My Spore Review

Or…Promise me the moon, give me a Moon Pie

I want to start my review by saying a few things. First, I love computer games. I’ve played computer games now for as long as they’ve been around, really. Second, I did not follow the hype for Spore. Three years ago now, my son came to me, radiant in the glow of his newly-discovered Next Best Thing. Throughout those years, he would follow each press-release, movie of some celebrity playing Spore, and review of promised features and salivate. Spore would revolutionize gaming, he said! They promised him lots of things…from what I half-listened to, it sounded good. Evolution where your choices proved fundamental in the evolution of your species, from one cell to Space Empire.

I didn’t listen all that hard, because I didn’t want to be disappointed. I knew it was being made by Maxis and the Sims people which was okay, but the Sim line after Sim City, to me, has become rather blasé, with an almost reality-television level of gruel. But, Wright was talented, so I was willing to give it a shot. Then I discovered that EA was involved…

I became filled with a sense of dread. Unless you like sports games, EA should be an immediate warning flag. They are a simply awful company. Their killing of Earth and Beyond was a smack in the face to their customers, but their buyout and destruction of Westwood Studios, one of the Grand Old Dames of the gaming industry, was inexcusable. I’ve not heard a good thing about EA since then, when I swore to never buy another EA product.

I wish I had stuck to my guns…Spore is…well, it’s misspelled…it should have been Spoor.

It’s *pretty* and well-dressed spoor, but it’s still droppings that have been left by other computer games. If you have played Asteroids and Pac-man, then you’ve played the cell stage. There was apparently going to be a water stage, but it somehow fell off the game, and you go from cellular to land stage and make your creature. Your creature stage is E.V.O. but with three dimensions and a peaceful route to go. The tribal stage is next, followed quickly on its heels by the civilization stage. If you have played *any* RTS game, Age of Empires, Starcraft, Dune 2 (by the now-dead Westwood; thanks EA!), you’ve played these stages. Then it’s on to the space stage. If you’ve played Master of Orion II, you’ve played this segment of the game.

Now, you might be saying, hey that sounds neat. Okay, I will give you that if this game were these stages all done *well*, then it would have been pretty awesome when you throw in the fact that you get to use a low-to-medium complexity 3D modeling program to make your creature. But sadly, it’s more that if you took those games and then made a VERY limited demo of them and then strung them together, that’s what you would have. The name of the game in Spore is “Limited Choices.”

Other than the Creature Creator itself, which most of the poor sheeple that got suckered into buying the retail game had already bought, there is a resounding lack of choices to be made.

Let’s start with clothing. You get a matrix of 4 by 4 clothing items to be used by your creature once you get to tribal stage and then it expands a bit in the civilization stage and the space stage but all in all, the amount of choices you get for these things are ridiculously small. Then, instead of being able to color your clothing, your only coloring choices are determined by changing the coloring of your person/creature’s body. That doesn’t make any sense. Beyond that, in the realm of clothing, getting clothing to cover your creature is only accomplished by slapping on multiple bits of junk. How about you give me a texture that I can color? Like spandex…I don’t even get spandex? And good luck getting a mask to work as a mask.

Then, when we’re making our buildings and land units in the civilization stages, you get one land, one sea and one air unit, and the possibility of having 9 if you capture the other two types of cities (military, religious and trade). The buildings are one type of house, one factory and one entertainment…and turrets for defense. So let me get this straight…I’m playing Age of Empires with up to 9 units and 3 building types? Woo. Let me get my heart medicine. And your strategy for fighting? Heard of the Zergling rush, now known as ‘the zerg?’ That’s it. Zerg for the win. Oh hooray…where’s my confetti?

Space stage was *almost* awesome. It was very pretty, and used a 3-D star map a la Star Control…and done differently might have been worth buying the whole game for. But, alas, such was not to be. Your ship is the ONLY ship you get…kind of like Star Control 2…wow, look, another game that I loved, but stripped down and crammed in…in an empire that rapidly spans star systems, you are the only means of defense and transport. Your ship. That’s it. So after you make a couple of colony worlds, ANY time pirates or enemies attack you must RACE back to the world and defend it. Too bad that you were doing a quest somewhere for someone, and there’s no way to keep track of what you were doing before being interrupted. The main commodity you trade is spice (which was, honestly, a nice homage…back to Dune again…oh wait, and EA killed Dune 2’s creator Westwood studios…now I’m upset again), but this commodity is only made on the planets in limited quantities and YOU must pick it all up if you want to trade it to anyone. You have no defenses for these colonies but land based turrets at first, which are ridiculously easy to kill, forcing you to come back to defend. Later on…much later…you get an automated weapons platform that you can leave on colony worlds that is *almost* enough to defend against anything, but it’s outrageously expensive.

So, to build your empire you must constantly run back and forth collecting spice to trade to capricious AI worlds (or your own) in a sort of reproduction of Taipan (you’re OLD if you remember that game), while defending against raids and eradicating diseased creatures until you have enough money to buy these uber-turrets. Meanwhile you’re building up the abilities of your ship, like how powerful it is and how far it can travel (a point that will become painfully pointless, by the way, at the end of the game).

Even so…as frustrating as it is, the Space game might have been cool enough to buy the game for. Except once again, limitations abound. Why can I not get a list of my worlds, what type of spice they produce, and whether they have an uber-turret or not? Why can’t I see what animals inhabit my worlds?

Oh, why would I care about inhabitants of worlds? I’ll explain…a world is usually found in a non-habitable state, and you have to terraform it. Which sounds way cool, but in execution, is not. You have to adjust atmosphere and temperature, which is cool, but then you have to populate it with one large, medium and small plant type…and then two herbivore animals and one omni- or carnivore. And there’s three levels of habitation acceptability. So that’s 9 plants, and 9 animals. They must all be unique types to fill a niche. That’s complex and really cool and is kind of fun…

Except you get no list of what your planets have on them already. And you can’t just go into orbit at a planet and say “Give me one biota load including everything on this world.” Oh no, instead, you have to swoop down and tractor beam up one of every niche biota…or many if you want to terraform lots of places. But sometimes, a creature for that niche is not actually present on the world…having been eaten by the rapacious carnivores…so you have to fly around while waiting for them to repop. Invariably…and I mean it’s like an immutable law of the game…you will have a raid or biodisaster on some world while you’re trying to do this, leading to immense amounts of frustration.

Even so…I could put up with all of this really unnecessary annoyance (unnecessary if you know the other games that are out these days) if at the end of the space game they didn’t commit one of the cardinal sins of gaming theory…taking away an accomplishment for no reason other than to extend the monotony of your game. In pen and paper RPG terms, the Gamemaster takes away some of your stuff.

At the end of the space stage, no matter how well you’ve done, you have to make it through V’rix…er…Antaran…er…Borg…ah yes, Grox space...to get to the planet Orion…oh sorry, the center of the galaxy, to win. As you enter Grox space, you are eventually attacked. You fight in space without actually fighting, you see your ship and their ships and there are flashes and booms…and you usually beat the ships…but you take damage. That’s okay…I’m sure I’ll be okay, you think.

Until the game pulls that ultimate sin. Uh…because our game really doesn’t feel long enough and we want you to grind out at the end we’re going to…oh wait, uh…the navigation system is uh…having issues with…um…gravity, yes that’s it…and we’re going to uh…restrict our jump range for…hmmm…safety, yes that’s it!

So now…looking again to the center of the galaxy…you have to make 40-80 jumps while getting another 2-3 enemy ships on you that you really can’t fight other than watch the flashes, which are, by the way, making it really difficult for you to target the next star. If you *do* for some reason try to make the masochistic charge to the center of the galaxy, make sure that as soon as you start the space stage you start buying repair kits for your ship. You will not be able to buy enough, ever, I bet. The alternative is to kill Grox colonies from time to time to make a base that you can fly back to, ONE PARSEC AT A TIME, to repair at. The Grox empire is huge. You would never be able to take them out. Or maybe you can…this might be the stupid “hardcore gamers can find a secret ending” that EA “let slip.”

Anyway, so you got enough repair kits…or you opened up the cheat panel in frustration…and you’ve made it to the center of the galaxy. Congrats! Now they give you a Genesis Device that can remake planets to an ideal level for you.

Forty-two times. That’s it. I’m sure that’s an homage but come on…I’ve attained supreme cosmic power and fought my way through to the center of the galaxy for a 42-charge Genesis Device and a time-share spiel? And you come back out at the center of the galaxy where the hostile Grox are still looking to kill you.

Okay so that’s the over-arcing critique. Now let’s get into the Going To Drive You Nuts Because All Other Games Have This Stuff But Not Spore list:

• No autosave function

• No ability to remap keys or control functions, and the control functions change each level

• No Big Useful Lists…like what type of city my city is…what type of spice my colony makes…what type of animals live on my planet

• No ability to rename your planets or stars, other than by cheating…built into the cheat menu, but you can’t have it, not yours

• No way to take in-game notes as to what you were doing when you got called back to Irregularis IV to fix the governor’s hangnail.

• No way to set waypoints or forwarding for units in Civ stage, no way to forward spice production to closer to your end of the galaxy in space

• No way to save templates for colony setup. There’s virtually no real difference between cities or colonies…might as well have the ability to say “give me this setup for all, please.”

• No good way to defend your stuff in space stage without you racing to help

• No way to easily pick up terraforming life forms

• No way to end the monotony of the space level. Oh wait, that’s not a function of other games…but no other game has made me feel like I’m filling out TPS reports like this stage did.

Now let’s go back and talk about evolution. They told us this game would have consequences for choices you made. It’s true, you do get little racial traits that are due to what you did as you grew, and that’s REALLY cool…but how come I can re-design my creature from a bidped with two heads to a quadruped in one jump? That’s not evolution, that’s redesign. Why, if I put 6 level 1 legs on my monster thingy doesn’t it move faster than a critter with 2 level 2 legs?

This game *feels* like it had way more in it and then they scrapped it and went with a stripped-down variety. Like they gave you a Mustang outer shell but a Yugo engine and transmission. Apparently you were going to be able to design plants…you can’t. Apparently there was a water stage…there isn’t. There was a huge list of things that You Were Going to be Able to Do…but they’re no longer in the game.

To be fair, it’s fun making the critters. It’s fun designing the buildings. It’s kind of neat, some of the things that you get to do. It’s very pretty. But the drawbacks are too big. This game is a shell of what it appeared, and was promised, that it was going to be. Wright had this to say about the game…

“We were very focused, if anything, on making a game for more casual players. “Spore” has more depth than, let’s say, “The Sims” did. But we looked at the Metacritic scores for “Sims 2″, which was around 90, and something like “Half-Life“, which was 97, and we decided — quite a while back — that we would rather have the Metacritic and sales of “Sims 2″ than the Metacritic and sales of “Half-Life.””

If this game has more depth than the Sims did…and if this game is an indication of the quality of Sims 2, then I am glad beyond reasoning that I never played either of those. I don’t believe for a *minute* that Will Wright is being honest with us. I think EA came in and said “you’ve had enough time working on this…we know it’s not what you want, but what you have is too ambitious, and it doesn’t work. You will strip it down and sell the last working build of this game…NOW!”

It’s a pleasant enough diversion for a thoughtless couple hours…think of it as a sort of glorified Tetris…but as a game…I’m sorry to say, but:

Spore sucks.

We got sold a bill of goods as consumers. I feel truly sorry for you people that have followed this game’s production for three years. If *I* feel disappointed with the game, you folks must be utterly devastated…like Santa Claus just killed a kitten in front of you.

Maybe EA was trying to capture the next Pokemon generation. This game is fit for 8 year olds. If you’re older than this, you’re going to be bored, frustrated, and aggravated. For those of you that have not bought it yet, I implore you; wait until it hits the bargain bin if you must buy it…if there’s any justice in the world, this game will be in the bargain bin next month. It’s worth ten dollars, at most.

Any word you had to look up in a thesaurus was the wrong one.