What’s going on with Spore? For something like the last four years, it’s been touted as the greatest thing ever programmed for a home computer, such complex and deep gameplay that it would be like creating entire worlds in your living room.
And…I’ve heard pretty much nothing since release. There was a quick buzz with the Spore Creature Creator or whatever that splinter of functionality was called, but other than that, the news has been flat.
So, what’s going on with Spore?
Depends on who you ask. Either it is a charming lightweight game or it’s a massive disappointment where five mini games welded into one poorly constructed game.
Either way it’s not a revolutionary game and there’s not much to discuss about it unless you’re really into the creators and like to make different objects/creatures. Hardly something that will cause a mainstream buzz.
It, well, didn’t quite live up to the hype.
Nothing could. Sometimes it seemed like it was going to The Game to End All Games. While it is innovative in some areas (sharing content, creature & building creation), the rest of it just doesn’t have enough weight. You could call it shallow; you could call it light-weight. After you play through a few times, there’s not much left to do. Sims 2 is more of a sandbox. Spore is a decent little game in its own way, but it could not withstand the expectations that bore down upon it.
Regardless of the content the draconian DRM killed it dead in my view, just take a look at the Amazon reviews.
It’s Will Wright channeling Peter Molyneux. It’s ok but not great, and it’s nowhere near what it was hyped up to be.
What they said, and I’ll just add that it’s too damn easy. Especially if you go the carnivore/warmonger route.
Heh. My thoughts exactly.
Spore is a game I play whilst watching a DVD or something, where I get to play God (albeit a very limited one) and direct my own brand of Theistic Evolution in one corner of my screen whilst I watch John Cleese do hitler impressions in front of German hotel guests in the other.
The other two corners are for porn, obviously.
Also, it’s obvious Will Wright was aiming for a really young audience, and the games media never bothered to mention that, as it would be counterproductive to the hype they have to churn out to put food on the table. If you were, say, a second-grader when it was released, it would likely have met, if not wildly exceeded your expectations. This isn’t an slight against the effort that went into making that game, just saying that the sort of things kids like are the same things that bore older folk to tears.
That’s what happened with me. I was interested in at least trying it; then found out about the DRM and crossed it off my list of things to try.
Mark me down as another who hasn’t even tried it due to the DRM, but I think the DRM crowd are the minority for people aware of Spore and haven’t bought it.
Spore is like a Frank Gehry designed building: it sounds great in abstract concept but once you start digging down into the details you realize the roof leaks, the floor plan isn’t suited to its purpose, and it costs a fortune to maintain. Even those people willing to get the game weren’t really impressed by it so there was no word of mouth and in the fast paced world of gaming where people call things from two years ago “old” it vanished.
I think the problem is that the part of the game that everyone was most excited about- the part where you evolve your critter and customize its appearance and structure, the part of the game that was hyped the most and which required the most developer time to get right- is, in fact, just about the shortest, most inconsequential part of the game. I made a ton of creatures and had a lot of fun running them around the world, evolving them to exactly what I wanted… and then realized that it was only about 2/5ths of the game and didn’t affect the other 3/5ths of the game in any way.
I wanted another SimLife or SimEarth. Instead, I got a knock-off of Civ.
As a pseudo-member of the games media (i.e. I don’t get paid and it’s not my full time job), this is just ridiculous. No one in the media mentioned that because Will Wright himself never mentioned that.
The game was designed for all ages, which is why Spore porn was such a huge deal whereas naked Sims have existed for ages and no one cares.
All ages does not equal kiddy.
Everyone’s opinion will be different.
I hated it. It was a charmingly put together game but it became very quickly apparent that there wasn’t a lot of thought put into the mechanics of it. As Lightnn’ poiints out, the interesting part of the game - the evolution part - is too short and doesn’t really work the way it should, while the rest of it is just a mediocre strategy game.
What struck me about the evolution part of the game was that there wasn’t any evolution. You could just completely redesign your creature on a whim, providing you ate enough food and got enough points (which was itself just a grinding exercise.) Want to go from a beaked two-legged birdlike thing to a four-legged poisonous thing? Just hit the button. Except for one decision - whether to be herbivorous or carnivorous, and you make that call at the beginning of the game -there was never any long-term consequence to any decision you made, which I found just terribly, terribly disappointing. I was hoping for a game where your decisions could have interesting long term ramifications - if, for example, you spent evolution points on being a quick birdlike thing you’d always need more food, or if you decided to become a cold blooded creature (needing food less often) you’d be vulnerable to weather down the line. Maybe it would even affect how your civilization would work once you attained intelligence.
Well, it didn’t have any of that. It was, for all practical purposes, the Creature Creator with a crappy Civ clone tacked on.
Will Wright is one of the greatest game developers of all time and my hat is off to him for his many successes, but Spore is, in the truest sense of the term, a poorly designed game. It’s really pretty, well presented, intuitively organized, and I didn’t have a single crash or bug with the out-of-the-box version. But the GAME is extremely ill-conceived.
Remember Black & White ? Same level of disappointment. Times five.
Is it worse than Daikatana? I have never forgiven Romero for that.
My biggest disappointment with spore was how the creature creation works… The form of your creature makes no difference, at all… In the end its just an rpg, and your creatures success is solely dependent upon the gear(body parts) it equips. Not fast enough? Fit the +3 foot of speed. So long as all the same parts are present, it doesn’t matter if creature was designed by a 2 year old blind kid randomly clicking about the screen, or a professional artist with 40 years of experience… They will function exactly the same. The parts don’t even need to have correct placement, they simply have to exist somewhere on the model.
Once I saw that in the creature creator, the game lost every bit of interest to me. I would have had great fun tweaking my creatures form and function, experimenting with new limbs, arrangements, etc in order to make a ruthless killing machine. Turns out, I just needed to add the +4 mouth of biting on my creatures ass.
I’d rate it as 0.24 Daikatanas on the Bitch Making scale. Most overhyped disappointments like Spore don’t crack .5 even if they can’t fall into the negative range.
Epic failure.
I remember all of the hype surrounding the game and I couldn’t wait to try it when it came out. The only thing that made me happy about the game was the fact that I wasn’t the one who shelled out $55 to try it.
They touted as a game similar to The Sims’ sandbox mode; the apparatus and shape you made your creature could doom them or help them thrive. The game looked a lot less linear in demos and previews.
I was so disappointed in the game itself. They took out a chunk of the underwater stage (only to sell it back as an expansion pack later on, apparently) and it didn’t matter too much how your characters were shaped. Each character still had to waddle from Nest One to Nest Two to Nest Three while deciding to make friends and/or kill other creatures along the way. Killing was just biting and slashing, allying was just singing and dancing and little more. The next stage allowed a few more variants, as did the last stage. It was just too linear and felt like one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure!” books only it was just twenty pages at most. An extremely “Choose Your Own Adventure!” book.
The only enjoyment I got out of that game was seeing all of the creatures other people made.
:(Spore is doing my head in at the moment.
I had uninstalled it, and put it away, but someone showed me “Sporn” and I got a hankering to play it again.
Won’t work.
It JUST WON’T WORK!
I’ve tried everything, and it just keeps crashing when it tries to load.
The thing with this game is, and I said this before it was released, that it was hyped as “You can do anything you want!”. The problem is, all that was really there was “The programmer can do anything he wants!”. Which is, of course, always true for every game ever.