Spore: My Take

Okay. Let’s get one depressingly inevitable thing out of the way first.

Now that’s done, we can begin.

There’s been a whole lot of ranting about Spore’s DRM recently (not least from myself, albeit I seem to be coming from the opposite direction to 99% of the rest of the Internet) but I’m not here to talk about that today. I’m actually going to talk a bit about the game, having spent some time with it and played it from start to “finish” with one of my creatures and started again with another.

I’ll start by saying that Spore is enjoyable and plain FUN. Many developers these days are dead set on either creating a movie, or creating something that’s self-consciously “hardcore” or something equally unappealing to a cynical old bastard such as myself. Spore eschews all of that by providing an experience that is pleasantly “light” to play yet has something that may not be “depth” but is certainly an addictive quality that keeps me wanting to return to it.

Part of the appeal is, of course, the user-generated content. The fact that, once my little single-celled creature evolves sufficiently to crawl out of the primordial soup and onto land, he/she/it will encounter creatures created by my friends, family and colleagues… well, that’s just awesome. Already I’ve had discussions with several people with amusing stories about my creatures turning up in others’ games, and even my spacefaring race’s starship turning up and suddenly abducting creatures from their game! (Disappointingly, the above-pictured “Massive Cock Monster”, produced by myself and a colleague from work upon his first discovery of the Creature Creator, hasn’t appeared in my galaxy as yet but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.)

This is the great thing about replaying Spore. The first time I played it, I didn’t notice any of this stuff – I was concentrating on actually playing the game and understanding the mechanics. Fortunately, the mechanics themselves are very simple to pick up and build in complexity at an almost perfect pace – starting with simple directional controls in the Cell stage, adding an MMO-style “hotbar” in the Creature phase for using attacks and social abilities, adding a simple RTS interface in the Tribal phase, refining and increasing the depth of this in the Civilisation phase… before combining everything you’ve learned throughout the last few hours into the much more lengthy Space phase. And the great thing about the Space phase is that in your travels to the various planets around the galaxy, you can drop down onto a planet and see a computer-controlled species/tribe/civilisation going through exactly what you’ve been through – you can either sit back and watch it or do your damnedest to interfere with it through various means. Once you’ve been through the Space phase and experienced this a few times, going back to a previous phase means that you suddenly notice a whole lot of weird shit going on… like a sudden stampede of creatures running away from a now gigantic-appearing spaceship which is lasering them to death, or abducting them, or dropping meteors on the planet.

So that’s a lot of fun, and to me one of the best things about the game – the fact that it FEELS like a coherent universe where not only do you go through all these stages, but “everyone else” has to as well – and that “everyone else”, despite being computer-controlled, feels like it’s controlled by other people thanks to the fact that they were all DESIGNED by other people.

Vaguely related to this is the thing I like most about the aesthetic of the game – the constantly changing sense of scale. Right from the very beginning, Spore is a game about growth. Eat enough primordial goo as a wobbly cell thing and you get bigger, until you can eat the things that used to be screen-sized. Wander around as a creature and everything seems very large. The world is a big place, any invading spaceships seem huge and threatening and it’s a scary place to be part of. Become a tribe and you feel like you’ve taken a step back. What was once a single screen-filling creature has become a group of creatures that appear smaller individually but exhibit a greater influence on their environment. Become a Civ and you barely see your creatures at all, as they spend all their time in buildings and vehicles – but their influence spreads and grows until they have dominated the world. Reach the Space stage and, while your spaceship of your own design is undoubtedly cool, it’s presented as quite a small object on screen, making you feel suitably insignificant when surrounded by the thousands of stars that make up the Spore galaxy, until you start conquering or buying out star systems and you see the tangled web of your empire spreading across the galaxy map, growing bigger and bigger with each new conquest.

Other little things tickle my happy places in nice ways. The community side is dealt with well, though I wish there was some notification when someone comments on your creations as at present you have to check your page to see if any comments have come in. There’s Achievements too, a clear nod to both Xbox Live and Steam’s successful integration of this feature – and they’re an interesting mix of achievements too, with a combination of simple “play this game for 40 hours” style ones along with more complex “Win the Civilisation Stage by launching nuclear missiles”-type ones that encourage replaying the game in different styles – plus the fact that playing the game in different styles actually makes a difference. My first race was an aggressive species of carnivore, which meant they spent a lot of their time fighting. (Plus their voice ended up sounding like Brian Blessed, a fact which I was immensely pleased about.) My new species is completely different. They are non-aggressive, social herbivores, which has meant that the strategies required to survive the various stages (they’re currently up to the Civ stage) are rather different, focusing on defence or negotiation rather than outright killfests.

So is Spore the masterpiece the hype makes it out to suggest? Who knows. What I do feel, though, is that different people will take different things from it. I will certainly enjoy revisiting it with different creatures with different personalities and abilities and attempting to play the game in different ways. Others may tire of it quickly due to its relatively simple gameplay – simple compared to a more in-depth strategy game, at least. Others may spend most of their time in the Creators and enjoy adding more and more content to both their and other peoples’ games. It’s certainly a game with a broad appeal and, if we have to use that over-used term “casual” game, it’s a good example of a game that is easily accessible by both people who have been gaming for years and those who are relatively new or not as obsessively interested in the hobby as some of us.

(Oh, and the fact that they incorporated the music from M.U.L.E. into the trading screens in the Space phase is enough to make me want to have Maxis’ babies… though the purist Atari geek in me wishes they’d used the Atari version instead of the inferior C64 tune. My new creature, Gollumer, is a homage to that game.)

Check out my profile on the Sporepedia and feel free to add me if you’ve got the game and haven’t added me already – the name is, of course, “angryjedi”.