The notion of creativity goes pretty much out of the window, as all your choices become dictated by game mechanics and efficiency, but in a way that isn’t particularly deep or fun. If you want to succeed in Spore, you need to constantly make sure you’re maximising your creature’s potential, swapping parts in and out all the time to raise one or two skills, just so you’re more able to befriend or destroy the other species on the planet. But I liked the creature creator, didn’t I? Yes, but only because I was ignoring all the less interesting stuff in it – stuff that is now integral to the game. Put simply, most of Spore just feels like stripped-down versions of other games, with the creature creator sort of draped over them. After that comes the ‘tribal’ stage, which is more like a scaled-down version of Age of Empires, and again sees you trying to make friends with, or wipe out, the other tribes. The second stage, where your creature grows legs and is able to start roaming around the planet properly, plays like pretty much any online RPG you might’ve come across, only without any other players to interact with – just a load of other creatures to make friends with, or destroy. It plays like flOw, only without the interesting visual style or beautiful sound design. The first stage sees your single-cell organism swimming around, trying to eat plants or other living organisms in order to grow larger. So, what changed?įor a start, your species’ evolution is split up into five distinct stages, each of which plays like a fairly naff rip-off of another game. There were some stats and stuff for each creature that seemed loosely related to the pieces I was adding, but to hell with that – I was having fun. And good fun it was, too – many an hour was spent making weird and wonderful creatures with six legs and eyes on their hands, and then watching in amazement as the game more-or-less succesfully animated my entirely impractical creations with ease. Then, Spore Creature Creator came out, and I promptly threw a fiver in EA’s face in order to mess around with it. You can keep your video games, son – this is something else. When Will Wright did that demonstration of the game where he was messing around on a planet for ten minutes and then suddenly pulled the camera back until it’d made a seamless transition to viewing the entire solar system, I literally gasped. Spore, though, was something I’d kept an eye on, because it sounded genuinely exciting. Too Human? Don’t see why everyone had such a huge problem with it, I thought it was really fun. Peter Molyneux? Under-appreciated genius. I’m not usually one to follow hype, because I’ve seen the crushing disappointment it can put people through, and it’s not something I’ve been keen to sample. It’s just not what I’d been led to believe it would be. And why was I so upset? Because the game was actually rubbish? Sort of. The idea of Spore is that you guide the evolution of a species, all the way from its life as a single-cell organism, to an all-conquering, space-faring super race, and… look, I’ll be straight with you, here – what I’d really like to do right now is ignore all notions of fairness or objective criticism, and just rant about how utterly disappointed I was with Spore when I first got my teeth into it. But something potentially far more interesting. Something that won’t get your 13 year-old daughter all excited at the prospect of being able to recreate Big Brother on her laptop, admittedly. Check it out, guys! It’s that new game by Will Wright, the guy who made The Sims! So it’s got to be totally amazing, right? Because The Sims sold like six billion copies, and spawned an unholy amount of add-ons and spin-offs, such was its universal appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike! But this isn’t The Sims – it’s something else.
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