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Spore is, despite the creator's intentions, half of a game. Granted, it's half of a fascinating, different, occasionally wildly fun game, but it's still not quite what I was paying for.
Cell and Creature stages: Hella fun. These are really the only two that allow visceral interaction with the creations of other users. They're simple games, executed very well - Cell stage is basically the Flash game "Flow". Creature stage is a third-person fantasy animal simulator of limited depth but surprising charm and emergent permutation.
Tribal and Civ stages: Both a complete waste of time, IMO. After the first playthrough, there really isn't much to recommend them, as they're procedural grinds with no complexity or depth beyond the aesthetic value provided by the visual creation tools that are unlocked. Without those tools, these stages are substandard Flash/Java RTS games with all the options of Rock Paper Scissors.
Space stage: It's fun. It's also utterly punishing, and balanced to the point of ridiculous frustration. The areas where it seems broken may be a conscious design decision - you have to be engaged in the game, at all times. Having a moment to put gear-shaped purple mesas and eyeball trees on your hard-won wildlife sanctuary becomes a lot sweeter when you have to carve that time out of near-constant crises.* Your mileage may vary. Some of this stage's punishing mechanics forced me to think a little differently, and bore joy from frustration for it. I'm just not sure how much replay value is in that, now that I know teh win-method. Space does get very grindy, a timesink of diminishing returns, and the game deals with this by making the endgame nightmarishly aggressive.
I'm still enjoying the first game I started (almost finished...), but the others I've begun in the meantime are a bit boring. Spore's problem isn't actually one of ambition, as it clearly can deliver. In fact, I get the feeling that the devs did deliver it... and the publisher has decided to trickle it out in expansion packs. It's like having a great game held hostage, released a body part at a time, as a goodwill gesture. I definitely wouldn't have paid what i did for it, had I known**. Half price, sure.
* the frequency of disasters has apparently been corrected in a patch, but I can't see it.
** Had I known about the DRM, I'd have downloaded when it was pirated, nearly a week before release. Any claims made about EA "easing restrictions" are pretty much crap - the invasive SecuROM is still there, as is the limited activation system. I'll try to find the appropriate link to the breaking of that system. It apparently removes access online content, but that presumes that their servers are the only place to get the (elegantly packaged into small .PNG files) creations of other users. I'm extremely curious as to what people think of this form of DRM, as it's clearly got nothing to do with piracy. |
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