The Periphery of the Mind

So above is the Spore Widget, which lets people see the stuff I've been tinkering with in Spore. I wish it was a little bit clearer, but the last four creatures are shown in reverse evolutionary sequence.

Made it to the Space Stage yesterday, and it really is a whole new game. The learning curve is higher than before, but now things are really taking off. Literally. Exploration, planet changing, colonization of other worlds, research, artifact hunting, and so on. Two of the missions I had really stood out. First I was hunting artifacts for some alien empire. I went to one of the target planets holding these artifacts and found it buried inside the city of a (more primative) alien race. I wasn't sure how to get to it, so I just started burning the city to the ground with my ship's lasers and looted the rubble. As I was doing this the city came under attack from it's continental neighbors, who were waging a holy war against them. While the game said nothing on the matter, I couldn't help but imagine I was seen as a herald of divine favor... or wrath.

Another mission made me realize just how big the space stage is. I had 20 minutes to locate a specific world around a specific star and gather half-a-dozen life different life forms from it (the planet that gave me the mission wanted to increase their biodiversity). The thing is that I spent three minutes just looking at my map of star systems I'd visited (the target was a place I'd already been to). And then, once I found the system, I had to find the world within it. It plays out easily enough, which is impressive in and of itself, but the scale and scope of the space stage is literally astronomical.

Labels: Games, Geeky