Late night discussion: The first Spore expansion pack
Seeing as how both of my housemates have to get up two hours before I do to make it to work (their jobs suck, huh?), I typically go to bed long after they do. So since they’re not around to play games with at this hour, I need to find something else to occupy my time with. Hence this Late night discussion post, which I hope to turn into a regular feature. This is for everyone else who’s staying up late (or has the audacity to live in a different time zone).
The first Spore expansion is coming out in less than a month. Details are sparse, but it’s looking like it’ll cost $20 and consist of new parts for the creature/object editor and … that’s it. If you aren’t thoroughly underwhelmed by this, you must be in the target market.
Does this piss anyone else off? I remember way back when I used to play The Sims (don’t give me that look). The expansions for that game seemed to serve no purpose other than to enrich Will Wright. I wouldn’t even call them proper expansion packs, merely content packs. I couldn’t justify spending my hard-earned money on them, and so I didn’t. So I’m very disappointed that Spore seems headed down exactly the same money treadmill that The Sims perfected, but seeing as how Electronic Arts is running the show, would you have expected it to go down any other way?
I suppose it might be time to write off Spore. I wasn’t impressed with the initial release, but I held out hope that it would get on the right track with the inevitable expansions. “They didn’t have enough time to flesh out all of the stages of the game,” I reasoned. “They should be fixing it soon.” In hindsight, the naiveté inherent in these statements is hysterical. Are there any serious PC gamers left who haven’t given up on Spore yet? I’d love to hear from you. Please convince me that Spore can still be saved, because I’m thinking that all signs point to fat chance.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:36 pm
And I don’t suppose the content pack will add genitals as a creature component? (+2 Mating anyone?) Forget biological realism, we have to protect the kids. No matter if the genitals didn’t look anything like a human’s (I’m thinking you could get away with copying off a snake). It looks like our only option will continue to be making our entire creatures into giant phalluses — if the Spore videos on YouTube are any indication, anyway.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:09 am
they should take Spore, and make like… a GAME out of it. Master of Orion - style.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:14 am
Or even just a decent RTS for the civilization stage. The ability to truly build and customize your own units would be amazing, so long as the point costs for each component were properly balanced. Unfortunately, in Spore, all of the designing except the creature creator is purely cosmetic, and even the creature creator has severe limitations. That’s really my biggest complaint with Spore. For all the effort that went into this game, I just wish there was more meat to it.
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:57 am
It’s really a shame about Spore. I remember months or years ago feeling such excitement about it. It sort of occurred to me well before playing it that it might not be much of an actual game. I still held out hope though, all the way through the tidepool phase. When I had played about 15 minutes in the creature phase, though, I realized just what it was - a framework for selling expansion packs. Each individual stage is incredibly shallow. It seems certain they will try to fill it out with expansions.
Or, perhaps not. Maybe they will just leave it as-is and sell “content packs” that don’t actually do anything to the gameplay.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Hey, I love the way that kaka plays…..