a bad review

[MarkG]

copying from one of the reviews on amazon

The biggest problem with this game is how limited it is compared to what it could be and what I think we were led to believe it would be.

Think about how varied animals are in real life, how many different environments they are adapted to live in, how different they are, their size, their biology, their behaviour, their diet, etc.

Now look at Spore. There is precisely one environment your creature can live in at a given stage, and that's the water in cell stage and the temperate land every other stage. There are precisely 3 diets - any vegetation, any meat or both. Customisation is limited to selecting body parts that will allow a few different attack moves, a few different socialisation moves and a few abilities which don't really matter very much. You can create an animal without arms or legs but the fact the game only provides a single environment which isn't well suited to it and the game also seems to have its idea of what the "correct" path for evolution is it's pretty pointless to do so.

Where are the animals which live in the sea, where are the animals that live underground and in caves, where are the birds (you can glide a short distance, but you're still essentially a land animal), where are the parasites, where are the differences in cold blooded versus hot blooded animals, where is the VARIATION? Creatures can be made to look different but they are basically all the same with a few inconsequential differences.

The second main problem I have is there's really no evolution by natural selection at all in this game sadly. What features a creature has is not affected in any way by what came before, you can completely remove all features and completely reshape your creature in one fell swoop. The one tiny nod to evolution is the way your creature has behaved at a stage can give it one of three sets of abilities when it moves onto the next stage, but this has nothing to do with its physical characteristics. It's a shame really since this could have educated children somewhat on how evolution works and in this incarnation it does the exact opposite.

so does this have any merit?

[pg]

yes, it's basically all true

[Dale]

Yes, very much so. It is sold as a very adaptive game, but in reality it is sadly fairly linear.

Creature abilities from bits are not adative, so there's no incentive to give your creature lots of striking arms at the expense of other attributes. You place one bit with a high ability and that's all you need.

The strength of the ability is not even related to the size of the bit either. You can have a teeny-weeny spike, but still gain the full effect from it.

As for environments, yes, you are strictly kept to a minimum of environments. I was silently hoping for birds, fish, amphibions, even animals living in hostile planets such as poison gas planets (and the fun of dropping oxygen breathing animals onto a nitrogen planet ). Sadly there is none of this.

I do fear however, that all of this is going to cost us in $40 chunks over the next two years.

[MMC]

Yes and no.

Granted there is a limited scope for choice in what your creations do, and where they can live. I have mentioned elsewhere that it would be nice to have a civilisation of underwater creatures, who build a spaceship full of water, etc.

And granted there is a limited scope for education, but the same argument could be made of Civ - The Romans didn't really invent buddhism in 2000BC, for example.

Now to answer those concerns:

The simplest answer for the first problem is that there is a lot of scope left open for expansion packs. Look at how the Sims gets expanded with different themed items. Spore could easily get expansions that allow you to create underwater civs, space-dwelling lifeforms with no need for spaceships, anything really.

Basically whilst this game took aorund 4 years to make, they spent most of the first 3 and a half years just fiddling with the tech and seeing what could or couldn't be done with it. Then they rushed a very basic, very easy to grasp game out of the door. It's a great game, but it's gonna rely heavily on expansions in the long term.

As for the second problem... Like I said, it's a game. Be careful not to get too caught up in whether or not it's realistic. If a teacher were to use the game as a tool to teach, they could very easily use it to show the theory of evolution, by only tweaking their creature and never changing more than a tiny piece each time. It is simply a tool that can be used in many ways. The fact that Uses B and C also exist doesn't mean it's any less good at Use A. Again, Civ can be used to teach history, or it can be used to completely ignore and rewrite history. What's the difference here with Spore?

Spore can be used to equally teach both evolution and intelligent design. It's simply a case of how you use it.

[FrostyBoy]

Unfortunately for me, and I assume many others, "expansion packs" is an insult. I am more inclined to stop playing the game entirely, than to add-on what I feel should have been there from the beginning.

If the expansion pack includes everything that has been mentioned above, then it might be worth it, but if it's "Spore: Underwater World!". and the next one: "Spore: Death Battle!" and so on, then they can go **** themselves, and I think we should make sure they get that message loud and clear before it's too late.

[MarkG]

thanks for the responses. it will be a while until i get spore, i need to upgrade to leopard first...

[FrostyBoy]

Leopard?

I thought people stopped buying Apple?

[MarkG]

Originally posted by FrostyBoy
I thought people stopped buying Apple?

obviously you're misinformed


here's another review

The gameplay is SO boring and dumbed down that it appears to be aimed at five-year-olds.

Most of the much-ballyhooed editors actually do nothing at all. That's right, they have no effect on gameplay WHATSOEVER. You can spend ten hours in the building editor, making models for EA (that's right, they own all your creations) but these models will have no effect at all on your in-game stats.

Spore is essentially a collection of five separate minigames, all of which are dumbed down to the level of 5-minute Flash games with glitzy graphics. There is little or no integration between the various minigames. That means that what you do in Cell stage has very little real impact even in Creature stage, aside from what mouth you choose. Do you want to eat meat only, plants only, or everything? OK, so you spent 15 minutes choosing your mouth.

Then we get to Creature stage, where the awful realization of the terrible debacle that is Spore begins to hit. See, Cell stage is much too short, too simple, and with too few choices, but it's not until you reach Creature Stage that you begin to understand how completely EA dropped the ball here.

But in Creature stage, it becomes apparent very quickly that what you do in the editor has very little effect on gameplay. If you get an eye, or a nose, it does nothing. Creature form does nothing, other than the creature having to face its prey with a mouth to bite. I understand that creature height allows herbivores to eat from taller trees. Big deal.

There is no physics engine. It doesn't really matter how many legs or arms your creature has. It doesn't matter if you have eyes on its rear end. Creature stage fighting is mindless MMORP-style buttonmashing with no point to it. Go to a new nest. Eat. Mate. Put some new parts on your paper doll.

And that's the main problem. Those new parts, most of them, don't actually DO anything. A few of them do different things but they don't do them within the context of a physics model, they do what they do as simple numbers: 5 speed, 3 bite.

Big deal.

Then we get to Tribal stage, which is a well-made little RTS game that will last you all of 5 minutes. It's so easy on Hard (and the others of the first 4 stages are as well) that it takes about 20 minutes to beat. And it's the same every time, so there is zero replay value. That's true of the other stages as well, by the way: there are so few choices-- and the small number of choices has been cunningly obscured by the complexity seeming to be available in the editors but in fact missing-- that there are really only a couple of ways to play each stage. There really aren't any glaring problems with Tribal, it's just far, FAR too simple. It doesn't even have the redeeming value of multiplayer. It would still be much too simple in multiplayer, however.

Age of Empires this is not. Age of Empires came out in 1998.

Then we get to Civ. Civ is the worst of the five stages, and is so dumbed down as to be insultingly pathetic. You have one type of each of three kinds of vehicle available, land sea and air. You can design the vehicles but there is again very little gameplay impact from your choices. You win by assimilating the other cities somehow. You do this by either buying them, by shooting them with bullets, or by shooting them with bullets of religion. There are three types of buildings that you can place, and there's a simplistic web of relationships that connects them. I am making this sound very much more complicated than it actually is.

Then, there is the building editor. The building editor DOESN'T DO ANYTHING. IT HAS NO IMPACT WHATSOEVER ON GAMEPLAY.

Now we come to space stage. Space stage is the widest of the five stages, and the most plagued with grievously horrible gameplay decisions.

Again, it's oversimplified. It looks like it's complex but it's really not. There is an ecological model for planets, but it is so simplified as to be not worth even bothering with. It's not even on the level of a five-minute Flash game. The cities from Civ are back, but they don't actually do anything at all this time except harvest spice. They don't even seem to defend themselves, even if you buy turrets.

See, you're expected to defend your entire empire against alien attacks and against internal ecological problems (random events, in other words, that require that you go to the planet and kill some diseased animals with a laser) WITH ONE SHIP.

Consider that against the backdrop of the vast galaxy. You have one ship. You get more ships to fly with you but the other ships in the fleet are similar to the Options in Gradius. They fly around with you and attack what you attack. That's all.

This is a game that tries to be Master of Orion, but only gives you one ship to maintain an entire empire and protect it against attack.

SO, to wrap it up, Spore is a bunch of hacked-together, overdone, simplistic minigames, with hackneyed gameplay, which are not integrated together at all. It is not fun even for the first play through. If it were only oversimplified, that would be reason enough to avoid it like the plague. If if only had invasive DRM, that would be reason enough.

But the gameplay in this title is just horrid. Horridly bad, on the level of bargain bin children's titles from dev houses in eastern Europe.

i'm not troubled of the "easy minigames" thing. but having no consequences no matter what you do in the editor kind of sucks...

[Dale]

I think that last one is a bit extreme, more along the lines of someone hyped to the extreme by the marketing and being totally disenchanted by the game because they expected the universe, and got Spore.

Markos it IS a good game, just don't expect it to model the universe okay?

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Dale
Markos it IS a good game, just don't expect it to model the universe okay?

well... ok...


still, if your creature doesnt have eyes, does it still see?

[Dale]

Not really. You get a very reduced radius of sight.

I haven't tried it but someone on the EA forums did.

[MarkG]

so no batman?

[FrostyBoy]

I tried it in Cell, you can only see a very small circle radius around you, quite difficult to play because you will end up swimming into bigger fish than yourself more often.

I have only touched Cell and Creature Stage, but I am getting the feeling Cell stage is the best of the lot simply because of the cause and effect implemented into it.

[Patroklos]

Spore

Sadly, the second review is spot on. I am enjoying the game but then with only about five hours play time that isn't saying much. I see ZERO relpay value in this as it stands.

[Bkeela]

I'm not even going to bother wasting bandwidth on this turkey.