Spore: A New Generation of Gaming or a Massive Bore?
September 25th, 2008 by Amazing College Student Guy, Fletcher
Just as in the movie and music world, video games can suffer from the dreaded phenomenon of over-hyping. When an entertainment product spends years in development, expectations tend to rise, especially when it’s touted as something that watchers/listeners/players have never experienced before. The problem is, the finished product can end up falling short of unrealistic expectations.
Spore, developed by Maxis (run by Will Wright, the famous creator of such franchises as SimCity and The Sims) and published by giant Electronic Arts, does indeed suffer from this flaw. After a hopelessly long development cycle and endless delays, the final game is a fascinating gem that just isn’t that fun to play.
Supposedly inspired by the famous documentary “Powers of Ten” (check it out, it’s on Youtube), Spore aims to be a simulation of life from the microbial stages all the way into a space-faring future. You begin as a single cell, harvesting plant matter or consuming other organisms and gradually build your way up the food chain. At a certain point you evolve legs and move the operation onto land, and so on. The problem is, this sequence is broken up into five stages: Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space. The jumps between them feel a little sudden, as you literally go right from a large microscopic creature into a landfaring one. This separation really hurts the theme of gradual growth of scale.
The “Cell” Stage
Each sequence is very cleverly designed. For example, at the end of the Creature stage (which consists of running your creature around, defeating or working with other creatures, and evolving new body parts), in a sequence meant to symbolize the development of self-awareness, players are treated to a dramatic cutscene inspired by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the Tribal stage (which plays like a simple Real Time Strategy game), you can assign your creatures various duties, from didgeridoo players to axe-wielding warriors to fishermen. All of this is fantastically animated and presented, even the music being wonderful (and it actually adapts to your playstyle, a very amazing feature). Again, though, each sequence is essentially a different genre of a game that is over-simplified. This is understandable, as the game is meant to appeal to large audiences casual and veteran alike. However, to me it just felt boring.
Some creatures you may encounter in the “Creature” stage
Another great feature of Spore is its incorporation of multiplayer elements. There is no direct multiplayer mode, meaning you’re never actually playing with other people. However, everyone’s creatures are saved into a global database, so the majority of creatures and civilizations you encounter are actually made by other players. This adds a large amount of replayability, as there’s always more zany creations to see.
To a veteran gamer like myself, Spore was a bit of a letdown, to be honest. It’s flashy gameplay wasn’t able to completely hide it’s very simple fundamentals. But to people familiar with other games from Maxis like The Sims, Spore can likely be the ultimate simulation game…a “Sim Everthing,” if you will. Remarkably, “Sim Everything” was a working title for Spore at one point.
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