Hey! This post is really old. You should take it with a grain of salt.
Well, as you may have read on my twitter stream, I now have Spore.
I pre- ordered from EB games, and picked it up on the official release date, despite it being for sale earlier, because I'm weird like that. Anyway, I've had it for about 4 days and I've played... ooh... I reckon close to 10 hours. (So these aren't really first impressions as such, but whatever.) Anyway.
What can I say? Spore is incredible. I'm sure you know how the mechanics work by now, but here's the general idea. You control the evolution of a species from single celled organism to a galaxy dominating empire. Throughout this journey it goes through several game archetypes, from the RPG-ish creature stage to the Civ-like Civilisation stage. Space stage is basically a sandbox, with some inter-empire relations and a simple overarching plotline (basically- OMG THERES SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS AT THE GALACTIC CENTRE AND WE SHOULD FIND OUT WHAT ITIS! but first go terraform this planet, colonise it and build an ecosystem from scavenged organisms... or not, we don't care). It works surprisingly well.
Here's some of the best bits:
One tiny little programming plus: It plays very nicely with minimizing, unlike some games cough Dawn of War cough. Some gripes:
Just one: WHY MAXIS WHY NOT MULTIPLAYER! Even in just single stages, not the whole game. Playing the tribal or creature modes especially would be really cool with a friend, just as a standalone game. Spore = AWESOME! I'll probably continue to post a couple of my creations on my blog as I make them. That's about it.
Rockwell
< Book in a day Hooray! >
Thu Sep 18 10:18:00 2008
Well... Spore wouldn't exactly work with multiplayer. I mean like, if you built a social creature it is almost certain that someone else with an aggressive creature will kill it immediately. Or if your best spice producing planet was suddenly destroyed by some addict who could afford multiple planet busters (5 million Spore Bucks each). Multiplayer Spore would really only work in the cell stage. Which would be awesome, because it's already a survival of the fittest mode.