everyday gamer

I’m not sure yet!  I sure do wish I had a beta code though.

I suppose it’s very telling that my series of Spore entries have been spaced out as such.  I haven’t been writing about Spore because I haven’t really been interested in playing it as of late.  To be frank, I agree with Chris Kohler’s assessment that it’s a little boring.  That’s not to say that Spore is a bad game.  It very much isn’t.  But in that vein, I know exactly who the intended audience of the game is: the same mainstream audience that has snatched up Wii Fit and Wii Play by the truckloads.  The same audience that enjoyed The Sims and would enjoy playing with their customized creatures in the simplified game archetypes.  Even then, there’s nothing wrong with that as more gamers playing games is still a good thing overall.  It’s just not my cup of tea.

It’s interesting to find that the complexity that was so absent in the first four phases of Spore is almost overbearingly present in the final phase of the game.  In a sense, the preceding evolutionary phases act as a tutorial for the Space phase.  The main problem comes from the fact that whereas the other phases were simply the previous phase with a twist, the space phase seems to be a total disco inferno.  There is a hell of a lot going on in this phase, whether it be meeting aliens, defending against space pirates, establishing trade routes, abducting wildlife, terraforming planets, etc., some of which could happen concurrently.  This is a good thing for players who can deal with the more developed sense of micromanagement.  However, I just don’t see the mainstream finishing out the phase – as I mentioned before, Spore might be too smart for many of us.  They’re more likely to open up the Creature Creator and start a new campaign.

To me, the ability to create and share content via the Creature Creator is where the strength of the game lies.  When EA produces an expansion for Spore (99.9999% chance they will), a natural extension of this might be to extend their powerful tool by introducing a framework for user-created scenarios a la LittleBigPlanet, which would go miles as far as keeping the players interested in Spore.  Wishful thinking, though.

The end of the Creature phase signals the beginning of the Tribal Phase and the finalized look of the creatures used as avatars for subsequent Spore sections. The creature phase is used to demonstrate the beginnings of animal pack mentality such as hunting and socializing.  In actual execution, the phase is very similar to a single player MMO.

The Tribal phase begins with a cute cinematic of the creature gaining sentience and raising a stick in triumph, signifying the inclusion of culture into the history of the creatures’ evolution.  Spore takes what was built in the previous phase and meshes it with a rudimentary Real Time Strategy (RTS) game. The strict adherence to simplicity present in previous phases is present in this iteration as well: The end goal is to establish the creature as the dominant species on the planet by via declaring war, entertaining other tribes, or a mixture of both.  The tasks are facilitated again by the creature creator, this time with the addition of wardrobe with each article of clothing giving a bonus to gathering, combat, social skills, or a combination of any two.  Ultimately, that simplicity limited the development of the phase and it again felt like a glorified tutorial as I quickly played my maracas, flutes, and digideroos to global dominance and the Civilization phase.

I’m going to assume that Spore’s fourth phase mimics Civilization, despite never having played a single Civilization game in the series.  In that regard, I very much looked forward to the new phase of the game only to find that my past game decisions as a friendly, herb-devouring, socially adept but retarded-looking antlered bird creature put my civilization on the path of religious zealotism  (Yeah… I don’t really see the connection).  The goal of the game this time was to extend the influence of my nation throughout the planet, beginning with my freshly thrown together mess of a car equipped with French horns, organ pipes, and a Zen gong exerting its religious hegemony on a nearby spice mine.  This was followed by yet another session of begrudgingly throwing together random objects in the creature creator to create buildings for my city.  Yes, I said begrudgingly – designing so many creatures, vehicles, and buildings was extremely tiring and overwhelming for me at this stage of the game and I really wanted to move on as quickly as possible.

The actual meat of the Civilization phase consisted very simply of me building as many faithmobiles as possible and rushing my neighbors in early RTS fashion.  My weapons of choice however weren’t explosives and bombs but rather words and faith delivered via a singing holographic projection of my creature.  There’s a bit of suspension of disbelief at work here as the cartoony visual of bombs vs. psalm didn’t really do it for me, but the holographic of my bird creature was a laugh-out-loud moment.  In any case, the cycle of building vehicles and taking over cities continued a few more times until I was presented with a cutscene indicating that I now had access to flight technology and was presented with another creator!  Ok, seriously now.  Despite my clear irritation, it was at this point that the game took an almost inexplicable turn into the realm of non-casual gaming: the introduction of flight into my game for whatever reason multiplied the difficulty of the game many times over and the other large empire on my planet was soon at my doorstep dropping bombs on my city with its swarm of not-so-friendly airplanes.  Ugh.

My solution to this problem was rather unorthodox:  After 3-4 failed attempts to fight the aggressors off, I opted to try establishing a trade route.  “Ok, they’re not attacking me.  Now we’re getting somewhere!”  After a set time of commerce, I was given the option of buying out the city I was trading with.  So I did.  And then I received a message from my former enemy asking for an alliance of which I gladly obliged to.  And then the phase ended.

Err..what?  Was it seriously that easy?

The internet was completely ablaze this morning with the rumors of Valve being purchased by Google.  The news was broke by The Inquirer tech news site (not to be mistaken with the Enquirer, mind you) so I was initially skeptical, though I would not be surprised if it were true given Google’s projected path to world domination.  And because STEAM is the model for digital distribution.  Thankfully, Stephen Totilo of MTV Multiplayer Blog posted later in the morning about his conversation that morning with Doug Lombardi, Valve Software’s VP of marketing who indicated that the Inquirer story was two words “complete fabrication.”

One word.  Phew!

Don’t get me wrong, I think Google will get into the gaming industry as a publisher.  But Google and their philosophy of “Do no Evil” seems a bit too evil in this scenario; Valve is a beloved developer.

How beloved?

Thanks to Grady who presciently linked the video to me.

The Cell phase comprises of roughly the first 20 minutes of Spore.  It begins with the design of your single celled organism in the creature creator.  You start off by designating yourself as a carnivore or herbivore and then you get to spend a little bit of time in the Creature Creator although you’re a bit limited in what you can do to your little blob since additional body parts need to be unlocked.  Afterwards your cell is thrust into a very beautiful version of freeform Pacman where the goal is to basically eat as many of the correct colored pellets (green for plant, red for meat) as required to sprout legs and advance to the next stage of evolution while avoiding the predators and essentially “tricking” out your creature with numerous new body parts you’ve attained.  While the actual body parts you can get in this phase don’t really have an effect on the rest of the game, it does serve as good practice in using the Creature Creator and preparation for the Creature phase and other later stages. In that regard, the Cell stage is set up sort of like a tutorial and once you play it through once it becomes trivially easy.

Once you actually get the power to add legs to your organism, the Creature phase begins.  The game archetype at this point shifts from a 2D version of Pacman to a 3D Pacman-meets-World Of Warcraft game where the goal is to become a dominant species in the planet via social (dancing, singing, posing) or not-so-social (uh..eating other species?) means. As reward for being an herbivore in the first phase, I was presented with a rainstorm-creating ability that helped me on the social track a bit more. As you befriend or devour more creatures in this phase, you get additional body parts to utilize in the far more fleshed out Creature creator.  What’s particularly interesting in this phase is that there is nothing stopping you from doing a full on creature redesign. You can even start becoming the opposite diet designation if you so choose.  However, the end goal in this phase remains befriending or devouring the other species.

Once I filled up my DNA bar, my retarded bird-like creature with antlers was headed to the Tribal phase.  Overall, I liked this phase a bit more than the Cell phase because there was a semblance of complexity present.  Which is a bit of a stretch in itself since it’s basically just “kill” or “dance/sing/whatever” on demand.  Final verdict of the creature stage: underwhelmingly fun.

That’s it for now.  Next time: the Tribal and Civilization stages!