Spore: The Evolution of my own Impressions Part III
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.
