Spore

[alexander]

Moving any Spore discussions here, tis the law :)

[alexander]

Originaly posted in Challenge for Thinkers... (this is just the easiest way of moving a thread :) )

Spore looks interesting, but as I read through it I thought it seemed kind of rediculous. Since no one has yet described a tree of life for a creature, at least The 'Spore' team could of pretended how bacteria could join into multi celled, then into large multi celled, onward into somethin else.

Yes your right it is rediculous, in fact the game is really 6 games in one and i dont think your previous stages have much to do with your next stage other than passing it.

 

From Wiki-Spore

 

1. Tide Pool Phase, similar to Pac-Man

2. Creature Phase, Diablo

3. Tribal Phase, Populous

4. City Phase, SimCity

5. Civilization Phase, Risk and Civilization

6. Space Phase (a.k.a. UFO stage or Invasion), with some elements reminiscent of Destroy All Humans!, and later, sandbox gameplay.

 

As for the bacteria ruling the universe, why not, who says you need intelligence to get into space, all you need is a method, say an astroid or some freak of nature that we are not aware of. After humanity is all destroyed and the sun dies it may be that the little pesky simple organisms that are the only ones that will 'survive' and live on elsewhere. We cant assume anything if we just look at our case, anyways sorry for getting off topic, you should start another thread arkian about this topic

[alxian]

i'm just slightly more interested in this game again since EA has partially announced that Simcity and The Sims sequels can be expected in the next fiscal year.

 

(yeah right)

 

but otherwise this game still looks Too dumbed down to be fun. i just burned my fingers on Sid Meier's Railroads thinking it would be a serious attempt to revive the old ghost.. no such look. all games these days are built so any idiot can play.. its sad when the die hard fans have to try harder just to make their own fun.

 

--

 

i'd be more into the intrplanetary commerce.. but something tells me the experience won't be as involve as it should be (too few resources, inability to actually micromanage trade agreements, defend/invade worlds for precious resources etc).

[alexander]

i'd beg to differ on the fun part, the ability to create (mold, evolve, texture, color) your own character, buildings and all brings excitement, your ability to import creatures that other people have created into your echosystem, evolution at work, and strategy too, its more of a combination of many games into one.... it will be fun, it will consume WOW amounts of time...

[Mercedes Benzene]

I look forward to this game! In March, it was announced that Spore was to come out sometime in late fall of 2006. =.= RIGHT. So obviously that did not happen. Now I'm hoping it will make a fairly early 2007 release. ::phones::

I simply love the idea of being able to craft your own creatures and experience "evolution".

 

Extremely fun-sounding in my opinion.

[IDMclean]

I am of the understanding that you actually evolve your creature over time, from bacteria to civilization building, planet spanning vehical users.

 

From there, the stars. If you've not seen the demos of it, and Will Wright's discussion of the principles involved, then you probably will have a "well, I guess that's kinda neat." additude about it. If you've seen the demo of it, then you probably will have a more upbeat "It looks great." additude, more or less.

 

If you haven't already I highly suggest sitting through the 1 hour demo of it from E3 2005 and maybe even the one from E3 2006. The 2006 one has more on the galactic metagame (millions of planets... OMGWT*!). You can find both of those on google. Or even over at Wikipedia I believe.

 

Spore, Wikipedia

[Boerseun]

Riiiiiiiiiight... from Alexander's well-intentioned start to this thread in the Year of our Lord 2006, to my personal impressions of this... this... er... this... "game".

 

I received the "Creature Generator" on a freeware disk that shipped with a PC magazine I bought middle of last year. So, without further ado, I decided "awesome - let's build sum stuffs!"

 

I loaded the "Creature Generator" or "Builder" or whatever the hell you want to call it, and was immediately transported to my youth. The youth I lived through, where there was no such thing as personal computers, and the best you could get is a pile of stinking play-dough from which to give life to whatever goes for entertainment in your warped little head. The "creatures" I got to build with the "Creature Generator" looked exactly as crap and stupid as the stuff I built from play-dough when I was around three years old. Matter of fact, when I was potty-training, I recall having created much more life-like and believable monsters with my anus than what I could do with Spore's "Creature Generator".

 

That should have been the first sign.

 

Nevertheless, last year sometime the game finally shipped. I ignored the utter crap that was the freeware "Creature Generator", thinking that it was merely a beta version of some ideas that the developers might have flung around the office between coffee breaks and getting down to some serious programming. Turns out it was not the case, though. There was no serious programming going down at all. Those f****rs were shooting up crack cocaine whilst filming a threesome between Barney the Dinosaur and two Teletubbies for artistic inspiration for their Wunderkind, Spore. Turns out that the utterly crap and artistically juvenile bullcrap dished up with the "Creature Generator" is the pinnacle reached in Spore.

 

So, shopping around a bit, I was aghast at what they were charging for this... game. So I thought to myself to hang on for a bit, because after a couple of months the prices will drop. And then I heard about EA's DR management scheme: You can install this game a grand total of three times. Every time you install, your motherboard specs are sent through to EA, who keeps a dastardly list of all machines this... game... is installed on. Evidently, the execs at EA live in a world where machines are never formatted and rebuilt. Which leads me to believe that the EA execs don't use Windows, or know their asses from their elbows. Yet, they built the game to run on Windows. And you can only install it thrice.

 

In hindsight, it could be a good idea. It could be that the EA execs know that no single buyer of this... game ... would install it more than once, in any case.

 

So, I decided to lower myself to the ranks of Blackbeard, with a yo-ho-ho and a bottle or rum. I turned my back on civilization, got myself a parrot and a fake wooden leg, and turned pirate. If anybody wants to call the cops on me, please go ahead. I'll even supply my address. I copied "Spore" from Download music, movies, games, software! The Pirate Bay - The world's largest BitTorrent tracker with the full intention to try out the game, and if I liked it, to go and buy the original. Sure.

 

And this is my take on it:

 

There are a few stages, you have to go through all of them to achieve... to achieve... er... I think, something.

 

First stage:

You're a ball of hairy snot floating in some pool with other balls of hairy snot. Some have got teeth, some don't. You're supposed to eat little pieces of green crap if you selected to be a fag fairy herbivore, or other balls of hairy floating snot if you're a manly carnivore. You get to decide whether your play-dough snotball with have teeth or poison glands or a boombox on his shoulder or teeth or any number of eyes. The success of any appendages you decide to add to your snotball has absolutely no effect on whether they'll survive or not. If you get eaten by another snotball, you simply spawn all over again to destroy the last vestiges of any pretentions the game might have to somehow simulate evolution. Then, somehow, if you've achieved enough "DNA" points, you get to go to the...

 

Second stage, the "Creature" stage:

There is absolutely no connection between the first and second stage, except for the drooling moron behind the computer. And the colour scheme of your playdough snotball somehow got carried over to your "Creature". You're not swimming around anymore, you're now cruisin' for a bruisin' on land. Land which, I might add, is the sorriest excuse for a computer-generated landscape I have ever seen. The colour scheme is reminiscent of a trip I went on in my youth, when I mistakenly snorted laundry detergent. Pac-Man (circa 1980) has a much, much better pallet as well as texture, because of brute honesty: It doesn't pretend to be anything else. But I digress. Getting back to gameplay, you cruise around land either eating plants (you fag, you) or other animals. And then you get to "serenade" other animals, thereby befriending them. I still have to figure out how befriending other animals fits into Darwin's Grand Scheme of Things. Befriending these other juvenile first-grade excuses for cartoon animals is something you have to do, whether you're a herbivore or carnivore - if you don't you don't get to the third stage. Actually, I'm lying. It's not first-grade graphics. Even a first-grader will immediately see it for the incredibly bad bullshit it is. But eventually, if you haven't sucked a lead pill from the business end of a .45 Magnum by this stage, you'll get to the...

 

Third stage, or the Tribal Phase:

...which sucks nuts. You have to run to another tribe, sock them a good one, and take over their town. And that's it. Truly. Seriously. No ****. Do it enough times, and you get to the...

 

Fourth stage, or the Civilization Phase:

...which is exactly the same as the previous phase, with the exception of having to design little cars, little ships, and little buildings. But know this, whether you put a ten-meter long cannon on your little tank's turrent, or a fluffy marshmallow instead, that tank will still fire the exact same. Your ships will float as fast and as effective whether you design it to be a solid brick or a big-*** duck. It simply doesn't matter. And it's so incredibly easy. You simply send your little shippie off to some city over the horizon, where they will pommel the next civilization into oblivion. Easy as cheese. And ugly. This game, so far, has been ridiculously easy, and hideously, retina-scorchingly ugly. And once you've done this, you get to...

 

The Space Stage:

In which you get to cruize around space, and get to planets where the same horrid graphics depicts planets one of the stages above, and you can either collect sample animals and... I honestly don't know. I spent a grand total of ten minutes in the Space Stage of this... this... game, and I simply couldn't take it any more.

 

Conclusion:

The idea behind Spore was good and sound. The execution of it, however, is probably one of the biggest disappointments in the history of electronic entertainment. I get sick at the thought of calling this thing a game, because that's an offense to those borderline stinkers who can still justifiably identify themselves as such. This is an offense to anybody even casually acquianted with the theories put forward by Charles Darwin and his successors. The gameplay sucks, so even if the science is ignored, this thing is still crap. The graphics, at each and every stage of this game, could have been done much better by a syphillitic swamp donkey close to death with no teeth. This game is not worth a tenth of the money they ask for it, in any currency you care to mention. I'm actually thinking that if EA actually pays me the cover price to play this bomb, per hour, I still won't do it. My time is much better spent, say, stabbing myself in the eye with a phillips screwdriver.

 

Which might be a clue as to how this... game... manages to suck so spectacularly. They could not get testers for it. They all committed suicide in the beta phase already.

 

Some games are okay. Some games suck. Some games suck so bad, you battle to find words for it. But Spore sucks so spectacularly, they had to invent a brand new level of crap for it. And there is currently only one member.

 

One more thing - thank God for piracy, and thepiratebay. If I had actually bought that piece of crap, I would have battled to the end of the Earth to get a refund. For pure, unadulterated crap like this has no right to exist in the universe I'm in.

 

God, Spore sucks. Is there anybody here who've "played" it, and actually liked it?

 

 

 

I

[phillip1882]

i didn't find the first four stages that disappointing, though your problems with the game are spot on, it was mildly enjoyable. where i thought the game really failed was the space stage, by a ton and a half. you can't build fleets, you cant set up a defence, you cant really invade, you're mostly just an errand boy for various species. i mean seriously, how much dumber can you get?

[IDMclean]

They chose the blue pill ultimately to get it done and shipped. They could have gone for MOO--Master of Orion--for the space stage, but instead they gave us the pseudo-"Lost In Space" option. I would have been perfectly happy with a Homeworld-style setup. Anything as long as I got a fleet to mess with.

 

I wish they had gone with what they demoed for several years leading up to the release. The different stages are effectively non-sequitur. I had been hoping that transitioning between stages was like pulling back to see a larger and larger landscape. Instead, they opted to go for the hard transition where they break and switch to the new minigame. The choice to do so broke the potential links of causality between the stages.

 

As iteration one, I hope that iteration two addresses the deal breaking weak points of iteration one. Sid Meier and Chris Taylor should work along side Will Wright; they would build the spore that the fans had been expecting since the first demo. Kinboat, the modder who made the community tools for the Total annihilation modding community and got hired by Gas Powered Games, would improve the in game tools.

 

On a more personal note: Death to the Military and Religious space-faring civilizations! Extorsion or War? I'm a scientist, diplomat, and trader. I've got more allies, technology, and resources than you do. I'll blow up your planet. Stupid Civilization AI.

[Boerseun]

Instead, they opted to go for the hard transition where they break and switch to the new minigame. The choice to do so broke the potential links of causality between the stages.

That's another crucial problem. But be that as it may, Spore ranks very high on the suction meter, because each and every one of those individual "mini-games" suck spectacularly, too, on their own merit.

 

I mean, for each and every one of those games, tons of better games exist in the same genre. So, as far as these games are so incredibly unrelated and completely crap, you could play a much better different game for every scenario.

 

I think Spore was sunk because of boardroom politics, where some salesman pitched a crap idea to a bench of decision makers who have no idea what the business is all about. How Will Wright (SimCity?!?!? The Sims?!?!?!) put his name on this pile of steaming manure is so far beyond me...

 

...and then the only way to sell it was to overhype it over a matter of years.

 

Which makes me very cynical towards hyped releases, and gives me an even better incentive to pirate a game prior to purchase.

 

Which might, ultimately, be a good move in the Greater Scheme of Things. Unashamedly **** games like Spore will turn more users into pirates, previewing entire games before purchase, because they've burnt their fingers (rather expensively) by believing the market hype when they invested in Spore. This, in turn, will force other games to be better (or at least just live up to the hype) if they want to make any sales. Ironically, plugging in to the theme the game was supposed to be about, this is evolution in action, baby. Crap games (like Spore), will simply die a sad and lonely death, whilst the stronger, better ones will survive and procreate.

[alexander]

Great, another great concept, poor execution, why cant they make more games like Hack and Defcon, great concepts, great execution, or Crysis, mundane, same old crap concept, great execution, why do they have great concept, and an utterly horrifying execution that you want to shoot some devs for like that

 

Gah, back to maybe black and white, or age of empires 3 or something... I think i might give AoE a go, i know its an M$ product and all, but it is a very beautiful-looking game :hyper:

[alexander]

I meant Empires Total War, that seems really cool

[Boerseun]

I'm pinning my hopes on CitiesXL, which started as a private initiative because of SimCity Societies suction.

 

For some reason, developers nowadays go with the idea that the simpler a game is, the better it will sell. This might be good for FPS games, but I'm more of a strategy and micromanagement nut.

 

I mean, I still play the odd SimCity 4 game every now and then, but it is showing its age. The new stuff just blows. And it's not because I'm getting older (I'm 32). My sister's kid is now 11 years old, and even he prefers my older games when visiting (SimCity 4, AoE, Empire Earth etc) over the new stuff, because the new stuff is "too easy", and "kid's games".

 

The designers have chucked SimCity 5 into the trash and instead came up with SimCity Societies, because the learning curve for new players was "too steep". Idiots. The complexity of it all and the interrelationship between different elements is exactly the reason I love games like that. It exercise your brain muscle ever so slightly more than the average point-and-click monkey see-monkey do kinda games.

 

But I truly believe that the final say as to game design and the logic behind it, sits squarely with the Board Members who have never, never played a single game in their entire lives. They are devoid of having a soul or imagination of any kind, and this rubs off on their final product. Because of the sheer size of these modern games, and the vast number of people that must be employed to slog through all the phases of development, gone are the days of individual mavericks who came up with the masterpieces of old. Today, a computer game is a purely commercial mass product, and like purely commercial products, they are completely friendly towards the lowest common denominator.

 

Hence games like SimCity Societies and Spore, which will knock your socks off if you're a drivelling, drooling moron. But they're ignoring the more intelligent segment of the population. Or maybe we're just in such a minority that nobody actually cares.