It's Time for Another Spore Thread. Again.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

True enough, though it really does beg for expansions. Admitedly, they did technically build four games, but each really is only as indepth as a poorly balanced flash game, which folks build in months.

I guess most of the scrapped development revolved around the customization. (Since no matter what you do, everything behaves pretty much exactly the same.)

It's kinda sad when the first and shortest bit feels the most fleshed out. It is really cool to see the bigger critters in the back ground and then run into them.

Creature plays... well, it's basically just "Here's your nest, here're other creatures' nests, dance for them or eat them till they all die." (Extinction usually happens after 3-7 kills... ) At one point my critters decided to migrate to a new nest a fair distance away, of course they wandered right through another nest on the way, so that when I followed them, I died a few times. Which, surprise surprise, sent me back to the old 'abandoned' nest.


Tribe plays basically the same... Only your creature is locked in form. You do get clothing bits that you can attach to them in the same way as evolving them. You either send your tribesmen with musical instruments or weapons, either dancing for them again, or killing them. (Oh, and the other 'tribes' are basically random critters again... so it's just kinda changed perspective from point-n-click to limited RTS. Extinction is caused by wailing on their big hut until it explodes.)

On normal there were 5 other tribes. You can 'domesticate' wild critters, but it doesn't seem to do anything.


Civilization mode FINALLY opens up the full planet map to you. (In the prior modes, you're limited to a coast-line.) you design A tank, boat and plane. Their look doesn't matter because they all act exactly the same. Tanks and boats launch an arching projectile while planes shoot lasers.

You have a couple options. At least I did that I hadn't noticed. Conquer everyone via different means (Religious, Military, and Commerce) or save up 12 or 16k 'sporebucks' and launch an ICBM winning the mode instantly. Cities are static positions, with limited building slots that show up in chain fashion.

Building slots linked to the city hall show up, then slots linked to them. There are only three building types: housing, Vehicle +1, up to I think 30; factory, +450~ SB/m for each linked building, causes 1 unhappiness; entertainment, creates 1 happiness and 1 for each linked housing/city hall, 1 unhappiness if linked to a factory.

Ultimately, if you spam land vehicles, you'll win over the AI if you build enough housing.


Space I haven't toyed around with much yet... but meh.



On the bright side, the creators are fun enough to sink a ridiculous amount of time into. Although, the critter painter needs to have at least a couple of color options unlocked. And I can't get the tribal painter to paint the clothing instead of recoloring the creature...

[Jaepheth]

Can someone tell me about the game's DRM?

Is it a notable pain in the ass? Does it hog resources at all? Does it attempt to connect to the internet on it's own? etc...

It may be the deciding factor between me using my gift certificate to buy Spore or GTA IV for PC.

[Ohma]

As I recall the biggest potential issues (aside from the generic "well I can't tell for sure that that's a legit CD in the drive so nuts to you!" that most DRM has occasionally) are that it will contact SecuROM once a week to make sure you aren't suddenly pirating the game, and you're limited to three installs of one copy (though you're supposed to get those back if you uninstall it...still though...).

[Covenant]

I think the majority of DRM concerns are overstated. Securom is far from the most invasive of the bunch, so it's really easy to take care of if it's causing some issues. It's aggrivating, but it's not the end of the world. The online authentification element is the most dangerous element though, since it requires someone else to validate your physical CD exists or they'll fuck your stuff up. We'll see how that goes, but I haven't seen any problems so far.

Limiting the amount of installs is a stupid aggrivation though. We'll see how well the game does in the resale market, but this is going to seriously hamper it's long-term availability unless they keep printing more copies for a very long time.

As for the need to constantly upgrade your critter, I'm playing on hard, but not because of creature stage, I wanted to play the OTHER modes on hard but I'd gladly play creature on easy. I love E.V.O. but Spore's creature phase is, I have to say, extremely unsatisfying. I actually dislike the creature phase, and that makes me sad, since it was the part I was looking forwards to the most. You're strongly encouraged to play all the stages, from cell to space, but playing through creature phase (and honestly tribal... and come to think of it, civilization...) is a pain in the ass.

Best way to play spore is to play the Cell Stage and then jump right to Space. I was really excited and now I'm just upset. Creature mode shouldn't charge me for simple legs, goddammit. Legs are not great genetic leaps! Charge me for arms and bipedalism! Because I need to constantly kill or charm more creatures over and over again, I'm forced to upgrade my jaws, claws, and so on. So if I liked my creature with the cute widdle bug jaws and I don't want the hellspawn locust jaws, I'm fucked. That or I need to give my dude giant buzzsaws sticking out of his ass so he can slash properly.

The whole creature stage is entirely unnecessary. Instead of creating creatures and testing them against increasingly fine-tuned environments until you angle yourself into intelligence, it's essentially like a version of the creature editor with all the pieces removed, and you need to scour the world to find them before you can play with it. That's not fun! I can think of a million ways to improve that whole section, but as it is the game is just not fun during that section. I'm pretty neurotic about it, I go into fits if I can't justify my creature evolving limbs, or if my graph is going to be all wierd at the end. I actually try to do things like slowly change the color and structure over generations and throw on a fin or a small nub a generation before I evolve limbs on that spot.

And something that's sorely lacking is an actual evolution element. I'd kill to see the game actually take my creature and do a variation on it, increasing certain things, changing parts, etc, to create other species of my same creature, and populate a world that looks unique and strange but all somewhat similar. The random assortment of Spore creatures is a colorful but somewhat stupid selection. It sounds silly but it also breaks my immersion and makes me think about all the way it could be better.

I want to note that the Cell stage does do something very similar to what I'm proposing, by slowly increasing the proportion of Your Cells to Other Cells the more advanced you get. Something like that, with a thing that morph copies of your species to fit Food Chain niches, and I'd be thrilled.

[Ohma]

It doesn't create alternate versions of your creature? Darn, that's rather disappointing, that'd be a fairly easy way to populate people's home planets/show off what's possible with the creature editing tools (slight variation A changes creature B in fairly dramatic ways ect.). That and the non-stacking stats thing seem like very odd design decisions to me.

If you're going to make a sandbox game based around player created content, where each player has their own world/species that's supposed to be unique to them, wouldn't it make sense to not restrict higher game-stat stuff to only specific creature parts, and have some sort of random generator to create offshoots of the players species (from various stages, possibly utilizing parts they get but don't use) to populate their planet? (and therby further individualize it?)

That's just weird. (sort of like a less annoying version of the arbitrarily non-customizable -unless you cheat- stats in the Sims)

[Covenant]

Yeah, and as I said, they do populate the environment with friendly versions of your cell in the cell phase, so making a copy-paste creature with some of the hands, feet, etc swapped... like taking your entire creature, fattening it, coloring it one step towards green, replacing it's jaw with a herbivore one and turning it's arms into legs to create a Large Grazer creature... should not be out of the realm of possibility.

I'm sure they floated the idea at some point, knowing Wright. They even played with the idea of editing your planet's chemistry and such before creating life, but it's a bit sad to see it all go to crap. I'm not sure about the overall game though, I'd like to see what happens if I create life on a world with my spaceship... can I then play from that world's creature stage, using the creatures I made there? I doubt I can, but it'd be interesting to find out.

[PeZook]

A few observations. I reached the Space Phase yesterday...

1) The game is kinda addictive (to me, anyways), but then again - I liked The Sims. My wife loves it and spends 90% of her time in the creators fiddling with her cute widdle cwitures. It actually plays a lot like The Sims, which weren't really a game as well: The Sims were about gathering resources for your Sim, furnishing his home and doing wacky shit, Spore is about customizing your creature and civilization and then hunting for UFO achievements. If you hated the Sims, you will hate Spore.

2) Despite the above, Space Phase sucks and is horribly tedious. I may be doing something wrong, though, so I'll reserve judgement untill the next day of play. So far, however, I can't seem to win a war with an alien civ: they attack my homeworld every five minutes with a fleet of ships, and if I try to counterattack, my UFO is out of energy after I'm done blasting through the defending fleet, and I can't raze any cities. One time when I managed to do that, they recolonized the planet immediately...of course, this may be because I barely upgraded my UFO with one new weapon so far.

BTW, it's not true you only get one UFO. You earn "badges" and ranks for doing shit, and your starfleet gets bigger and bigger as you do. There's something like 12 ranks, I'm not sure what's the maximum size of your fleet.

3) Space Phase has a lot of random shit to do, but it's not GalCiv. It's The Sims: Galactic Edition. Dicking around with planetary ecosystems is kinda fun, though. I haven't tried ruining enemy environments yet, but I can't wait to make their homeworld a sulphuric hellhole.

4) Civ Phase is the weakest. Tribal Phase actually had much more depth: you have to care about your tribe members, make tool choices, balance offence and defence, etc - it's actually a viable game, kinda.

In civ phase there is practically no aspect of citizen welfare: you get a city and three types of buildings. Build all three, spam defence turrets and you're set.

BTW, cities are locked in type to religious, military and commercial, and they can only build vehicles of their type. So if you're a militant civ, it's World War from the start: since you can only expand with military force, and it makes everybody hate you. You can conquer the world in 20 minutes, BTW, since military units are disproportionately powerful and pwn every other unit type. And, of course, the AI sucks at war.

Also, since resources are ridiculously abundant, you can just wait and press the "I win" (oh, sorry...ICBM attack) button.

[Covenant]

You don't actually have to balance tool choices. I always play on hard and I easily beat Tribal stage just by having everyone take whatever weapon you start with except Fire and just attack anyone who attacks you. Once they squander half their forces they're totally toast. Keep people off you by having your Chief give them gifts. If you start with spears, you're golden, and ideally you have a flying stealthing creature so you can be a total dick to the enemy. If you start with fire, well, I dunno. My guys had slash 5 bite 1 but going unarmed felt almost better than going with fire, but your mileage may vary. Basically though, just pick max weapons and go. If you lose half your forces, retreat, and continually make babies.

I made a new creature and had a lot more fun via cheating to give myself enough DNA to start off with to have a six-legged creature. It's not like it gives any advantage to have multiple duplicate legs, so I don't see why it penalizes you for it. Made the game a lot more fun.

The key to winning space phase is to avoid pissing off your neighbors as long as possible, and focus all your efforts on colonization. You're usually given a mix of friendly traders and antagonistic warmongers with the occasional dingbat religious fuck, so what you obviously want to do is make as much money as you can trading with the Commerce=Good crew to buy weapons and stuff from the Xenophobes and continually do missions for the craziest people. If you pay their outrageous tribute demands they generally stay friendly longer, and the more missions you do for them, the friendlier they are. The reason you want to colonize is so you can harvest more types of spice, which allows you to make your rounds and always have a way to make a profit. Money is primarily used for bribes, and only secondarily used for buying items. The thing is, the longer you play--even while un-upgraded and broke--the more stuff you unlock. Unlocking parts gives you a more powerful ship, so eventually you'll have a robust economy, most of which is going to tribute and defenses and stuff, and then you'll unlock the Zorkian Death Beam or something, and just decide it's time to stop paying out.

Overall, missiles are extremely potent weapons, but your second best bet is the autoblaster. Once you unlock the advanced laser though, you'll want to use that, since it stops enemies from running off to heal like they like to do.

[PeZook]

You don't actually have to balance tool choices. I always play on hard and I easily beat Tribal stage just by having everyone take whatever weapon you start with except Fire and just attack anyone who attacks you. Once they squander half their forces they're totally toast. Keep people off you by having your Chief give them gifts. If you start with spears, you're golden, and ideally you have a flying stealthing creature so you can be a total dick to the enemy. If you start with fire, well, I dunno. My guys had slash 5 bite 1 but going unarmed felt almost better than going with fire, but your mileage may vary. Basically though, just pick max weapons and go. If you lose half your forces, retreat, and continually make babies.

Well, I did say i thought it was deepest, not actually very deep

On the space phase, I pretty much figured it out by myself. War becomes a lot less annoying if you have enough money and cards to unlock second tier weapons, and carefully pick your battles. I also figured out a way to capture enemy cities with their defences intact, which helps a bit

It's 3:40 AM here and I just finished eradicating a particularly annoying enemy, and I can say Space Stage has some genuinely badass moments.

I descended on the guy's homeworld with my UFO and comitted genocide by turning his lush green planet into a fiery ball of lava. It made my day to think how his "Hey you pay up or we kill yoo!" folks now suffocated and drowned in hot fiery molten rock

[Covenant]

I'm actually so frustrated by my one game's constant harassment attacks against me that I might make a new civ. I already have two in space phase, but I am sick and tired of all my neighbors constantly demanding tribute of me despite the fact I'm friendly. While I'm slowly winning the war, it's slow and it's montonous. I'd rather that the battles were big and puzzle-tastic instead of difficult-to-do clickfests.

[GuppyShark]

Also, since resources are ridiculously abundant, you can just wait and press the "I win" (oh, sorry...ICBM attack) button.

Concur, I'd be surprised if anyone didn't get the "Finish Civilisation stage in one hour" achievement.

I went religious, and the "I win" button for them is that every city on the planet instantly joins you. I hit it thinking "That can't possibly be right."

There need to at least be build times on units. More than once, my response to an attack was to build ten times the tanks my enemy had, instantly and on the spot. Makes building a strategic reserve or garrison pointless.

However, I did enjoy the stage. Finishing my land opponent off, accepting an alliance with an economic civilisation and then immediately sending my fleet to besiege his enemy felt, well, satisfying.

I get the feeling my enjoyment of this game will be more about creating totally customised races, a la Space Empires.

[PeZook]

Concur, I'd be surprised if anyone didn't get the "Finish Civilisation stage in one hour" achievement.

Commercial win is also ridiculously easy, especially if you exploit the fact that enemy empires don't try to get your spice geysers back.

As long as you seize a shitload of geysers before the first enemy civ appears, you're set. Just pay the enemy off and buy them all out.

I went religious, and the "I win" button for them is that every city on the planet instantly joins you. I hit it thinking "That can't possibly be right."

There need to at least be build times on units. More than once, my response to an attack was to build ten times the tanks my enemy had, instantly and on the spot. Makes building a strategic reserve or garrison pointless.

Build times would be good, yeah. However, the mechanics of civ phase are so fundamentally broken that no quick fix will suffice, I'm afraid.

At the very least, you'd need to have food as a resource, too, some basic tech progression (rather than LOL four cities = airplanes) and build times to make the phase actually challenging.

However, I did enjoy the stage. Finishing my land opponent off, accepting an alliance with an economic civilisation and then immediately sending my fleet to besiege his enemy felt, well, satisfying.

I get the feeling my enjoyment of this game will be more about creating totally customised races, a la Space Empires.

Space Stage would be a lot more enjoyable if it wasn't for the brilliant "Hey we can attack your planetz instantly with fleets, fucker!" mechanic.

I'm not sure if building turrets on your planets actually has any effect unless you get there to fight the invaders and switch to planetary maps.

Also, getting to the center of the galaxy should give you something more than the lame genesis device...

Oh, another gripe: why the hell can't I edit sentient species I abducted with my UFO? They just die if I try. I wanted to resettle some guys from a civ I found, change their skin colors and diet and see which civ would outcompete the other. But not only I can't resettle them (they make little bonfires and die after a while), I can't edit them at all!

So I will have to get the stupid "make contact with 40 civs which will then proceed to endlessly annoy you" badge in order to create a species from the ground up to run my grand dickish experiment. Dammit!

Oh, but I did paint a civilizations moon pink. I literally snickered when running away after that, imagining astronomy professors having heart attacks

[Stark]

Wow you so can abuct dudes, terraform, and you CAN'T drop a bunch of different guys on a planet to see what happens? You can't edit them and see what happens, Darwin Pond-style?

I don't think Wil Wright knows what he's doing.

[PeZook]

Wow you so can abuct dudes, terraform, and you CAN'T drop a bunch of different guys on a planet to see what happens? You can't edit them and see what happens, Darwin Pond-style?

I don't think Wil Wright knows what he's doing.

You can, but only with animals. Though terraforming is rather, um...simple, so I'm not sure if you can do a "edit a cow to he a ruthless carnivore" thing and have it eat all the other species.

Terraforming pretty much goes like that:

1) Alter atmosphere/temperature (it's pretty much + -, so no different kinds of atmospheres possible)

2) Introduce three kinds of plants (small, medium, large)

3) Introduce two species of herbivore

4) Introduce one species of carnivore/omnivore

Then repeat (there are three "levels" of terraforming, with T3 being lush with life andT0 being barren). I pretty much drop random species of plants and animals and the planet works every time. I don't think it's possible to mess up the ecosystem by introducing a superadjusted killing machine which will outbreed all the others and ruin the biosphere.

Which sucks, because that would be an awesome way to destroy enemy planets

[Ohma]

Okay, after getting my hands on a copy (I'm only up to the creature stage so far) one thing that seems a bit odd (again coming from the "this game is more like The Sims: Evolution" angle) is the way parts effect your creature, it really doesn't make sense that multiples of the same part don't stack, it's just weird since it means my birdmonkey dudes who have like, spikes and horns all over get killed in like, two hits from other people's crazy death machine min/maxed dudes.

It also strikes me that a lot of the weird things which don't exist in the game are probably going to be in an expansion pack...which I'm normally okay with in the Sims because most of the time it's not something that really should've been in the base game (save for pets in 2...though I guess I can understand why they didn't get that right of the bat...).

Also, I've had run ins with epic versions of two creatures I've created in the CC which I'd been imagining as epic creatures (The Sharkape and Botanical Horror) and it was AWESOME. Also Stukons (another creature I made in the CC) are apparently huge, and jerks.

[PeZook]

I actually cut myself off from the Spore Server, because I didn't want a bunch of minmaxed deadlykillers infesting my computer

[Covenant]

I'd be happy with the idea that items don't stack if they also can be added for free. If upgrading my guy to have level 3 horns costs 150 bucks and no matter how many I have they won't stack, then I should be able to have as many as I want. What's unfair is that two pair of feet provide no advantage over one if those feet are the same type, but I must pay another 250 dna point just to have a symmetrical arrangement. Same goes with horns and other stuff. Now, eventually I'll have enough DNA--I'm waiting before tribal and I'm sitting on thousands from basically eradicating all other life on Planet, but it's an unfortunate system.

Also, I just can't decide what to make my guys look like. I really wish I could take a fucking species from the CC and import it into my game the way I do with buildings. I want to tweak it elsewhere, goddammit. In the creature stage I can't even edit other creatures, so if I want to see what an Ookguh's spine looks like so I can make something with a similar bodyplan, I'm fucked. Goddammit.

However, some of the small things are nice. Stuff like if you go invisible within range of anything, some scouts will come over--even scouts from nests you're a good distance from. This is not only interesting because most stealth games have an extremely poor modelling of "huh? What was that?" behavior that Spore seemingly casually adds by just having them investigate, but it also bothers then when they notice you reappearing.

[Tolya]

In my personal review of Spore there is only one sentence that is important and that expresses both my opinion and my personal experience with this game.

"No game that gets boring after 3 days can be called a good game".

After all those years of pre-release hype, Spore should give fucking free blowjobs not to be considered disappointing.

The same goes to those lazy bastards at 3D Realms, although Duke Nukem will have to ship with a harem of pornstars to actually raise an eyebrow.

[Stark]

I actually cut myself off from the Spore Server, because I didn't want a bunch of minmaxed deadlykillers infesting my computer

I would like to say that this wasn't at all predictable and that certainly no online persona named 'Stark' made this very prediction months ago. Certainly, nobody had to ask 'Stark' what possible problems player content stream could have created, and why he felt that complex systems for moderating this content would need to be put in place.

Nah.

[Vendetta]

The same goes to those lazy bastards at 3D Realms, although Duke Nukem will have to ship with a harem of pornstars to actually raise an eyebrow.

I'm fully expecting DNF to be about as good as Prey. A diversion for a weekend buy just as quickly forgotten.

[Broomstick]

Best way to play spore is to play the Cell Stage and then jump right to Space. I was really excited and now I'm just upset. Creature mode shouldn't charge me for simple legs, goddammit. Legs are not great genetic leaps! Charge me for arms and bipedalism! Because I need to constantly kill or charm more creatures over and over again, I'm forced to upgrade my jaws, claws, and so on. So if I liked my creature with the cute widdle bug jaws and I don't want the hellspawn locust jaws, I'm fucked. That or I need to give my dude giant buzzsaws sticking out of his ass so he can slash properly.

Before you make the leap to civilization you get one more visit to the creature creator where you can "devolve" your maxed-out killer to a preferred prior look.

A few observations. I reached the Space Phase yesterday...

1) The game is kinda addictive (to me, anyways), but then again - I liked The Sims. My wife loves it and spends 90% of her time in the creators fiddling with her cute widdle cwitures. It actually plays a lot like The Sims, which weren't really a game as well: The Sims were about gathering resources for your Sim, furnishing his home and doing wacky shit, Spore is about customizing your creature and civilization and then hunting for UFO achievements. If you hated the Sims, you will hate Spore.

I think this is an important point - if you like shoot 'em up games, and heavy player-vs-player content you won't like spore. However, there is obviously a niche out there for both those who like "sim" games, and those who like atypical games such as Myst and those types might be more attracted to Spore than, say, heavy-duty Halo or Unreal Tournament players.

I agree - if you hated Sim anything you'll probably hate Spore

2) Despite the above, Space Phase sucks and is horribly tedious. I may be doing something wrong, though, so I'll reserve judgement untill the next day of play. So far, however, I can't seem to win a war with an alien civ: they attack my homeworld every five minutes with a fleet of ships, and if I try to counterattack, my UFO is out of energy after I'm done blasting through the defending fleet, and I can't raze any cities. One time when I managed to do that, they recolonized the planet immediately...of course, this may be because I barely upgraded my UFO with one new weapon so far.

I haven't upgraded my UFO from the initial weapon at all yet still managed to fight off two or three "raid" type incursions against the home planet. I've also made a couple alliances so that's a few empires I won't have to fight off (though I am paying some tribute).

The Space phase changes play significantly in some ways from prior phases and I found it more difficult/frustrating than the others. This is good in the sense that it is challenging (I figured out winning strategies for the other phases pretty quick) but there has to be a balance between boring and impossible.

BTW, it's not true you only get one UFO. You earn "badges" and ranks for doing shit, and your starfleet gets bigger and bigger as you do.

Ya, I just earned my second spaceship. Not sure what I'm supposed to do with it yet, though.

3) Space Phase has a lot of random shit to do, but it's not GalCiv. It's The Sims: Galactic Edition. Dicking around with planetary ecosystems is kinda fun, though. I haven't tried ruining enemy environments yet, but I can't wait to make their homeworld a sulphuric hellhole.

It actually hadn't occurred to me to use terraforming as a weapon... I'll have to try that....

[quote[4) Civ Phase is the weakest. Tribal Phase actually had much more depth: you have to care about your tribe members, make tool choices, balance offence and defence, etc - it's actually a viable game, kinda.

In civ phase there is practically no aspect of citizen welfare: you get a city and three types of buildings. Build all three, spam defence turrets and you're set.

BTW, cities are locked in type to religious, military and commercial, and they can only build vehicles of their type. So if you're a militant civ, it's World War from the start: since you can only expand with military force, and it makes everybody hate you.[/quote]
Not exactly true - if you use your "cultural weapon of choice" to conquer a city that uses a different weapon set you can elect to keep that new set and use it, too. So my "warrior" race of thoroughly unpleasent meat-eating peacocks (yes, frilly pack hunters) conquered a religious nation and then proceeded to use both techniques on the rest of the planet. In addition, early on my warriors formed an alliance with another nation and at the end, when it was just us two, they elected to merge with us rather than having to fight them (and not needing to use either the ICBM or "fanatical uprising" options). So you could have a civilization start out with military weapons then, after conquering their first city, use religion to take over the world and, presumably, vice versa (my religion types just stuck to converting and buying everyone else).

I missed the years of hype about this game, which might account for why I feel no disappointment. I learned about it about two weeks ago, when my Other Half expressed interest in it. It's diverted me from World of Warcraft for a couple days, but not forever. I like a variety of games and don't expect any of them to change the world or make my breath fresher. For those days I don't feel like gank-or-be-ganked I'll enjoy making weird creatures and little huts and tall buildings. Other days, I'll take out my insanely powerful shaman in WoW and kill things with merely my body odor.

Sounds like they over-hyped Spore which is a shame because it is an amusing diversion. I've also noticed that critters my Other Half designed are showing up on my planets, and one of my sentients is part of the wildlife on one of his worlds.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I just bought FFIV on the spur of the moment at GAME whilst shopping today. Has anyone seen the Spore DS game and played it? It looked like just another Pokémon clone in ways, though from what I've heard of the main game itself, I bet you could have a fairly functional full system on the DS.

[Ohma]

I would like to say that this wasn't at all predictable and that certainly no online persona named 'Stark' made this very prediction months ago. Certainly, nobody had to ask 'Stark' what possible problems player content stream could have created, and why he felt that complex systems for moderating this content would need to be put in place.

Nah.

Indeed, though it still goes back to the deal with parts not stacking for some reason (they did in the creature creator, and cell stage, so I'm almost wondering if it was a last minute decision). If they did stack it would be much easier to combat...well, everything (which I guess is its own problem, but as it is, I'm having trouble killing anything more deadly than the weird armless squirrel things on my planet unless I'm just building my creature to be super kill-guy, which is a problem if the game is supposed to be more along the lines of Sim Evolution than whatever the gamerhype wanted it to be).

Oh, nifty thing happened a bit ago, I was migrating to a new nest and a UFO came around and started abducting other creatures, it was kinda' cool.

[Stark]

Yeah, but even if they stacked, there would still be the 'best creature' for a given amount of resources, and importing 50 copies of it from the world was always going to make the game increasingly lame and make it much harder to tool around with 'wierd' creatures that aren't as good as the 'perfect' ones. There needed to be a vetting stage involved, or filters on downloads, or some process put in place.

There's a mobile phone Spore game too; on iPhone it looks pretty strange. It apparently has the creature editor too, but it's like $13 so pffft.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Well, if anyone can polish a turd and get it sold who doesn't have a name that starts with Will and ends with Wright, then it's Steve-o.