Legendary. Fearsome. Ruthless. All of these terms have been used (specifically by me) to describe the mighty Star Werewolf Barbarian Lords! Their Endless Solar Death Legions have been the doom of one thousand worlds! Or, hopefully they will eventually.
What, you may ask, are these ferocious creatures, and where did they come from?
The answer is simple: they evolved from a really badass cell (teejirius friggenawesomensus) on the harsh world of Teejiria... in a little game called Spore.
For those not in the know, Spore is the latest creation from game design genius and The Sims creator, Will Wright. Spore is part 3D-Art studio, part evolutionary model, and part civilization simulator. You, as the player, begin with a single-celled organism in a tide pool collecting DNA points to advance your creature until you can eventually reach land. At this point, you go from feral, foraging beast to a pack or herd that eventually becomes a tribe... then a technological civilization... and eventually, a galactic empire interacting with races created by other players in a model galaxy with thousands upon thousands of planets in orbit around an equally daunting number of stars.
It would be impossible for me to accurately describe Spore in writing. If you want to see it in action, I recommend looking it up on GameTrailers.com, or the official site, Spore.com. Other than the scope, the most truly mind-blowing thing about Spore is the myriad editors open to you. From cells to creatures to buildings and vehicles, everything is player-generated from dozens of morphable, rotatable, resizable parts. The game even has a system for adding custom color schemes and a variety of textural finishes to everthing you create. It truly is a 3D art program in its own right and, even more amazing, the game can take pretty much any crazy ass thing you can make and animate it in a variably realistic way.
Spore is immediately engaging and very gripping. I took two different civilizations from cell to space in the three days after the game's release: The aforementioned SWBLs, and the scientifically-minded quasi-centaurs known as the Astralith. I plan on posting of both civilizations and their mainy adventures in the future.
If I have one criticism of Spore, it's that the gameplay can get tired very quickly. Even going from cell to space first as bloodthirsty, warmongering carnivores AND as peacable, religiously-motivated ominovores, the progression experience wasn't that different. At the civ stage, it's only a matter of shooting music at cities until they give up rather than shooting bullets at a city until they give up. The space stage also reaches a simmilar point where the novelty wears off and you realize you're just doing the same "Save this species from a deadly disease," "Save us from evil cyborgs," and "Go get this thing and bring it here" missions over and over. If the actual starship combat were a bit more complicated than "Hold the right mouse button to fly, hold the left mouse button to shoot," things might not have started to feel repetitive so fast. A cockpit view with WASD controls could have gone a long way.
The game does a good job of awarding you with achievements no matter what you do-- from the surprisingly addictive terraforming to just declaring all out war on everything in sight (guess which one the SWBLs prefer...)-- which eventually stack to allow you to "Rank Up" RPG style and unlock new toys for your ship. There's also a quasi-storyline involving evil cyborgs called the Grox who seem to be hell-bent on keeping you from reaching the center of the galaxy, which has a pretty cool pay off. Still, it only took me a week after reaching the space stage to get the final rank (Omnipotent), tear through the Grox blockade to get to the galactic center, and even go out of my way to find Earth. Yes, it's in the game right where it should be. Astronomy nerds rejoice!
It's true that I kind of rushed my way to the galactic center instead of taking my time to build my empire in that direction, but the point is that you quickly start to feel like you're trapped in an endless cycle of repetitive missions once you claim the big prize and move on. The other problem that starts to crop up in a game so open-ended is that it starts to open your mind to other possibilities, and you soon get bogged down thinking about all of the things you can't do. I would have loved to have been able to go back to creature controls in the space stage to walk around my cities and colonies. Even better would have been the ability to land on a hostile world with just a ray gun and your wits and try to recover an artifact on foot. Alas, the nature of Will Wright's games is that they take you to the moon, and then you get disappointed that you can't quite reach the stars.
Spore is a triumph in game design, and enjoyable from start to finish- if not exactly as replayable as one would imagine in the Space stage.
Spore gets a 4/5.
And if you accuse me of stealing X-Play's rating system, let me remind you that Adam Sessler did not invent the base10 number system. Also, G4 has been dead to me for years.
See you next time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Bravo!
I, knowing extremely nothing about gaming and/or games, would like to give you a hearty pat on the back for making this post (which, under normal circumstances, would have been way over my head; what with it being about 'games' and whatnot...)very AWESOME!
Yeah!
-Aleksandra
I watch, and am wary....it is hypnotic, and yet it appears as a deep, dark tunnel to me...like RuneScape take II. >.O
-Thanks for the compliment, Aleks! Glad you found it entertaining.
-Eisley, you may not need to worry so much about Spore. As I said, my one gripe was that it wasn't as replayable as I thought it would be. It's a great game, but it's not the kind of game that sucks you in for years or even months. I might go back to it occasionally, but once you've done everything a couple times it starts to lose its grip on you.
Post a Comment