SPROEZ!!!

[Chardok]

So I am thinking about getting Spore tonight because I'm just not feeling WAR, and certain astute members of SDN are almost always right in their recommendations. Is it fun, should I wait, how long does it usually take to copmlete a "cycle" (Campaign) and is it as endlessly replayable as it seems to be? Please be as Stark-like as you can when presenting reviews/opinions.

[PeZook]

. Is it fun,

Depends. If you liked The Sims, you will like Spore...once.

how long does it usually take to copmlete a "cycle" (Campaign)

About two days before you get to the Space "infinite boredom" Stage, depending on how much you play. Nowadays, I could do it in three hours, probably, since I know all the mechanisms.

and is it as endlessly replayable as it seems to be?

No. No matter what creature you make, it becomes completely irrelevant by the Tribal Phase, and even in the Creature Phase, the only differences are cosmetic (Oooh! It walks on four legs instead of three!). And the actual gameplay mechanics are utterly simplistic - thus, Spore manages to elliminate its only original aspect (the creature creator) and turns into a very pretty Flash game.

Starklike enough for you?


P.S.

It also doesn't simulate ecosystems at all, despite bragging it does so.

[Covenant]

I could be harsher than that. Spore is the failure of vision over game design, in that while the idea to reduce the game into a Sims-like game for any of the manifold idiots of this world to goof off in with their little retarded creatures, it fails to do so, and becomes a BAD flash game.

Wright failed the essential test of a minigame. Is it playable on demand? In Spore the answer is a resounding No! If I wanted to play Sudoku, I want to play Sudoku now, not after beating a game of checkers and then filling out a mad-libs. Each game section is simplistic and dull, with uninteresting objectives and an uninviting reward system. But the biggest failure is that these sections are railroad-car linked to each other, and playing through one advances you towards the next. Even in the simplest and most fun stage, the Cell stage, even any minor level of play FORCES you forward. So if you had wanted to simply goof around as a tiny cell in an interesting Pacsteroids game, you cannot, because as soon as you've eaten X number of giblets the game grows you in size at that very moment and changes everything around you. Let me tell you, the last area of the cell is a fuck lot less fun than the earlier ones, so you're basically shoved out the door and onto land.

Once there, the charm offensive fails completely. You start off as a semi-cute incarnation of your cell, and wander around doing the stupidest game ever made. Click on bones to get new parts. Sing or fight to get more points, and more parts. You do this once, you've done it entirely. Like WoW with 3 abilities, you're stuck by a rubber band to your target in a fight with only one of a meager few abilities to use. When you die you come right back--no branching evolution or anything, you just appear in the nest you came from.

Even if it was easy, it could be fun if it had simulated an ecosystem. It does not. Regularly scattered out along the planet is a random selection of fully formed creatures. This is the Intelligent Design theory on a dinnerplate, even though Wright's not an ID guy. Creatures don't follow an evolutionary path, you see. Your creature will to some degree but nothing else does. What would have been an easy, interesting system for simple speciation ends up being completely ruinous to the atmosphere, and extremely dull overall. Each creature has a nest--usually just one nest, so that means on a continent you may have 100 unique species, and once you predate one to death, it's gone. Six kills, and they're extinct. Awesome, eh? They stay nice and clustered around the nest so it's easy to do. And you have to, since you don't get many points for only killing a few. And eventually the game forces you on--even though the Wasteland you've made (or the happy Disney-land if you've chosen to sing to the other creatures and win peacefully) probably encourages you to do so--by moving your nest without your consent. You start the lonely road to the new site, and instead of the primitive cellular-inspired designs from the coast, you're now in the midst of Dickbears, who've sprung fully formed from the Aether to challenge you--dongs a-waggling. It would have been nice if the most successful, least edible creatures from the coast had showed up here, bigger, meaner, and more evolved--but no. Like we said, there's no evolution here. Even worse, it's not even fun to make creatures--one item of a type is all you can have function, in contrast to the creature editor. No more Bite 20 creatures with 5 gaping maws. If you have 8 arms with simple claws you get Claw 2 while a creature with one claw on a single one-joint limb hanging from it's ass can have a Claw 5 claw on there and kick your ass. Feel like customizing your creature? Spore says fuck you, put on one of each of the best parts or die like a fucking Dodo.

So you've beaten the creature phase by finally killing enough shit to grow a fucking brain. As soon as you let it the game will kick your ass into Tribal stage, which ends about 2 minutes after it starts and leaves you wondering what the fucking point was. Sing to your enemies, or burn their huts down, it doesn't matter. If you lose it restarts you, and if you take your time they'll gang the fuck up on you since everyone hates your goddamn guts. Sometimes all the tribes are your species, sometimes not, but it doesn't matter. They do some minor damage based on natural ability, but spears and axes override that, and it doesn't even matter--just bribe them with food until you have enough members and then terminate them ASAP, since the longer you take the more Tribes show up, and they all want YOU and only you dead.

Beat this, and you go to the Civilization phase, which takes another 4 minutes to win, and even has an "I Win" button for all civs just in case you almost were having fun. Just push it and move on, you don't get a prize for having fun, and the longer you take the less exciting it becomes. Blah blah, they launch a Spaceship.

Now the game is over, just quit. The Space Phase is a joke. The first time you play it, you'll have fun for a few hours, maybe a few days. Then you'll realize "All I get to do is fly to a planet, alter two variables (heat, atmosphere) and plant a colony, some trees and some Dickbears?" Yes, that's all. Spread your forests and Dickbear herds across the galaxy, it doesn't matter. Trade is a joke--you do it all yourself. Want money? Well either do a mission from one of your Sociopathic neighbors or Collect Spice from your planets (by flying to them) and sell it to the other civs (by flying to them and selling it) over and over and over.

Warfare is also a joke. Unlike in the demos he showed, space is choked with other Space civilizations, you don't really get to have fun dicking around with 1940's era alien civs much. If you so much as fart in someone else's space and they don't already worship you, their faction rating goes down and they'll start a war. Wars consist of your planets being attacked by regularly spawning uninterceptable alien fleets of 20 or more ships, appearing in groups of 5 or 8 across the world in question. Want to save your planet? Fly all the way back to your Empire and play "hunt the rapidly moving object in a tree-dimensional plane" with the worst battle engine ever. Think Missile Command, if your command was mobile in three dimensions, and the missiles were TIE Fighters. You can eventually get good at it (I recommend the laser weapon) but it's never, ever any fun, and they will just shit at you forever until the war ends. And since these fleets are uninterceptable and invisible, you have no way of doing anything about it. If you're fighting a war with a species across the Galaxy, they still hammer your colonies--though usually the nearest one. But since fighting your way through space is a fruitless and tiresome endeavor, what this usually means is that you're halfway across the galaxy when warfleets start appearing over your planets. Awful. Worst yet half of the galaxy centered around the galactic Core is owned by an evil race of muppets who fucking hate everything and will go to war, permanently, if you attack one of their many aggressive vessels or defend any of your friends from them. Not defending your friends makes them angry at you too. So either way, you are FORCED into War, a war which is not fun at all.

Even when you win the game, the war doesn't end, since the Center-clustered evil guys don't go away. Remember, this is spore! Your different species all exist in the same 'galaxy' just in different regions, and can meet each other. So that means that the evil monster men have to exist in ALL savegames, so they can't just let you win, and they won't let the evil guys call a truce, so you're boned. Fly around collecting spice, or whatever, it doesn't matter--there's nothing else to do. You can go look for Earth or turn planets into giant Smiley Faces, but it's dull and unrewarding and there's no point to it all, and meanwhile you're constantly being hammered by fun-obliterating enemy attacks.

If Spore were merely a flash minigame, it would be better than it is now. As it stands, the game takes several small games that would have been fun if they were playable on demand and daisy-chains them, forcing you to stop playing just as it got good, and loading each thing with so much shit that you can't ever enjoy where it ends up. The simple joys of the cell phase and early creature phase give way to the boring and tiresome monotany of everything else, and that's where it stays. You can play it more than one to try to enjoy that early buzz again, and it is still fun to make your creatures, but you almost wonder why. You can play the creature editor and just make things there, but bringing it to game destroys the magic entirely. It's not fun. It's not even a game anymore. It's just a mess--like an Interactive 3D MS Paint program. If all you want is to cut ravines into dirtball worlds and watch little floppy-armed creatures mill back and forth around a nest site, this is your new crack cocaine. If you're looking for a game of epic struggle from cell to space, join the club and give Spore a pass.

[Kanastrous]

My office mate played it obsessively for three days, then abandoned it. Draw your own conclusions.

[Chardok]

Wow.

:shocked:

That was....amazing. So no Spore....wao.

[Alferd Packer]

Eh, I wouldn't buy it. I personally like it and still play it from time to time, but I can honestly say it's more likely than not not worth the money. It was for me, since I've spent enough time entertained by it to justify its purchase, but I acknowledge that there are many people who'll get sick of it in an hour or less.

[Stark]

Yeah, it's balls. The first level is fine and it's all downhill from there, the content creation is pure window-dressing and the later stages are so boring and easy it's hardly worth playing at all. Cov covered pretty much everything, but holy shit the lack of a fire control system in space mode is bizarre.

[Serafina]

The designers are nice.
Creating creatures/vehicles/buildings/starships IS a lot of fun.

But beyond that, there is no real "gameplay" - and by that i mean a lack of story, challenge or original content.

The game also suffers from a massive degration as you advance through the stages - the "spore" andd "creature" phase are a lot of fun and are actually original.
But the "tribal" and "society" phase are utterly crappy - basically very, very bad RTS.
The "space" phase is fun again, but only because its a wide, open sandbox and you can employ biological warfare and WMDs (enlarging creatures to monstrous size to level enemy cities and heating/freezing/flooding/dyring a planet).

While Sims 2 acutally had nice challenges and the possiblity of TONS of self-imposed challenges, Spore offers no such thing.

[Stark]

The 'creature' phase is NOT original. It's MMO graphics with simplistic MMO combat with really basic 'missions'.

The space phase is... well... it's awful.

[Covenant]

Really, the game could be a totally huge awesome fun-fest if they had made a few different decisions. Actually modelling a very simple ecology would have been nice. Make a planet have 9 animal species total, assigned by niches, and you fill one of those niches and develop intelligence. Instead of going to tribal phase right then, let you play around some and build your little cities in Creature-level size--trade in your claws for graspers, evolve your brain to develop tools, etc. Never remove my options, or kick me out of my creature--just give me extra levels of abstraction I can choose to view. Then let my space phase be more sandbox, less tedium. I've made it to space--let me encounter an open galaxy of primitive worlds, waiting for me to fly over and start modifying the basic chemistry. That would be glorious.

Basically, each element of the game is un-fun on it's own, and blocked off from each other, the whole is bland and boring. If you can play it, do so, and enjoy a run through. But try to avoid buying it unless you've got plenty of cash. It's not uninteresting, it's just not much of a game.

[Chardok]

wonder what interstealler adventures expansion is brining

[PeZook]

Adventures?

You can:

1) Plop down colonies. Which requires money, which in turn means lots of shuttling back and forth between planets.

2) Modify the environment. Takes a long time, isn't fun at all.

3) Plop down plant and animal species. Doesn't matter which ones (AT ALL) as long as you get a small plant, a large plant, two herbivores and a carnivore species. You can't, say, introduce unbalanced killing machines to ruin enemy ecosystems. If all niches are filled, they will die when you put them on the planet.

4) Go to war. Yeah, Cov already covered the "no fun" aspect of this one

5) Create your own creatures. Did you know this is one of the most expensive functions of your UFO? Yeah, be prepared to pay a shitload of money for the chance to make new creatures in Space! I had no idea what they were on when they made this decision.

[Singular Intellect]

What seriously pissed me off with Spore is the enormous micro management system in place. If anything goes wrong with one of your planets, you're the only one who can fix it, despite dozens of your ships flying around in the background. If you want a standard colony configuration for colonizing planets, you'll be bored to death needing to set up every single one manually.

But worst of all, my initial dream for the capablity to create fleets of ships and actually conquer the galaxy were cruelly smashed when I found out you only control one ship, ever.

I was elated when I bought Spore and first played it. After about a week of stretched out play, I lost interest.