arstechnica.com — With Spore, Will Wright intends to make you an Intergalactic Galactic ruler who begins life as a bottom-feeding primordial soup dweller. When I first saw the game back in early 2006 I wondered, would Wright and his team over at Maxis be able to pull this off?
Sep 8, 2008 View in Crawl 4
zemenarSep 8, 2008
E.V.O? /curious
swedishninjaSep 8, 2008
Play for as long as you want!
thiscommentsuxSep 9, 2008
Blind faith is blind.
solistusSep 9, 2008
Not a single person has dugg him down thus far.
solistusSep 9, 2008
Spore does not come remotely close to simulating anything. It's essentially a string of shallow arcade games. It doesn't attempt to model actual evolution in any tangible way, nor does it produce realistic creatures, worlds, etc. It's a bunch of shallow mini-games attached to a cool content creator. That's it. If this is the next gen, count me out!
solistusSep 9, 2008
The animation of player-created models is pretty cool, but the graphics quality lags behind virtually any big budget title from the past few years. It simply does not support many now standard graphics features. It pulls off its aesthetic well in the cell stage, but it's never as pretty as most modern games are. The gameplay is incredibly shallow. Cell stage is a 15 minute minigame, and is probably the best part. Creature stage is where all the potential is squandered; since part stats don't stack, you can either use the same handful of parts every time or just mess around without paying attention to the game mechanics at all. The Creature Creator is kind of entertaining, but it's not worth 50 bucks. The fact that CPU species just sit around a campfire until you choose to interact with them and don't evolve or compete really ruined the game for me. The weak DNA point system replacing any attempt to 'simulate' evolution (at least through requiring some continuity between generations) was also pretty disappointing. There's no game mechanic incentive to ever produce anything but a biped with arms! Weak... The Tribal and Civ stages are pathetic excuses for strategy games with lackluster content creation options (ooh, look at all the cool vehicle parts... that don't do anything...), and the Space phase is too shallow to be the 4X it pretends to be, but has too many annoying pirate and disease events to be an enjoyable sandbox experience. I've been following Spore for a couple years, and it seems like they gutted or removed outright everything that was supposed to be cool about this game. Maybe in a couple years with a couple hundred dollars' worth of expansion packs, Spore will be the game we've been promised for years. As it stands, it simply isn't that game.
elranzerSep 9, 2008
Just to clarify things... I own and love all of the above (Wii, PS3, 360, GTA4, MGS4, Spore, SSB:Brawl).I just think all of you are silly.
dugg2deathSep 10, 2008
I know it's getting slammed for the DRM (rightfully so) but.. the game itself is pretty fun. I like that I can just jump in, play for 20 min, and enjoy myself.
oscarolimSep 11, 2008
Actually i read the article, but I dont like the activation system. I am not saying there should not be a anti piracy copy protection. But to limit the activations to three, and then have to go trought the hassle of calling them and hopping they will give an extra activation... This year I have already changed major components on my computer 4 times. And like me I am sure there are others. I really wanted to buy the game, but I already had activation problems with bioshock, so activations like those, no more for me.