What makes it even more annoying was that I was lots of fun pottering about in Space. Raising cash by trading Spice could feel a bit grindy but was more than made up for by being able to mess with planets and fill them out with crazy menageries. Of the other stages, I’m most fond of Cell (for much the same reasons as put forward in the Verdict). Creature starts off really well, but I found it dragging on towards the end. The less said about Tribal and Civ the better though.

So I’m done with Spore for now. I’m left feeling tired and humiliated after jumping through hoops to try and get to play what I’ve payed for. When I’ve moved and am online again I’ll give it another go, but I’m damned if I’m going to keep this shit up.

I dimly remember some sort of alarm bells ringing when Sir William Wright first described Spore as a massively singleplayer game. Its a bad example, but you can run an Ultima Online shard oneplayer (providing you have another computer to act as the world server) and scoot around one-shotting every enemy, awarding yourself black dye tubs and neon blue sticks and hot pink cloaks as you go, but its boring as hell – empty, pointless. Enemies – no matter how exotic-looking or frikkin HUGE – behave in a very predictable way – so the sense of progression /danger /achievement was lost. From what I’ve seen this seems to be the main downfall of Spore’s design (though alleviated slightly by the addition of interesting player-built content).

Even with the best will in the world (and Sir William Wright is probably that will, apologies to that one bard guy) running a huge universe with all detail simulated at every level is impossible – so the level of abstraction applied to each stage becomes important. If the sense of your species being an entirely unique and personal progression of your playstyle is lost, the accumulating grind of each section becomes glaringly apparent. This is a problem particularly between Creature > Tribe > Civ. I completely ignored my species’ previous traits of social herbivorism in preference of raising a bunch of carnivorous warmongering assholes and none of my allies batted an eyelid. Though in fairness by Space phase they were all warmongering assholes anyway.

The Sims – for all its faults – was essentially a singleplayer grinding game – and expansion packs did little but rebalance the grind from one skill to another, or adding an entirely new tree of grinding. However, for me the most memorable moments in it came where something unexpected or tragic occurred (Dwarf Fortress has the same thing going on) despite your attempts to keep the bed/job/ mining/ toilet /clean /recover *tin underpants*/ brewing/ groom dog/ kitchen cycle going. It gives mostly irrelevant events a place in the narrative flow of the game – like a sim pissing himself first thing in the morning and then bolting to work, while a baby or stray dog enters the house and laps at the nutritious puddle. Or Dwarf Fortress’s “Kob Attalir has gone berserk!” and “Cog Bronchiol is depressed at being confined. He has admired a fine shackle lately” .

edit for inexplicable deletion

I am sure that various Spore features have been kept deliberately aside for expansion packs, but what we are left with seems like the framework for an awesome game, or half a licence to print money, I am not quite sure. Probably as with The Sims it will be a mix of the two.

TL DR: I am struggling to find game :(

I mean, in the Creature stage I would place my poison spitters on the back of my feet and they would still work. Which was a relief, because I could move stuff around just to make the design pretty, even if it didn’t make sense.

But it was even better in the Cell stage, where placing spikes around your mouth actually helped because then you could push your way around and right into your prey. Etc.

One thing I wish for was the option to continue playing each stage without that nagging “ADVANCE” thing. Okay, I get it, my cell / creature is ready to evolve, but I want to play with it a little more, leave me be!

EtA: The Space mechanics are worth noting : I do like defeating an enemy with atmospheric tools, rendering a planet uninhabitable with the power of terraforming. Dropping a monolith on a primitive species, right next to an enemy, is pure gold when they finally evolve and take over the bastards that’ve been kicking their god-daddy around. It’s just that there’s too much weakness at the start -the player basically just grinds, without fear of death, all the way to the ubertools, then wins. For all the evolution and implied complexity in the system, the game is a straight line.

@ Plopsworth: now I’d like to see a RPS Girlfriend Statistics post. Okay, not quite so gender based, but a look at the games our traditionally non-gamer friends have taken to while under the influence of personality. Or badgering. Sound like our GFs could have a good discussion on video games, based on the similarites/disparities of your list, that would be worthwhile. If only to figure out how to fix games like Spore…

And, just like in Sims2, I will likely come back again and again just to play with the creators. Very few games have that kind of lasting appeal to me. MMO’s do lure me back from time to time, but that’s only when they offer new content. Sims2 didn’t have to do that for me to replay it, and Spore likely won’t either.

I’m male by the way.

I would give Spore a good score anyway, because it is such a different creature and because the game part did entertain me for quite a few hours. The longivety thing just ups the score.

Hopefully I’ll encounter your extraspatial Penguins/Toucans in my game, at which point I shall do my utmost to befriend them.

We need to see more of this! Anyone who’s not afraid to do so, please post your creations!

A year from now I’ll be known as the man who birthed the Spore Anxiety Pandemic, I’ve no doubt I’ll be left emotionally bankrupt by the guilt of it all.

I’m 100% with Esha on non-artists and Spore; as an artist in the game industry, it’s just great to see this giant toybox for the next generation to learn on – basically a giant digital Lego box, minus the sound of plastic pieces shuffling about in a big crate. This would have been the ultimate game for me when I was in elementary school; the creative empowerment of Spore is just really heartening to see.

The Civ stage was definitely a brick wall for me, it just throws way too much editing at you at once. Four buildings plus a handful of vehicles, moreso if you want to use a different strategy? That’s a lot, especially when you consider that unlike the previous editors, you are no longer resource-bound – it seemed like you could make the most complex building/vehicle possible right off the bat, instead of gradually evolving it through iterations as in the cell and creature stage. Sure, you could just grab something off the Sporepedia, but that’s like using a level-skip cheat to get to the endgame; it almost defeats the purpose of playing. It’s also harder to want to invest a lot of effort making content for a fairly short stage – I can spend plenty of time making ships in GalCiv2 because there’s a lot more meat to the game I’ll be using them in. Plus, at the zoom level I spent the Civ stage at, I couldn’t see my vehicles at all anyhow.

Anyhow, as long as people are showing off their creatures, I was pretty happy with how my space-faring Penguins came out.

Balanced as opposed to, you know; Our demands: Your entire economy, or we turn your house-globe into a shiny parking lot for our gun-bristlin’ warships of doom. Damn hippies.

This is one thing that bothers me about the Space stage, why do I not have more weapons of mass mind-control? I have The Happy Device, and that’s greatly entertaining, but the Religious Projection Propoganda Device of the Civ stage promised so much more.

The game would be so much more fun if I had a “We aren’t the aliens you’re looking to conquer, move along.” ability.

I do love the happy things though, I could shoot Happy Day at cities all day. Dance puppets, dance!

Of course, this is all great to give me some space here, as I’m sure that everyone else has taken two steps back.

I admit though, my primary draw is found with the creation tools. I love to 3D model aswell, and I’ve toyed with sculpting, so it’s no surprise that I’m all over the design tools in Spore. And the fact that it allows people who are convinced they don’t have any artistic merit whatsoever to see that that’s not true. I love Spore for that.

To state: My roomie has put together some absolutely brilliant bloody vehicles. His creatures aren’t quite as developed, having turned into the Homerians of planet D’oh (no, really), but the vehicles he made were absolutely golden. I hadn’t even considered creating a Star Wars-like landspeeder as a land vehicle, but he did… and he actually pulled it off with aplomb.

Whereas I’m not that great with the vehicles, but I’m proud of my werewolves in top-hats. (And of my Blusym too, who’re all but forgotten these days, poor buggers.)

http://eu.spore.com/sporepedia/view.cfm?id=500078479501&back=sp