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Fifty thousand years in the making humanity has reached a stage where it can look back at itself and say: I can do better than that! Spore is a universe, a fusion of a sim, a God game and an MMO, that attempts to mimic the mystery of evolution and the vastness of space, while reminding us of our closeness to one another.
Sounds heavy. In scope, Spore is; life, death and everything in between that span multiple generations. Spore is complex, but approachable. Through simple, addictive gameplay and an entertaining interface, Spore is for players of all ages. And it’s this that makes Spore something worthy of attention: complexity and freedom made approachable through simplicity of gameplay. And twenty five eyed cock monsters of course.
Although I claim that Spore is about freedom and choice, obviously it can’t be completely freeform. There are stages, levels of a kind, and rules. You can’t turn Neo and liberate your kind from the swamps. Starting off in the primordial ocean is a must. And with most things you start off small, as a single celled organism, nibbling, biting and swimming your way to the truth (curse you, The Matrix).
Spore is split into five stages – Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilisation and Space. If you’re into reductionism and brevity, you evolve your creature from a Cell to the lofty heights of an intergalactic spaceman. However, if you’re into Spore, creation, mystery, story and life: you tailor your creature from a cellular level choosing your behaviour and traits through action, reach sentience, travel on land, follow migratory routes, develop relations, fight for your species survival, evolve special abilities, become a tribe, choose your allies and enemies, explore, advance to a civlisation, design glistening towers and hovercraft, unify the planet by pacifying, destroying or bribing, create an intergalactic chariot, talk to the Gods, explore time, space, the universe and the meaning of life and inadvertently explore the interior of people’s minds: the creations of creation.
But don’t worry, you’re not thrown into the soup of creation without any pointers, there are clear goals – make friends with this race, establish trade routes with a neighboring city, make your inhabitants happy. Spore gives you the choice to do what you want, but leads you as much as it can. For that reason, it’s hard to get lost.
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Swimming around in pools of primordial goop isn’t all that fun. Greater things await, but alas, your brain is too small to comprehend them. To elevate your Cell self, chomp down on some meaty chunks – mmm! Or stick squarely to vegetable detritus. Me, I’m a goody two shoes. I stick to the straight path: make friends, eat vegetables, forgive others for eating me. Call me Jesus. By choosing what you eat (or who), certain traits become you: are you aggressive or peace loving? Do you like wearing ear necklaces or do you prefer to run and hide? Hiding will only get you so far as there are far bigger creatures that don’t care whether you’re a herbivore or an omnivore. They like the taste of meat. They like the taste of your meat (remind me never to write that again). By chomping on bits-o-veg or bits-o-meat you’ll earn DNA points to spend on evolving your creature. Stick a spike on it’s head, some extra fins or a few penises flanking it’s eyes. Lovely.
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After swimming around in the goop and increasing in size, you’ll eventually make your way to land. Land brings some wonderful things, namely legs. Now, legs aren’t the standard, in Spore you can slither or slide, but generally legs are a cool way to get things done. Moving away from the top-down view of Cell stage, in Creature mode you’re free to roam the landscape and attempt to make friends with the inhabitants of your continent (or eat them). As I said before, I play digital Jesus when I play any game involving morality or character development. In BioShock I didn’t kill a single Little Sister. No kidding. In Fallout I reached Paragon of Humanity. In Spore I made friends with everyone and by doing so I allied myself with every neighbour be they the mighty Dildos (yep, user generated content!) or the shady Turdwallers (I’m serious). Eventually you must migrate and follow a path to new nests for future generations of your race. Creature stage differs from Cell as you can radically alter your creation. I went through various incarnations from rotund ducks, tiny dinosaurs to weird, long legged geese, extending spines, bloating stomachs and legs, until I finally settled on a weird fusion of a duck and a football. Before you know it you’ll have explored a huge amount of your continent. You’ll have racked up a library of eyes, ears, feelers, legs, arms and horns. You’ll have eaten some groups of creatures, upgraded your nest and even roamed with other races.
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Once you’ve evolved your Creature, it’s time to evolve socially – nests are so last millennia, Tribal huts are the new thing. Come on, that burning desire to spear your enemies and sing them lullabies? We all feel that at some point. What a surprise that Spore sees you evolve into the social animal and wander the landscape meeting and greeting different tribes with different customs, skills and intentions. By making friends with other tribes you learn skills from them: how to make an instrument to impress or a hatchet to…persuade. You don’t have to be friendly like me. My girlfriend decided that she’d give different tribes one chance and one chance alone. She’d try and impress them with music and with gifts of food. If they weren’t fussed, she’d obliterate them. Harsh but fair. Once you’ve befriended (guess what I did) or obliterated five tribes, you’ve gained enough control to pool your resources and become a…
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Civilisation! Ah, the glorious age of order, officials and progress! It’s time for your Tribe to move on and become civilised and responsible. You’re not alone on your planet, there are other civilisations trying to make their way too. The aim: unification. And unification starts from within. By populating your city with entertainment complexes, factories, flora and houses, you can arrange them in such a way as to create beneficial relationships that provide you with money or happiness. Placing a house next to a factory will give you more money. Placing an entertainment complex next to a factory will cause unhappiness and placing a house next to a house causes nothing – it’s simply dull. Trust me, I live next to people in real life – it’s dull. By creating an idillic society that is happy and prosperous you have more of the green to spend on vehicles, ships and whores. Of course, making money from your cities is only a small part of what you must do. Straight out of a Frank Herbert novel, the primary currency of the galaxy is the Spice. And yes, the Spice must flow. Control the Spice and you control the universe. You have a few choices on how to unify your planet: convince them of your ways through religious means (which is actually done via a hologram that sings really bad opera), send them enough money so they ‘see sense’ or bash their brains out. Be wary though: the other civilisations want to gain control too. This isn’t Tribal where it’s over a patch of ground, this is sea, land and air warfare. Again, choices are everything and they define what you are and what you will be. I went the non-violent route and ‘brought them round’ to my way of thinking via the bad religious opera. Within no time I’d converted the planet and was able to build my chariot to the Gods: a spacecraft.
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Everything is a prelude to Space. The ant movements of your Creature, of your Tribe – nothing. Nothing in comparison to the hundreds of worlds with hundreds of species, all striving for success and to unlock the secrets of the universe. But then again, you couldn’t have got here without the creatures in the primordial pools, the weird maraca dances and the religious opera. Life’s a cycle, eh? After patting yourself on the back for unifying your planet, you realise that pat was a bit sudden. Space is huge. And I mean huge. Twenty five cock eyed monster huge. And your aim: well, loosely, unify – but also explore, trade, destroy, pacify. The list is endless and this is where I got a bit lost. Up until Space, everything was easy. Click this Creature to sing to him, charm him or destroy him, string a few Houses and Entertainment Centres up to make your populace happy. But space is vast! And difficult! Races attack you out of the blue! They demand money! I can to Space as a Shaman, a believer in life, but that only gets you so far. You have to wing your way across the galaxy in a tin ship to save your people, explore planets and unlock secrets. I’ve never felt so Major Tom in my whole life. Space is balancing eco-systems with abducted creatures, sculpting the surface of planets, dying oceans a new colour. While some of it is merely cosmetic, most of it is in service of the question – what is at the centre of the universe? By finding tablets and story planets scattered through the universe you’ll plod your way through, upgrading your Spacecraft with new guns, pacification rays, sculpting tools and more. The end, if there is one, is a mystery to be unlocked. EA have also hinted that there is a secret ending that only ‘hardcore players’ will see. I’d imagine it’ll involve terra forming and controlling every single planet in a huge spiral galaxy…
So what is Spore? Well, it’s a game – obviously. A very well thought out game that accomplishes much, promises more and largely delivers. Spore takes the customisation, the relations and the humour of The Sims, the God like power of Civilization and the rinse-repeat formula of World of Warcraft, packages it up into a heady mix of science, fiction, fantasy and playability and delivers a completely unique gaming experience. In a bizarre way, Spore doesn’t have a traditional story: just creation. The framework of the game is as loose as possible while still providing goals that are reachable and interesting. At times Spore relies too much on the design of things. Once you reach the Civilisation stage you design everything from outfits to entertainment complexes. Once you’re in Space, you can design every single building for each colony. These play no role in the game and don’t effect how well you do, they’re simply cosmetic. I found myself churning out designs just to get the playable parts of the stage. For a herbivore I don’t ‘alf like getting to the meat.
However, I’m mightily impressed that Spore manages to retain focus through what is really, five seperate games with differing controls, goals and even levels of interest. At times the World of Warcraft rinse-repeat formula wears thin and you find yourself clicking, sending huge fleets of roaming vehicles just to get the job done, but there is always the next level, badge, achievement or stage to reach. This is something that plagues games like World of Warcraft but is also their greatest strength. By making achievable goals that are rewarded with shiny badges and levels, it’s enough to make players play on. Cell is as basic as it gets, with each stage adding new ways of interaction and detail to the mix. Yes, things get more complex to the end, but then again, so does life.
Spore has received mixed reviews. Some claim it’s marvelous, a sign of gaming reaching a golden land where casual and hardcore gamers can meet. Others see it has a half baked concoction, attempting much and never quite succeeding. Maybe it’s the twenty cocks plastered on it’s large head that resembles the bollocks of a giant cow that puts people off, but more likely it’s that it’s different and bizarrely similar. Spore has also been in development for over seven years, maybe the hype has just been too much.
Spore takes what games have done for twenty years and compacts them, reduces them, sprinkles them with observation, science and thought and then throws in freedom and choice. It’s a bizarre idea, but it works. I’ve heard a lot of people say that Spore could have been so much more, but I fail to see where the game could have been expanded? Sure, certain controls and missions could be explained a little better, but the connection to your creation (the fundamental part of the game) is managed well. When you consider you’re playing many stages that differ highly, that connection, the spark of life, well, it’s a mightily impressive thing. By and large, the faults of Spore are far outweighed by it’s fantastic and refreshing game play. Unless Spore debuted with an conscious artificial intelligence that you nurtured or neutered, I’m not sure what could have been improved. And if you think something could be improved – go and build it!
For players that want to unlock everything, you can hunt the hundreds of badges and unlocks the game has. We’re seeing this more and more in games: unlocks, badges and achievements to reward players and make the game last as long as possible. In a way, it mimics the scoreboards and leader-boards in games gone by. And in Spore’s case, it makes a creative game an addictive one.
To see Spore as a failure is to find fault with the act of creation. Spore does it’s very best to simulate life in a way that is approachable, interesting and above all entertaining. That’s no small feat. Each stage is a game in itself, each features details and pop references (Gears of Spore, anyone?), quirks and skills. This isn’t a God game, it’s not an MMO or a SIm – but it features parts of them all. Spore is an evolution. By taking pieces of games that work, Spore clambers it’s way onto the shores of a new world, raises it’s head and calls out for a mate. From the sheer popularity of the Spore Creature Creator, there are plenty of mates out there, people who want to explore and and in turn be explored.
Mac Notes
Thankfully the Mac port works well on a range of hardware from a MacBook to a Mac Pro. The game even comes on a hybrid disc with the Mac and PC versions, something I haven’t seen in years. The game also works with the DVD out of the drive. Thank heavens for progress – that only took 50,000 years.
There is a weird touch: if you try and CMD + Q to quit, the Finder pops up with a message stating that you must quit Spore from the Main Menu. Why?
There were the few odd error messages and crashes while playing but nothing that disruptive.
The most important thing to remember is that Spore does not have an auto-save feature – save regularly!
