The Atheist Blogger

I know a few of you wanted to know what I thought about the new game “Spore” which I have been playing rather than writing blog entries this week. I rate the game 4/5 because it is great fun to play, and highly addictive. It fails miserably on several minor levels, which all combined count towards the 1 missing point that would have made it perfect.

DRM

EA have for some reason decided to put DRM on the game, which includes installing a copy protection product called “SecuROM”, which must be registered over the internet upon installation and whenever you start the game. I’m against DRM on the whole, but I understand why software companies (especially gaming) see the need to use it. To make money with these sorts of games you need to make sure that most people will buy it. We can all dream of the wonderful time when everything is open source, but it is safe to say that this will not happen to the gaming industry any time soon. DRM is a poor solution but currently the best solution for big companies (in their eyes).

The DRM that comes with Spore also means you can only install it 3 times before it is locked out, at which point you have to phone up EA and ask for a release code. This doesn’t affect me much at all for the simple reason that I never use Windows for anything other than gaming, so it remains idle in a 100GB partition for 99% of the time. I doubt I’ll install the game more than once anyway, but if I run out of installs, I can simply phone up EA for a release code. I’m sure by that time there will be cracks for it out anyway.

I should point out that the DRM in no way inhibits the gameplay, nor was it a choice of the developers. I find continually rating the game down on Amazon.com to be incredibly immature of people, especially since they did not even buy the game. Amazon are not the people who you should complain to, they did a fantastic job of delivering it on the day it came out. EA are the people you should send letters to, but make sure they address the DRM not the game. The game is great, the DRM is bad.

Cell Phase

The Cell phase is where you start off, after a meteor seeded your planet with life. You are given a random cell, complete with a mouth, eyes, and a flagellum. Your aim is to explore a 2D “tide pool”, eating either plants or other cells depending on whether you are a herbivore or carnivore respectively. This part of the game was done perfectly, and every so often you get to improve your cell by adding parts you collect along your way. I have one complaint, and that is it was way too short. I see all these great creatures floating past me, extraordinarily complex, but I can never be as complex as they are. After only 3 “evolutions” you have pretty much completed the level, and you are asked to evolve legs. Admittedly you can refuse and simply keep playing the cell phase, but you cannot gain anymore DNA points (which you need to evolve new parts).

Creature Phase

Once you evolve legs you run out onto land. I was disappointed that they decided to scrap the idea of an underwater environment, because that would follow the natural progression of species on Earth. I would have preferred to be a fish for a while, but I can understand that it could have caused problems further down the line if you kept refusing to grow legs. Once out of the water, you live in a small pack of your kind. You can either hunt or befriend other species, and your choices on that matter dictate what type of society you end up further on. You continue to evolve, and you can do this a lot of times, constantly hunting for new parts and upgrading your creature. I think I spent most of the time playing the Creature Phase, simply because it is massive and a lot of fun.

The thing that I think is absolutely unforgivable of the Spore devs to do was to remove every single form of procedural generating out of the game. When the initial spore videos came out 2-3 years ago, the procedural generation was one of the best things about the game. The fact that the way your positioned the legs on your creature dictated how fast it ran, or how it fought, was genius. The bit in the game where Will Wright (head developer) shows how to combine two actions (eating and running) to create a “drag” action was equally fascinating. Sadly, it never made it to the final game. You can only do one action at a time, and your speed and other attributes are dictated by what parts you use, not where you position them. Again, I understand how this could possibly have gone wrong further down the line, but to see a one-legged hopping creature outrunning my four-legged beast simply because my feet were weaker was heartbreaking.

Tribal Phase

One thing that should be noted about this phase is that it marks the end of the evolutionary path, in terms of biological evolution. The first two phases supposedly take place over several billion years, and the tribal phase and thereafter take place over a period of several hundred or thousand years. Essentially, it is the beginning of social evolution. This is kind of disappointing, and it would have been great to evolve your creature further when you were in tribal or even space phase.

Tribal phase is a pathetic attempt at getting you into the next phase. It is quite honestly my least favourite phase because it is way too easy, and you don’t really do anything. You are now in charge of a tribe of your creatures, and you must explore a tiny map, destroying or allying other tribes. You do this by collecting food, which involves selecting your tribe, and hunting an individual animal, then getting them to bring back the meat to your camp. You have to do this every time. I got fed up and discovered that if you simply told a few of your tribesmen to go fish, they would do so for the rest of eternity, providing me with an endless supply of food. I was the able to build up a fighting force, and conquer the entire continent.

In my opinion, this mode should have either been scrapped of made more interesting by having more buildings that do different things.

Civilization Phase

This phase is more like command and conquer than anything. It is a strategy game in almost everything you do. Your city plan consists of houses, entertainment, and factories, all of which you have to create yourself which is great fun although a tad repetitive. Luckily you can choose from the array of thousands of user-submitted content buildings which are brilliant. You must position houses next to entertainment to keep your people happy, but also next to factories to increase your income. If a factory is next to an entertainment building, your happiness goes down a lot, so the first part of game involves a lot of rearranging to get the best happiness along with the best income.

Once you start building cars and boats (also user-designed) you can start exploring the map, capturing spice mines (the currency of the phase), and eventually conquering other cities. Depending on how you have played the game so far, you will either be economic, military, or religious. You can then conquer cities by either buying them out, destroying them, or converting them. You also get access to some super weapons that allow you to conquer your enemies faster, and when you have them all, you get to build a ufo.

Space Phase

The space phase is aimed to be completely open ended, and it really is. There are supposedly over 100,000 star systems to explore, each with an average of 3 planets in them. What you do from this point is really entirely up to you. You can expand your empire by creating new bases on other worlds, make allies and trade routes, or just annihilate everyone you see. If you meet a religious empire and you are not one, they will continually demand “unbeliever tax” from you, which I found incredibly ironic since I had evolved a species known as “Richard Dawkins” on a planet called “Atheisphere”. Suffice to say, mine were a warmongering race, and I destroying the religious fanatics easily.

Given that this is the largest part of the game, there are quite a few faults, although they are really just annoyances so I will list them briefly:

1. Pirates. They attack your planets and rob you of your spice, which is useful for trading. They do this every 10 minutes or so if you are lucky.
2. The Grox. They are an unknown “species” of mechanoid that hate everything and go around destroying it. They attack once every 10-15 minutes and unlike the pirates will actually destroy buildings. Your only hope is to travel very quickly to whatever colony they are attacking, and defend it. The only good thing about them is they tend to up and leave with their entire fleet (usually several dozen ships) after you destroy one or two of them.
3. Ecological disasters. If a certain species catches a cold on a planet they need to be eliminated because apparently the planet cannot survive otherwise.
4. Missions. The missions are never-ending because they all follow the same general idea, just with different planets, species, and objects. It is a never-ending line of “go fetch this”, “go destroy these turrets”, “go collect every single type of plant/animal on planet X”, and occasionally “We don’t deal with unbelievers, go away”.

The problem with fault #2 and #3 is that they do not just happen to you. Every so often one of your allies will call for help and you will need to go assist them. You don’t get any reward, and none of the allies seem to have ships available to help you, so you are left a bit miffed because (a) you did all the work, and (b) these allies had vast empires of planets long before you had even reached tribal stage, yet you have somehow singlehandedly managed to create a spaceship that could easily wipe them all out.

As you increase up the ranks by continually collecting an intelligent species off planet Dazuradon because the Spleks of Suridane want to poke it for fun, you get to upgrade your ship. This involves better guns, better range, better power, better health, pretty much everything you would need for a spaceship. With it, you can explore the galaxy more and more, until you are urgently called back to your home planet to stop the blasted pirates again.

So why do I love space phase so much? Well, one thing stands out, shining brightly, casting all the faults into an epic shadow of doom. Terraforming.

Terraforming

If there was one area that Will Wright scored majorly on, if not the whole creature creator, then it would have to be the terraforming. Once you unlock the tools to do it (which I admit takes some time) then you can go about the galaxy, shaping planets, adding or subtracting atmosphere, heating them up or cooling them down, colouring the sky, land, and sea, and many other wonderful things. If at the end of it you have totally wrecked the planet visually, just destroy it!

If however, you have created a paradise, you must act quickly and balance the ecosystem by planting specific sizes of vegetation, then some herbivores, and finally the omnivores or carnivores. If you don’t do this, your lovely terraformed planet will slowly fall back to it’s original condition.

The more you terraform, the more cities you can build, and the more buildings you can buy for those cities. Once your civilisation is settled, the planet is added to your empire, and begins harvesting spice which it gives to you on each visit.

Of course, if you don’t want to bother about with terraforming, simply find a “claimed” world with a high terrascore and attack them, taking over their cities in the process. Of course, such an act of war will get you plenty of retaliation, so you might have to destory their entire race shortly afterwards.

Fun

Yes, there are plenty of things to complain about Spore, but there are in many such games. I think it was a mistake of Will Wright to show so many demos of the game before release, especially since stuff was taken out. It almost makes me feel cheated, but the low cost of the game (thanks Amazon!) is enough to make me forget it. I also think Will Wright should rethink his business model ever so slightly. His recent defense of the game, in which he stated they would rather have high sales than a high rating^[1], has been interpreted by many as a “quantity over quality” approach. When you make a game for 8 years, you cannot expect people to buy into an excuse like that.

The great thing about the game is it is lots and lots and lots of fun. This is the saving point of this review, and why I gave it 4 out of 5 stars rather than 3 or 2. Was it dispointing? Yes. Was it challenging? Slightly. Was it a great video game? HELL YES.

So Will, if you read this (I’m sure you won’t but my sentiments are echoed all across the internet), please release Spore 2 within the next 2 years. It should be an easy task for you, since nobody is looking for you to change the basic game. Just add more stuff to the creature creator, put back the procedural generating, and tweak all those wonderful settings to stop gamers from tearing their hair out when the pirates attack for the 1000th time.

If you can do all this, Spore 2 will be on track for a place as one of the greatest games of all time, a spot anticipated but sadly missed in your first attempt.