Spore: 2 of 5….and already played out

For the researchers of this question, whether anticipation enhances enjoyment of a consumer product  the Spore phenomenon might be an interesting topic. Apparently if you’re anticipating something good you’re okay with a delay. And, oh, oddly enough, if you end up with something bad, the delay is fine too. So that works out well.

In this case, waiting almost two years for Spore doesn’t seem to evoke much in the way of disappointment. It’s not great and it’s not horrible , so that may be just in the exact middle of the anticipation scale. We’re not upset at laying out the $50 USD for it because it is obviously a work of high craft and, covering, as we’ve said, a topic of extreme interest to us, a life simulator, we were looking forward to it for two solid years around here. Sorry to say it doesn’t look like it will have the staying power of a Civilization IV, or even X-COM, which has just been revived hereabouts, on, of all things, an old Windows 95 box.

In general, though the graphics and execution are superficially excellent, there is something a little bit off about nearly every aspect of the game, gameplay-wise. It may be a matter of blockbuster-syndrome that you see in $100 million film projects. Will Wright is a pioneer and may be one of the few designers who could pull something like Spore together, but when that much money is involved, no project can possibly be the vision of one person.

This review will concentrate on the gameplay. The creation of creatures, vehicle and buildings is a whole other aspect that is an activity in itself, if that appeals to you. Much of it has nothing at all to do with the playing of the game. Design one factory or spaceship and it will do you forever. This is all tied in with the game company’s effort to create a community around the game. That’s not really why we play games.  

The five games phases are actually distinct game styles that represent five genres in computer gaming.

Cellular Phase
Game genre: Early Arcade. After the opening movie, in which the cosmos is revealed and your plant is bombarded by comet debris, you’re an ostensibly one-celled animal in a tidal pool. this is not the theorized beginning-of-life-on-Earth model we had expected, that is, the Primordial Ooze. You’re in a tide pool, which would be near the shore, and long after the initial beginnings of life on the planet. So in a sense, the title of the entire software is a bit off. So you’re in the pool and you get to choose what sort of mouth you have. This is your first choice, carnivore or vegetarian. No real weight is assigned to that choice, or wasn’t in the one game I played almost-through. There may be nuances to detect upon frequent playing, but if herbivore is supposed to connote vegetarians which is supposed to imply pacifist, it didn’t work out that way in my one game.

Creature phase
Game Genre: Adventure/Roleplaying: One point for this phase. This is the cutest, and all things considered, the most fun phase. It should appeal to the furries out there. In fact any expansion concentrating on this phase might be worth checking out. (Heck, two years from now we may have forgotten our ambivalence about the initial release enough to give it a try.)

Village Phase
Genre: Real Time Strategy. Take over your continent by either defeating or befriending your neighbors. Repetitive, and, like all Real Time Strategy titles, it’s a click-fest. So if you enjoy that sort of thing you might like it. Win the continent by either allying with or defeating every other tribe on it. Quite the forgettable phase.

Civilization
Genre: Civilization: The greatest of computer games, a genre in itself. This phase is a severely hobbled form of it. Win your planet by overwhelming the cities of others, either by force, religion or commerce. Whatever vehicles you make will project that form of force. Doesn’t really matter what you start with, the cities you take over will determine what you end up with. My one pass through I started as religious but left the phase as military. The game almost gets a point for this, but at some point the AI seemed like it stopped playing. At normal difficulty levels, the game shouldn’t let you win.

Space Phase
Genre: 4X Space Strategy. Most disappointed, most anticipated, but still worth a point because it could have been the space conquest and exploration game we’ve been questing for since Master of Orion. But the random events in the short experience seemed heavily weighted toward bio-disaster, of course. And the “culling of the herd” nature of both the bio-disasters we encountered was disturbing. Two aspects killed this phase for us, one philosophical and the other physical: 1) we’re not enamored of flying around a planet killing off diseased individuals of a species, and 2) the 3D and the jumpy navigation around the planet surface and up and down into space and back activated some kind of vertigo reaction yours truly gets whenever playing a First Person Shooter or other action 3D games. Unfortunately playing through nausea and dizzyness is not my idea of fun. This may not bother others but it’s enough to set the game aside for me, and in the most promising phase too. O well. But from what we saw, and allowing for benefit of the doubt, it gets the other point for promise.

On the controversies surrounding the science versus intelligent design aspects, that’s for a longer post, if ever. There is no real science of genetics involved. Nor is it any more godlike than all the other god-games that have come along. It’s a game, not a treatise.

And also as we’ve mention in another post, as with big budget projects on favored film subjects, so much time, effort, money and genius having been spent on a topic, another attempt at is is not likely to happen for a long while, perhaps until a big orders-of-magnitude jump in  technology, like when we’re all comparing the gigabytes of RAM we have implanted in our heads.

So it gets 2 of 5. One for the Creature phase and one for the Space phase, which looked like the most ambitious gameplay, even though we couldn’t play it much. Sigh.

The ultimate evaluation on Spore around here, though? None of the Shears spawn are playing it. Lance has gone back to Europa Universalis II. Chuck bought an eight-year-old swords and sorcery with his own money, Diablo II, which I’ve set aside Civ IV for, and Escella is sharing a game of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened with Mrs. Shears.

So much for two years of anticipation.

Spore – Quick Take

More to come review-wise. And I have one solid commitment from a next-generation Shears, Next Generation, to contribute his impressions of the game.

First though, is this a Spore usergroup, way out in front of the game’s release by, oh, 15 years or so? These visuals could have been taken straight from the game. I wonder if these mooks would survive into the Civilization phase.

As I’m sure you know the game has five phases, Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization and Space, each with the animale you create building on the last, so in some respoects it is a strategy campaign game with scenarios that carry your base characteristics over from one section to the next. Right now your poster is working on the second, Creature, stage. Does the combat in this phase remind anyone else of that old Pokemon Stadium?

The creatures you create can have an infinite variety, eventually, but to start you are given the tightest of choices, a very binary herbivore or carnivore. We’re sure this was intentional. The rich game play to follow builds on this simple decision and neither choice appears to be in any way limiting.

Lance is standing here talking to me just now and senses that there may be infinite zoomability in the Space stage. He may be right. We’ll see when we get there but the game definitely qualifies for the title (and inconsistent themes) of this site. Your creature creation in the game is for sure Infinity Bound.

Again, more to come. With a special post commenting on the recent Slate articale just dripping with disdain for the idea that the game might, heaven forfend, point to Intelligent Design. My word.

One other impression is that Sporeis not science or natural history. There is a lot of love in the game. There’s dancing and singing and courtship displays. All-in-all this is not as mushy as you’d think and handled well. Your creatures can get ahead with cooperation and alliances. Although sharp fangs and claws will always help, creature-wise.

First impression in the Shears household is a deep game with lots of replay value. The Space phase may even approach the Master of Orion space conquest/exploration game that we’ve been questing for with no luck for the last 10 or so years. We’ll see.

Spore Week

Spore is spreading. We’ve preordered but only a day before release so our copy will have to wait its turn and is due to ship tomorrow. Look for a multi-Shears ongoing review to start up in the very near term. Papa Shears and the gang of Shears teens are drooling over the game. Heck we may even get Mrs. Shears to take a stab at it.

Check out the horrific reviews on that Amazon page. We have it on good authority from son Chuck, though, that this is an organized campaign because of the draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM, copy protection.) When we heard of that ourselves some time back, yes, we were none too pleased. You only get to activate the game on three computers, meaning after you upgrade hardware a couple of times you’ll need to repurchase (theoretically.) That’s if you only have one computer in your house. Our three activations will be eaten up the first day.

Organized or not, some of the reviews are quite detailed. We ourselves have had a mildly negative predisposition since seeing the preview videos. The creatures have been made a bit on the cartoonish side for us. But Chuck assures us that the skins will be moddable, so adding realistic textures should be possible. 

We disapprove of the overbearing DRM well, but with all the piracy you can see why a company would take such steps to protect their $millions$ in investment. However, it does not help in the long run. We have bought our copy in part because of extreme anticipation and a high interest level in the topic. We’ve always been interested in life simulatiors. We were too far along in our commitment to the purchase to back off. If we had known about the plans for the DRM we’d have thought twice so we, like many other, we’re sure,  are feeling a bit ambushed by it and it doesn’t sit well.

The ill will generated will carry over to other purchase decisions involving the same publisher. Case in point, we bought Silent Hunter III, a World War II submarine game, which had a frighteningly invasive copy protection scheme that pretty much required you to install the game company’s own DVD-ROM driver on your hardware. It would then make a scary clunking noise whenever you ran any disk. Turned out to be a chore to deinstall the game and the driver. I removed it the first time, and then reinstalled the game two years later after having forgotten all about that nasty copy protection. Played a few times but couldn’t enjoy it, and then uninstalled again. This time I put a note in the box. “Do not install because of invasive copy protection!”

We would never even entertain the remote possibility of buying a game from that company again.

$50 for three installs? I don’t see Spore lasting much beyond that as a resident on Shear computers. We’ll see. It had better be good.