The Periphery of the Mind

Woke up yesterday at 4, unable to sleep. Went to Wal-Mart to get groceries (I always go early in the morning anyway) and saw that they had Spore on the shelves.

After spending yesterday playing it, with occasional input from the Professor, three words describe it: impressive, cute, fun.

Basically you start off as a microbe in the Cell Stage, eating and growing and slowly evolving. It plays kind of like a gorgeous version of Pac-Man really, with you running around and gobbling up creatures and plants, trying not to get eaten in turn. As you grow, you begin to notice giant things in the tide pool with you. And even bigger things lurking in the background. As you get bigger, those giant things start to notice you, and you have to avoid them. Until you get big enough to eat them that is. After about ten minutes or so, you've grown big enough to enter the...

Creature Stage. Here you walk out on land, hunting for food and growing. The big differences of course are that you can really begin to adapt your creature. Growing legs, arms, advanced mouths, wings, and so on. And yes, your critters can fly. And you'll need every edge you can get, as the goal here is to survive and evolve. While you can play it out aggressively, I went for a more social lifestyle, charming and prancing around to impress other species. As you grow, with lots of cutsey mating dances and teaching of babies, you eventually reach sentience and the...

Tribal Stage, which is so far the weakest part of the game for me. Basically you can dress your critter now, domesticate wild animals, and go conquer or ally with other tribes. It's not bad, but I suspect it'll be fairly dull to play through again, as the only real variance seems to be in what critters are randomly evolved to compete with you. There was a lot more player input and variety to be found in the Creature stage, but fortunately that player input returns in the...

Civilization Stage. Here you finally set out to conquer the world and its resources, as well as creating all sorts of things. I'm only about a quarter through it, but I've been using religion to guilt rival societies into defeat with great effect. In Civilization Stage you can design your own buildings, vehicles, and even a national anthem if you want. It's really quite impressive. And what about when the world is conquered? Well, I'm not there yet but that leads to the...

Space Stage. Maybe then I'll get to deal with all the UFOs that have been tormenting my poor world as far back as the Creature Stage. See, back when my peaceful creature was trying to make friends with other species, a giant UFO started flying overhead, scaring them off. And while it didn't abduct my critters, it was apparetly hunting for new species. I think. And in the Civilization Stage, it appeared over a city, bringing the city joy and happiness as my armies were trying to convert them to the worship of a giant holographic frogman yelling at them (fortunately a third party nation appeared and just started attacking the city with its tanks, demoralizing them enough to embrace giant frogman as their god).

Seriously, the game is wacky and fun, and remarkably easy to get sucked into. All that said there are still some gameplay issues that bother me. I found at least one bug that crashes the program when first loading a saved game, but I've also found a workaround for it. And there are some problems I have in that the game isn't as free in letting you tweak your creature's appearance as I think it should be, but that's more of a personal opinion than an actual problem. I suspect that over the next few weeks the problems with game crashes will be fixed, and then it'll be a pretty much perfect product.

Labels: Games, Geeky