everyday gamer

I’ve been teetering the past two days on whether or not to pick up Spore.  To be honest, I’m not precisely sure why: The buzz from the Spore Creature Creator has been phenomenal.  Undoubtedly, the game will be critically acclaimed; it is a Will Wright game after all.  So after milling it over, I placed my preorder for Spore (and LittleBigPlanet) this morning at 10:05 AM and will be playing it in less than a week.

I suppose one of the major contributors to my general Spore lethargy has been the exceptionally large development time.  The game itself might as well be called SimEverything because that’s basically what it is: controlling the physical and social evolution a singular-celled organism through time.  The idea of Spore is so high concept that the long dev time is suitably justified, earning multiple E3 Game of the Shows in the process. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel that Spore‘s long fuse leading to it’s inevitable explosion had sort of become an exercise in patience: we’ve been expecting this game for far too long.

I forsee another problem related to this:  Will Wright is an exceptionally intelligent man.  His enormous cranium might perhaps the most biggest in the industry.  Spore could easily be too intelligent for a lot of us.  Garnett Lee of 1Up yours has listed Spore in his list of overhyped games for 2008.  I halfheartedly agree: Personally, I don’t picture the game to be as big of a break out success as The Sims was.  Spore just does not seem as accessible enough for the fickle and casual market, the same people that catapulted The Sims to it’s place in gaming history.  I hope that I am incorrect in this regard – this game deserves its own spotlight.

Anyone else picking this up?