Sep 09 2008
Spore: A Game of Evolution
Okay, I recently got Spore, and so I’ve been playing that for 2 days. Honestly, my husband took me to Wal-Mart at 12:15 am Sunday to get it as soon as we could since I have such limited playing time. (It’s nice to have someone who understands my gaming obsessions.) I didn’t actually even know it was coming out because they don’t seem to be advertising much.
So far, I have to say that this game is spectacular and gives me a lot of the gameplay and depth I’d been missing in playing MMOs. I get more into my Spores than my MMO characters, but I think that’s because I don’t have to deal with any annoying people and can wallow in the growth of my Spore from cell all the way to space explorer.
While the game is not overly hard, the appeal comes from designing creatures, watching them grow, and then taking them through various stages of “life”. I start off as a little cell, and I earn parts and buy them with “DNA” that I gather from plant or meat materials. Then I progress to Creature stage, on to Tribal stage, then to Civilization stage, and finally to the Space stage. The first three stages are fairly simple yet fun, and it allowed me to customize my Spore progressively. Though I could radically change my creature, I chose to keep it in theme and gradually make changes. The last two stages involve vastly different gameplay yet the continuous theme makes it intuitive. The in-game help is also vast and thorough. I had a few bumps but nothing that couldn’t be easily solved with a few minutes of reading.
The Space stage was actually quite challenging until I got the hang of it. I had lots of deaths, screaming, and restarting. Obviously, it didn’t take long for me to figure things out, but my initial mistakes were quite fun.
It’s not hard to “beat” the game, but it’s quite obvious that Maxis and Will Wright meant for this to be much more than a beginning-to-end type of game. The end of the game is incredibly open-ended, and it’s so much fun running into other creatures that I made or running into the creatures of friends. Building and designing vehicles also adds to the spice of things, and the building tools are quite excellent.
This game shows the brilliance and incredible scope that a game can take on if designed correctly. Now that I’m done with the initial fun of it, I can appreciate the sheer genius that went with designing and building this game.
