Monday, September 15, 2008

My review of Spore

Spore, the "sim-everything" from Will Wright, certainly was an ambitious project. Claiming to be the "jack of all games", it had a lot of promise! Well, for me the game that was full of promise seemed not to reach its full potential.

The game starts off promisingly. As with many games when you first load them up, it's always a little bit exciting. Then I realise that there's some kind of bug and the sound doesn't play correctly when coming through my MOTU828 audio interface. So, I try to quit to change the audio settings and the computer freezes. Even apple-tab doesn't work. NOTHING works, not even num lock. So, force power down... grr. I then try it again using headphones plugged straight into my macbook pro. This time silence. What the hell? I finally quit and restart it with the sound only coming out of the dinky macbook pro speakers. Oh well, it'll have to do.

The game consists of a number of different evolutionary stages, where the game changes at each point. The first stage is a 2D game where you swim around eating stuff (think Pacman). Then you evolve legs, go out of the water, and wander around beating up stuff and eating it. Then you make a tribe and it's a frighteningly simple RTS game. Then eventually you take over the planet and go to space where it's a space fighting/trading game. Sounds good, right?

Well yes, it DOES sound good. But the problem, and I'm not the only one to say it (and I can't be bothered finding a reference), is that each of these games are not good enough! For instance, the RTS stage is painfully simple, and even on the hardest difficulty it took me no more than 5 seconds to kill anything I could see. Before the space stage, the RTS stage appears to be the stage where one spends the most time, and to tell the truth, I think it is the most fun part of the game because...

The space stage is so unbelievably FRUSTRATING. You've got your home planet and your spaceship, and you have to colonise other planets by kidnapping and depositing plants and animals, collect various types of Spice for trading, and interact with other characters, making alliances and enemies as you quest towards the centre of the galaxy. Ok, sounds like Privateer, or countless other games I can't remember the names of. And hey, I LIKED those games, but Spore's version of it is so frustrating it was all I could do to stop from smashing my computer.

For 1 thing, the individual colonies on each planet, which are required to produce the spice that you'll need to trade, are painfully simple. You only have 4 choices of buildings - factories for money, houses for people to live in, entertainment of whatever time to make them happy, and turrets for defense. So EVERY city I made was 1 factory, 1 entertainment, 4 houses, and some turrets. Then, I realised that the turrets were COMPLETELY USELESS because every single time I was doing something else (like making one of the mind-numbingly repetitive trips to collect the spice from every planet individually (where's the fucking automation for that!??)), I'd get an "ALERT" saying that some hostiles were attacking one of my armed-to-the-teeth colonies and that they desperately require my attention. So I go and it's about 4 low-hit-point spaceships slowly flying over my city, not even attacking, and the turrets aren't shooting them down anyway. OK so I got to kill them, which was fun the first 10 times but how come EVERY SINGLE TIME I do something on the other side of the galaxy one of my apparently useless turret wielding 4-building colonies cry for help? One time I was bombing the crap out of one "enemy empire" on their home planet when I get an alert that these same guys have sent one peon to fly around in a fairly relaxed manner near one of my colonies, causing me to have to go back! So... fucking... frustrating.

Also:

1. Controls are stupid, and unchangeable (where's the reverse mouse Y-axis setting you fucks?)
2. Game is painfully simple, and then painfully frustrating.

Overall it looks nice and is kind of fun, cos you can create your own shit (which actually gets boring after about the 8th time), but I can't imagine it having a life longer than about 3 days.

Oh also the DRM is apparently stupid, but I wouldn't know.

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