any of these features though as my copy is legally impaired and I don't want to connect it to my Spore account.
To summarize, the game is fun. It's very repetitive though, the only change in the game is what other creatures you meet. Though the first time I played it I picked it up around 3pm and when I finally snapped out of it it was almost 10pm... It's been ages since a game last had that effect on me... subsequent plays haven't had quite the same effect though, but I guess that's because it's not as new anymore =P
I give the game 3,5 galaxies out of 5. It's fun but not really a competitor to The Sims, that is when The Sims was new. Now that hopefully a lot of people (I really hope most) have grown tired of the "profitfest" that is The Sims and it's endless add-ons, people might find this a nice change =P In the end I'm glad I didn't buy the game as I had planned, so I recommend you try the game before buying it.
For more info on the game check out the Official site here: www.spore.com/ftl