{"id":688,"date":"2016-05-11T13:30:02","date_gmt":"2016-05-11T11:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/?p=688"},"modified":"2016-05-11T13:30:02","modified_gmt":"2016-05-11T11:30:02","slug":"spore-review-beautiful-but-shallow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/spore-review-beautiful-but-shallow\/","title":{"rendered":"Spore Review: Beautiful But Shallow"},"content":{"rendered":"

I bought Spore in 2008 when there was some amount of hoopla around the game.\u00a0 Some of it was deserved – it promised to ship with bad DRM that made the game functionally useless if you put a foot wrong and then installed it. \u00a0Some of the hoopla had to do with the near Peter Molyneux levels of evangelizing that Maxis were doing for the title.\u00a0 According to them, it would probably be the last game you’d ever need.\u00a0 And, naturally, some of the hoopla was just about how intriguing the game was.\u00a0 It was doing something that modern games keep attempting:\u00a0 procedural generation on a scale that had never really been seen before coupled with the ability to build and share your works in the Sporeverse.<\/p>\n

But somewhere in all this hoopla – this fanatical chest-beating about it being the only game you’d ever need, Maxis forgot something very important.<\/p>\n

It forgot the gameplay.<\/p>\n

Your Humble Beginnings<\/h2>\n
\"In<\/a>
It looks a lot like Feeding Frenzy, doesn’t it? Well, get used to that, because that’s a running theme in Spore.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let’s start with the obvious.\u00a0 The technical achievement of Spore is pretty staggering, really.\u00a0 They called it a “Universe in a Box” and to some extent, that marketing is correct.\u00a0 You start the game, you make a cell-stage creature and you get dropped into the game.\u00a0 The problems, unfortunately, start right here.\u00a0 Beautiful as the engine is – and engaging as it is to glue parts to your cellular creature, the game that confronted you was so simple as to be absurd.\u00a0 You were playing a very nicely rendered version of “Feeding Frenzy.”\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Really.\u00a0 A casual game from 2004.<\/p>\n

Anyway, your goal is to eat and grow as much as you can until you can evolve.\u00a0 At this point, you gain legs and can walk onto the nearest beach.\u00a0 This nudges you into probably the best mini-game that Spore has to offer:\u00a0 the creature stage.\u00a0 Here, you forage for food, make friends and\/or kill other tribes, collect bones and move your nest several times as you gain more brain power from doing all of the above.\u00a0 It’s shallow and quaintly MMO-light, but it works – it’s also the best place for you to forge a bond with your creation.\u00a0 But upon reflection, it’s still pretty shallow.\u00a0 The number of things you can do is canned and this is exacerbated by the length at which you’re stuck in the stage.\u00a0 Want to grind out all the parts so you can make a nifty looking creature?\u00a0 Good luck.\u00a0 You’re going to be trapped there for a while.<\/p>\n

And so the game goes:\u00a0 the creature stage is followed by the tribal stage, a short, shallow rts-like mini-game where your creatures band together to form a city so they can take over the continent they’re on.\u00a0 This, in turn is followed by the civilization stage which is absolutely named for the game it’s patterned after – but – unlike Civilization-of-old, this is real-time.\u00a0 If you’re worried about failure, here never fear:\u00a0 all you have to do is create a vast army and swarm your opponent.\u00a0 It’ll turn out just fine.<\/p>\n

These stages all yield to the final, all-encompassing space stage.\u00a0 A stage that’s so staggeringly vast that you won’t know what to do – and that’s part of the problem.\u00a0 While it’s great that the game then turns into a somewhat simplified early-Elite clone, it’s terrible that it just abandons you, where – previously – it had been very pushy about what to do next.<\/p>\n

So, Spore’s design is a little all over the place.<\/p>\n

But the Builders, Man!<\/h2>\n
\"In<\/a>
This is one of the \/many\/ builders Spore comes with – in this case, we’re looking at the creature builder. Parts on the left, your creature in the centre and colours on the right. This is GREAT stuff.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I want to pause very briefly and talk about the builders, because the builders are amazing.\u00a0 Well, within limits.\u00a0 One of the very worst things about gaming is generally how little you can actually tailor and customize your characters and your surroundings.\u00a0 It’s gotten a little better over time, but for the most part, developers have carved out your character in a very specific mould and it’s incredibly difficult for you to break it.\u00a0 Quick:\u00a0 go download the latest MMO, install it and drop into it’s character creator.\u00a0 Then come back and tell me if you can make a fat character.\u00a0 What’s that?\u00a0 You can’t?\u00a0 The body slider only allows for mild burliness?\u00a0 And only on males?\u00a0 And only on some races?<\/p>\n

Spore thinks that’s ridiculous and it wants you to know that it has you covered.\u00a0 Want to make a centuar-like creature?\u00a0 Have at it.\u00a0 Want to make a blob with one eye?\u00a0 You do that.\u00a0 You should probably<\/em> add arms, though.\u00a0 But it’s not required.\u00a0 Want to make an ooze?\u00a0 It’s possible.\u00a0 And this doesn’t just extend to your creature.\u00a0 It extends to everything.\u00a0 Late game, you get tools that allow you to terraform planets.\u00a0 Along the way, you can build very specific buildings to your exact designs.\u00a0 OK.\u00a0 To be fair.\u00a0 You can’t make sprawling mansions, because the game does impose some<\/em> limits.\u00a0 But so long as you’re happy with building in a small-ish space, you can get away with nearly anything.<\/p>\n

And that’s laudable.\u00a0 Couple it with the way the game randomly generates everything around you?\u00a0 That’s even better.<\/p>\n

But…<\/h2>\n

In the end, though, I can’t recommend Spore as a game.\u00a0 I can recommend it as a one-off experience to play with all the builders.\u00a0 But you shouldn’t be spending a lot of money to do this.\u00a0 At launch, it cost $60.\u00a0 It wasn’t worth it then.\u00a0 Particularly not with the hassles it offered up in terms of DRM.\u00a0 If you can find it for $5, I’d spring right for it, though.\u00a0 You’ll laugh at how shallow the game play is and marvel at how dense and interesting the creators are.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, I think that Spore should have been built around the creature stage.\u00a0 And that should have included all the builders, worked in somehow.\u00a0 And with less shallow game play, obviously.\u00a0 That would have been a winning formula.<\/p>\n

This, however?\u00a0 It’s an interesting curiosity with a fair amount of charm and tools other developers should learn from.<\/p>\n

\n

I did a let’s play of Spore.\u00a0 You can watch it here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I bought Spore in 2008 when there was some amount of hoopla around the game.\u00a0 Some of it was deserved – it promised to ship with bad DRM that made the game functionally useless if you put a foot wrong and then installed it. \u00a0Some of the hoopla had to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[87,258,259,260],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":691,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions\/691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}