PC Game Fun Time

It’s election day here in the United States, which is Kind Of A Big Deal. I don’t want to get too political on a gaming site (though if you search my personal blog carefully, you can discover my political leanings), so instead I’ll divert your attention to something political yet completely nonsensical:

The presidential and vice presidential candidates have officially been released by Maxis as space ship designs for Spore. Apparently some enterprising individual at Maxis figured out that the space ship editor was flexible enough to render human shapes, and from there made the natural leap to re-creating the candidates.

Just don’t make the mistake of choosing John McCain as your space ship; the left blinker gets stuck in the on position on journeys clear across the galaxy.

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.

The long wait is finally over, and after many years of hype, Spore has finally been released. This news was immediately greeted with a huge backlash against the malfeasant Digital Restrictions Management included with the game, which limits each purchased copy of the game to three installations — ever. I’ve written about DRM multiple times in the past, so I don’t feel compelled to take this opportunity to make any statement on DRM beyond reiterating how terrible it is for the consumer. And judging by all of the negative reviews Spore’s DRM has engendered on Amazon, even Electronic Arts has to be questioning whether including such draconian DRM was worth it. As I write this, Spore has 934 one-star reviews out of 1,011 reviews total, a number that is only going to increase dramatically over the coming days.

No, what I really want to address about Spore is its failure to live up to the amazing game play that it once promised, an issue that has been mostly lost amongst all of the (justifiable) complaining over the DRM (although Ars Technica didn’t fail to take notice). What really sold me on Spore from the first times I read about it was the promise of truly being able to design a creature. I remember marveling at how all aspects of a creature were supposed to be procedurally generated based solely on the design of the creature. The characteristics of the legs you designed would affect how well the creature would be able to move — its gait, its stride, its jumping height, etc. Ditto for every other component of the animal. I was instantly fantasizing of three-legged creatures with a single exceptionally long appendage used for striking. Such a feature has never evolved naturally on Earth, either by chance or because natural selection is not conducive to creating it. The real appeal of Spore, to me, was being able to test out all sorts of bizarre intelligently designed body configurations that do not appear in the natural world to find the most effective ones. And it would be very telling if the most effective predators in the games looked curiously similar to tigers, lions, and bears.

Combine this ability to truly design your own creature with the Sporepedia, which lets you match up your creations against everyone else’s, and Spore would’ve been amazing. I could easily see myself spending days trying to tweak the ultimate predator, able to kill as many of the creatures created by other people as possible. But alas, such a thing is not possible with Spore the way it ended up, because the ability to truly design creatures was removed at some point during the development process (probably because it ended up being exceptionally difficult to do correctly). Don’t get me wrong, you still have the ability to fine tune the appearance of creatures to your heart’s content, but it is all cosmetic. The finished version of Spore, unfortunately, shipped with an ability-generation system that is all-too-familiar, not revolutionary.

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