@azhar and @azharcs both wanted a review of Spore, so I’m giving one (albeit a belated one).
Spore has been in development since 2000, so as you can imagine it’s an extremely well finished and very fun product. The game was from the same creator as The Sims and a key member of the development team was also a Civilization IV develop, so the game brings aspects of funny simulation with serious strategy.
In Spore, you design your own life form and take it through different stages of evolution. You start off as a cell in a 2D world, then you evolve into an animal in a 3D world, then into a sentient being living in a tribe, then in a civilisation before finally evolving into a space-faring species.
Cell stage
The cell stage is quite easy, but quite fun. Firstly, you decide whether your microorganism will be a carnivore or a herbivore. If you’re a carnivore, you must eat smaller organisms whilst avoiding predators whilst if you’re a herbivore, you must eat plants but avoid predators. ‘Eating’ involves chasing and then clicking on the other organism/plant.
This stage sounds really boring, but its simplicity is fantastic. This stage doesn’t last long, but it lasts just the right amount of time for eating microbes and avoiding bigger ones to seem fun. As you eat more, you grow bigger and you get more ‘DNA points’ to spend on additions to your organism (for example, spikes and eyes).
When you’ve eaten enough microbes, you emerge from a rock pool to become a creature.
Creature stage
The animal stage of the game allows you to explore the bigger world, whether your animal be bipedal, unipedal or 8 legged!
The creature stage maintains the basic idea of the cell stage but (literally) adds another dimension. Your creature is now an animal as opposed to a blob of cells and this animal must eat and evade predators, but it can also forge relationships with other species and your creature must find a mate.
During creature stage, you accumulate DNA points and unlock body parts, allowing you to further customise your creature and allowing it to evolve.
There are two stances you can take in creature stage: a combat one or a social one. If a combat stance is taken, the goal is to kill a number of members of a rival species rendering it extinct. A social stance requires you to impress members of other species, through mimicking, singing and dancing. Friendship provides alliances, so you can add members of your allies to your pack along with members of your own (who will assist you in killing/befriending other species). It also allows you to use their nests to restore your health.
Rival creatures are other players’ creations which have been automatically downloaded off the internet. This is an example of the RL social element of Spore, as you can add buddies and even subscribe to ‘Sporecasts’, where users publish lists of their favourite in-game objects/creatures.
I disliked creature stage, it dragged on and made me lose some of my interest. Whilst it’s great to adventure in your fantasy 3D world, the primitive in-game social aspect and lack of sophisticated methods of killing rival species makes this whole stage somewhat boring.
When you evolved enough, your species will reach sapience.
Tribal stage
When you’ve left creature stage, your species divide into tribes and you control one of them. You direct the tribe and must ensure there’s enough food, that labour’s shared properly and how to handle relations with other tribes.
There’s several ways of gaining food: you can either hunt, through making some tribe members hunters, fish, if you have earned fishing roads and allocated that duty to some members, or you can domesticate creatures and eat their eggs. Other tribes can also give you gifts.
You have the option, once again, to either employ a social or a combat stance. However, in the combat mode you can use weapons (arrows and torches, for example) against other tribes, providing you have them (you gain weapons by conquering or allying with other tribes). A social stance involves impressing other tribes with music, by playing instruments when they request it. You gain instruments the same way you gain weapons.
To complete this stage, you must conquer or ally with 5 tribes. For each tribe you ally with or conquer, you get one piece of a totem pole. It takes 5 pieces to complete this totem pole, at which point you advance to civilisation stage.
I didn’t find this stage particularly interesting, but it didn’t take too long to complete.
Civilization stage
This was the point at which the game started to get interesting for me. Your tribal village evolves into a city, and you are taken to a ‘city hall’ designer.
As a civilization, you no longer need to concern yourself with individual creatures but you create vehicles (sea, air and land) to mine ‘spice’, the main unit of currency in the game, and to trade with other cities. One you’ve traded enough, you can buy a rival city.
Alternatively, you can take over rival cities by creating military vehicles and quite simply attacking them.
You must ensure cities are productive and happy, through placing different types of buildings in the right place. You can also buy turrets to help defend the city.
The borders of each city are marked using Civilization-like colours.
This was one of my favourite stages, but it is cut short because eventually all cities unite when you (and your allies) have gained control of a sufficient number of cities.
Space stage
Once you gain control of your planet, your species advance into space. Space is quite like your planet, just much bigger. You must still decide whether to buy, ally or attack your rivals but you can also establish colonies on other planets.
In space stage, you can partake in missions to earn money which you can spend on buying tools to establish colonies, sculpt planets, form atmospheres and get powerful weapons. You can also collect artifacts which you can sell and your planets will provide you with spice to sell.
As you progress through space stage, you earn different badges and ranks, which unlock other features.
The space stage is effectively infinite, with tens of thousands of systems to explore. Other species, vehicles and planets are downloaded off other players. The game could probably therefore be described as a space exploration game.
EA promises there is an ending, but claims finding it will be next to impossible.
Other nice things
Best thing about Spore is that it runs on an Intel Mac like it does on Windows, using a proprietary fork of WINE (Cider) very effectively with their being little difference. The game does sometimes freeze on my Mac, but it isn’t the most capable thing graphically (only 128MB!).
If you have Spore, add me. My username is computerjoeuk.
