Spore Critique

It's been about a week since I got Spore and started playing it every chance I can get, mostly at the risk of being productive with my art work. And while I am enjoying the overall experience of the game, I feel the need to review it for one reason or another.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, Spore is the latest game to come out of the mind of Will Wright, creator of the popular Sims franchise and pretty much the entire simulation gaming genre. In Spore, the player is in charge of creating and evolving life on an alien world from the microscopic stage all the way up to the space age. The game even caters to those that believe in Creationism by letting you pick which stage to start out in once you've played enough of the game your first time around. Along the way, your creation will encounter other alien creations with several options available in regards to interact with them. The big selling point of the game is the fact that everything the player will encounter will be created by other players who own the game. Spore boasts having some powerful content creation tools that allows even the non-gaming types to create a creature on par with that of a Pixar or ILM employee without the hours or sometimes weeks it would take to construct such a creation normally.

For the most part, the game holds up to all the marketing hype and selling points. I'm continued to be amazed at some of the surprises that the game will throw at you in the various stages where player-created content is essential. (There's at least two stages where you will rarely see creations from other players due to the game mechanics.) It's very addictive, as I'm sure I've said in a previous post.

The game is no without their problems. It is clear that there was some kind of pressure from some higher power to get the game out as soon as possible. The game isn't buggy as hell, but it could be worse. I have not encountered some of the really bad ones as of yet, but the ones I've encountered are rather annoying.

For one, the creatures I made in the stand-alone Creature Creator do not translate very well into the final game, specifically if your creature has wings. As a result, I've been going through my game and redesigning those creatures slightly so that their wings are positioned properly.

Another problem I've encountered was a crash scenario that made it impossible for me to advance in the Space stage of the game. This resulted in a lot of deleted games for one reason or another. The same can also be said for the sharing aspect of the game, as some creations just refuse to upload to the servers properly. This has resulted in my second blog and my PhotoBucket account becoming a place for "exclusive content" for Spore that I've created.

Other than that, I now know what it feels like to have your life be sucked into a game a la Worlds of Warcraft and The Sims. And for that feeling alone, I will tolerate the bugs and glitches. I've even made a few buildings and characters as a result of channelling these frustrating encounters, so all is not lost.

Now if only I could stop playing it long enough to be more productive. I'm just happy I didn't install it on my "work" computer.