I’ve played as an aggressive, warlike species and as a peaceful, spiritual one. I’ve played all five stages, from amoeba to space, twice. It’s easy to get completely lost in the game. Jamie’s crocodile creatures in their natural habitatĪnd that’s really the thing about Spore. I can see myself sitting down to play for fifteen minutes before bed…and then staying up all night instead.” Did she enjoy it? “It’s a lot of fun,” she said, “the creatures are very cute. Was it hard to learn? Mom didn’t bring her reading glasses, so I summarized the already brief tutorials at the beginning of each level, but she had no trouble customizing her creatures or controlling their movement. Two hours later, my dad was tugging at her elbow, and she was fully immersed in creature phase, murmuring, “Okay, we’ll go just as soon as I finish…” When we finally did pry her away from the keyboard, I asked her opinion. When Mom sat down to try Spore, she insisted that she only had half an hour to play. I wanted to know if someone with interest in games but no experience with real-time strategy, resource-management, or role-playing games would be able to navigate effectively. So I figured she was the perfect guinea pig for Spore, with its complex backbone and very accessible interface. She enjoys puzzle and arcade-style games, and completed all 172 levels of Super Granny 2: Granny in Paradise. Mom, like a lot of women over 35, is an enthusiastic but decidedly casual gamer. As I played, I felt like my fourth-grade teacher: I wanted to pat Spore on its sweet little head and say, “You’re so smart, but you don’t apply yourself.” “Typically excellent graphics, clever animations, and that classic self-referential humor for which Maxis is so well-known” would have featured prominently in my concluding paragraph. “A brilliant extension of the franchise,” I should have cooed. By the time you get to space, which is essentially a quest-based RPG with an enormous map, there is no intrinsic difference between a friendly creature and an aggressive one.Īs a woman who never met a Maxis game I didn’t like (until SimCity Societies), it seemed as though I could almost have written my review before my review copy arrived. Except for terminology, there is little difference between converting the populace of a neighboring city to your religion, establishing overwhelming economic supremacy, or burning it to the ground, so it is at this point that the choices you made in the previous three stages begin to feel irrelevant. The next phase, civilization, has a bit more sophistication and more of a resource-management component, but it is at its core an extension of the tribal phase. Again, you choose between forging alliances or burning and pillaging other villages, and for all practical purposes, this stage feels like a minimalistic real-time strategy game. This is where your creature’s physical form and abilities mainly take shape, and it plays rather like a simplified version of The Sims, with up to eight social interactions available, based on your creature’s physical attributes.Īfter creature phase comes tribal phase, in which your creature gains sentience and establishes a community. When you’ve consumed enough other bacteria (and thus gathered enough DNA), you can evolve legs and enter the creature phase, where you play an individual member of your species, and either befriend or destroy other species. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past two years, Spore‘s gameplay can be summarized thus: you start as an amoeba, swimming around a freeform, two-dimensional, arcade-style world, consuming meat, plants, or both, as you prefer. After playing the game for a week and finding it both thoroughly enjoyable and ultimately disappointing, one question still lingers in my mind: Who is Spore‘s target audience? Some reviewers have nearly exhausted themselves patting Will Wright on the back for his latest (and perhaps most ambitious) undertaking, while others have criticized him for not taking his innovations further. Spore has been out for a bit more than a week now, and the reviews have been mixed.
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