Tag: M.U.L.E

Spore: My Take

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

O HAI OMG AI CAN HAZ SPORN YA?

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”.

M.U.L.E.

Many people who have been playing video games and mis-spending their youth (and beyond) as much as I have will have one game that really sticks in their mind from the “good old days”, that they like to return to as much as possible and are gratified to discover that it’s actually still good.

Some retro games hold up better than others. Some age gracefully despite limited technology. Others remind us just how far we have come since those early days of one-man programming teams. Others are so well-respected that they spawn modern-day remakes or sequel after sequel… or endless variations on Xbox Live Arcade.

My particular fond memory is for an early EA title for the Atari 8-bit range of computers named M.U.L.E. This game involved four colonists from a diverse range of species attempting to make the best use of the resources a small planet named Proc Irata had to offer… yes, that planet’s name is indeed “Atari Corp” backwards (and this wouldn’t be the last time Atari Corp would have their name used as an element in a game, with Red Rat’s Laser Hawk following a few years later pitting a lone chopper against the forces of the “evil Proc Irata”. One wonders if Atari had any say in all this.) and, as these things tend to go, to make as much money as possible by the end of a period of time that was set according to the “difficulty” level. I use the term “difficulty” loosely as, unusually, the difficulty setting in M.U.L.E., rather than simply making the computer players harsher and cheaper, it actually added new layers of complexity to the game.

M.U.L.E. was played on a month-by-month basis, with each month being a game turn split into several phases. First up was the Land Grant, where a cursor moved over the single-screen landscape of the planet one plot at a time, and players competed simultaneously to be the first to press their fire button to claim a plot. Different plots were good for different things – mountains were good for mining, the river valley running down the middle of the map was good for food production and everywhere else was good for energy production. This stage, despite its simplicity, was teeth-gnashingly frustrating in the way a good board game is when someone pips you to nabbing, say, the sheep port in Catan.

Next up, players took it in turns to actually manage their plots and assign them to particular purposes. This was done on a strict time limit, so players had to make decisions quickly. In order to assign a plot, players had to outfit one of the titular M.U.L.Es for energy, mining or food production before taking them out onto the map and dropping them into a plot, taking care to place them carefully, otherwise the M.U.L.E. would simply escape. In this phase, if players had time, and if they were playing on one of the higher difficulty levels, they could also attend a land auction for an additional plot of land, scan an area for its suitability for mining the more precious minerals and finish their turn by wandering into the pub to receive a “gambling bonus” according to how much time they had left.

Next up was production, which was sometimes preceded by a random event affecting production of one or more of the resources. This could be anything from sunspots increasing energy production to a pirate raid stealing stock from the colony’s store. This random element added some tension to the game and also meant that someone who looked like a runaway victor could have their big plans scuppered at short notice, which was always immensely satisfying.

Finally came the auctions, where players were able to sell their surplus stock either to other players or the store. Auctions were handled in an interesting manner, with players setting buying and selling prices by walking up and down the screen. If two players met, they would exchange goods and money until one or the other moved away. If no players wanted to buy or sell, goods could also be bought or sold from the colony’s stores (for very high or low prices respectively). After the auctions, the four players were ranked according to their net work before the whole process repeated again another five to twenty-three times.

So that’s how M.U.L.E. works, and its simple yet elegant mechanics, along with its good sense of humour throughout, make it a game that’s still fun to play today. Interestingly, though, none of these things are the reason why I remember M.U.L.E. so fondly, because I was much too young to understand how to play it properly when I was first introduced to it.

Rather, two things stick in my mind. Firstly, there was the music.

I defy you to not be humming this masterpiece of the POKEY chip all day. Evoking an appropriately adventurous sci-fi feel (in my mind, at least), M.U.L.E.’s theme is one of my favourite video game themes of all time.

Secondly, there was the “characterisation” of the game. In The Squadron of Shame‘s podcast, we’ve often discussed the merits of having a truly immersive game world. And M.U.L.E’s, while simple, worked brilliantly. Each alien race was distinctive and had its own character, despite only having about three or four frames of animation at most. The fact that this strange little world had its own curious rules, such as catching the little white dot (the “Wumpus”) on the map rewarding you with extra money, made it all the more appealing to be a part of – and made you feel a little sad when the ship came to pick you up on the last turn.

M.U.L.E.’s a game I remember fondly for all the wrong reasons – yet fortuitously, it still plays very well today. I highly recommend exploring its curious charms – ideally, with three other people.