everyday gamer

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!