• After the game applied a patch (which took a few minutes, though this may be more down to the fact that I hadn’t long started up my computer and it was still doing that inexplicable hard-drive churning Windows does for about half an hour after you turn it on when you’ve had a computer for more than a year or so), I logged straight in and started playing with no hiccups whatsoever. Looks like those server issues are mostly sorted out — though there are plenty marked as “full”. The team at Maxis/EA have bumped up the server number by a significant amount, however, so you should always be able to find one on which you can play. Pleasingly, too, you can play on any server in the world, meaning cross-region play is viable.
• Is the “online-only” requirement a form of DRM? Frankly I don’t give a shit, much like I didn’t with Diablo III. As far as I’m concerned, it’s an online game, regardless of the previous games’ single-player status. Thinking of it in that way, regardless of the reasons for it, means considerably less frustration. It’s annoying when you can’t log in, yes, but it’s annoying when you can’t log in to World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2, too. Getting irritable doesn’t solve the issues, though. Go and play something else for a bit. There are enough neat things added to the game by it being online that I have no problem with it requiring a connection to play. It should have worked perfectly on launch day, yes, but I am yet to see any online game from any publisher — even those who know what they are doing — not have server issues for the first few days after launch. We should be past that by now, but we’re not; that’s a fact we can do little about.
• The actual online component of the game is very cool, giving the game “world” a much greater feeling of life than in any other past SimCity game. I was playing a small two-city region with a friend earlier, and I was constantly kept updated as to what was going on in their city as well as mine. I could set up trade routes, send gifts of products or money or volunteer some of my “spare” emergency services to go and help out in their city, which brought me some money. There’s actually a pretty neat requirement to cooperate here — if your city is manufacturing tons of stuff and has nowhere to sell it, you’d better ask the other people in the region nicely if they wouldn’t mind awfully building some commercial districts so that you can send them your goods. The various city plots also all have various resources that can be tapped using the right specialist buildings, so there’s plenty of scope for collaboration there.
• The actual gameplay is simultaneously familiar and probably the biggest change to the series since it went isometric-perspective with SimCity 2000. Gone is the grid-based system, meaning you can build roads in any shape you like, and even make them actually curve. Gone is the rectangular zoning system, replaced with the ability to only zone immediately along roads, with the maximum building size on a road determined by how big the road is. In comes a much deeper use of various buildings like the police station and fire station, all of which can be expanded by bolting extra bits on to them such as new garages, offices, prison cells and other things appropriate to the structure in question. There’s a huge amount of depth, but it’s kept accessible by a simple, logical interface in which clicking on a particular category of items to build also summons relevant overlay information relating to, say, power, water or crime.
• The available area for buildings cities is quite small, but again I don’t mind too much. I don’t think I ever played a previous SimCity well enough to fill a full region, so I’m absolutely fine with the small space. When it’s full, I can either work hard to try and optimize it, knock it down and start again, or go and play in another region altogether. The game features a sort of “win condition” if you want one — each region has a space for a “Great Work” that generally requires the collaboration of all the cities in the area to complete, and if you want to say that you’ve “won” when you’ve built one, so be it.
• The soundtrack is lovely, being composed by one Mr Chris Tilton of Alias and Fringe fame.
• The tutorial is a bit patronising. I’ve played too many Facebook games to tolerate condescending pulsing arrows telling me what I should click on. I couldn’t see a means of skipping it, either, though it did at least have some useful information to impart.
• On the whole, it’s pretty good. It scratches that nice “creative” itch that SimCity has always stimulated, and the collaborative aspect opens up some really interesting possibilities. Once the server issues are stabilised and the team at Maxis can start concentrating on doing things like the regular special events and competitions, it’s going to be a really cool experience, I think.

On a whim, I started playing Spore again recently, this time with the Galactic Adventures expansion installed, which I never got around to trying previously. I still haven’t got far enough in my new game to come across any of the aforementioned Galactic Adventures, but I thought I’d revisit my thoughts on the original game, as I last contemplated it way back in 2008.

Spore caught some flak on its original release for a number of reasons — mainly dodgy DRM with very strict activation limits and early online connectivity issues (some things never change, huh?) — but also attracted criticism for not living up to its hype. Originally dubbed SimEverything, the game was supposed to be Will “SimCity” Wright’s last great masterpiece, simulating the entirety of life right from single-celled primordial soup up to space exploration. A lofty goal, for sure. But how well did it manage, really?

Beginning as a single-celled organism that is either carnivorous or herbivorous, you’re thrown into the primordial soup and tasked with surviving. Carnivores must eat little red chunks, herbivores must eat little green chunks. Both can be found just floating in the water, but carnivores can help the process along by killing other organisms. Herbivores, conversely, spend a lot of time running away to begin with.

As you eat, you gain DNA points which can be spent on improving your creature with various parts. In order to evolve your creature, you must mate with another of your kind, which pops up the creature editor and allows said parts to be bolted on. These range from various fins and tentacles that improve speed and agility, to spiky things, poison-spitters and other defensive measures. It’s even possible, with enough available points, to replace the creature’s mouth to turn it from a herbivore into a carnivore — or even to give it two mouths, allowing it to eat everything.

This process continues for a while, with your creature regularly expanding in size until once screen-filling enemies become tiny little minnows in the background, until you eventually fill the progress bar at the bottom of the screen and evolve a brain. At this point, it’s possible to continue swimming around in the soup to gain further points and collect any parts you missed, but the game nudges you in the direction of the next stage, which focuses on your creature’s life.

After climbing out of the ocean and evolving legs (which you attach yourself as you see fit), you then get to explore the surface of the randomly-generated world your game takes place on. At this point, progress mostly comes about through either befriending or destroying other species. New creature parts can be found on long-dead skeletons on the planet, and the player’s creature evolved with these parts, each of which offer various bonuses to either social or combat abilities.

Upon confronting another creature and choosing whether to befriend or kill it, a little minigame occurs. Combat is rather MMO-ish, with a small hotbar of up to four different abilities available. Socialisation, meanwhile, involves watching what the rival creatures do and copying their moves. As this phase progresses, the player’s creature gains the ability to bring along a “pack” of other creatures — either of their own species or allied organisms — which makes both socialisation and combat easier.

To make life a bit more interesting, certain species are naturally aggressive and will attack anything on sight, and there are a few “epic” creatures wandering around who are considerably larger than everything else on the planet. These can be defeated in combat with a bit of care, but for the most part they’re something to avoid and admire from afar.

Once the Creature phase is over, the Tribe phase begins. Here, the player is no longer in control of a single member of their species, but instead takes on a more “overseer” role, controlling their tribe like an RTS. Progression through this phase is determined by either befriending or destroying rival tribes.

You begin this stage with a small, simple village and the ability to construct a few “tools”. Food must be gathered to feed the tribe and is also used as currency to purchase tools and create new tribe members. Tools fall into two main categories, as with creature parts: social and combat. Social tools take the form of musical instruments, while combat tools are weapons and a healing ability.

Upon meeting another tribe, like in the Creature phase, players must choose what stance to approach them in. If approaching in social stance, both tribes will line up in front of each other and one will “perform” for the other. The “audience” tribe will call out different instruments that they want to hear, and the player must quickly activate their instruments to please them before the audience gets bored. Combat is simple point-and-click RTS-style, though there is also a hotbar of special abilities according to what weapons the tribe has equipped at the time.

Following this point, the game enters the Civilization stage, where the player must conquer the planet they are on by taking over, buying or destroying all the rival cities. The game becomes more complex at this point, with a lot more building, trading and military conquest — though as with the previous components of the game, this phase can be passed through peacefully with a bit of effort.

Following this, the Space phase begins, and some would argue this is where the game begins proper — indeed, this is the phase that the Galactic Adventures expansion concentrates entirely on. Players must explore the galaxy in their custom-designed ship, fly down to planets, collect items, terraform, secure “spice” mines, trade with other species, complete missions, defeat enemies and, eventually, if you want to “finish” the game, build yourself up enough to take a lengthy expedition to the centre of the galaxy — a risky prospect, since this is where the Borg-like Grox, the main antagonists of the game, live.

So Spore certainly does follow life from its humble beginnings up to the space age, and it’s very satisfying to look at the comprehensive “history” screen in the game and see how your creature has evolved over time. The main criticisms that were levelled at the game on its original release, however, were more to do with the fact that none of the game’s phases had a lot of depth to them — it wanted to be “five games in one” but didn’t really pull it off as well as some people wanted.

It doesn’t really matter, though. Revisiting it now has reminded me that Spore is a very entertaining game — sure, it’s pretty lightweight compared to some heavy hitters in the strategy and god game genres, but that only serves to make the game accessible to all. I’m actually rather glad about this, since I find a lot of strategy games rather heavy going and consequently find myself trounced by computer or human players on a regular basis. I can succeed in Spore while still feeling like I’ve been challenged somewhat, and simply enjoy the sense of progression, discovery and ever-expanding scale that the game offers — not to mention its wry sense of humour and wonderfully self-referential nature. The game even plays music from M.U.L.E. at certain points, for pity’s sake.

And I haven’t even mentioned what was one of the main draws of the game on its original release: its focus on user-generated content. All through the game, your galaxy is populated by creations from other players. With the Galactic Adventures expansion, this user-generated content goes far beyond player-made creatures, buildings and vehicles — there are full missions designed by players. It’s impressive that it all works as well as it does — content simply “invades” your game seamlessly, and built-in community features allow you to rate, comment on or, if necessary, ban content without leaving the game.

I haven’t yet touched the Galactic Adventures content since my current save has only just advanced to the Civilization stage, but I’m looking forward to investigating it. Further thoughts will follow when I’ve had time to check it out. In the meantime, if you get the chance to grab a cheap copy of Spore, it’s well worth a shot.

[Click the comic to see a bigger version if you can’t read the text.]

The Sims shouldn’t be good. It really shouldn’t. It represents all the things that people say they’d never want to do in a game. People always say that they don’t want their characters modeled in such detail that they need to eat, sleep, poo and the like. But it was this level of detail that brought the original The Sims game to life.

Over time, the series has developed in many wild and crazy ways. To the casual observer, each game may appear to be fundamentally the same. But in fact, each new game (and, for that matter, each new expansion pack) has changed the way the game is played to a considerable degree. So much so that The Sims 3 now has the potential to go in any one of a wild number of disparate directions according to what the player feels like doing at any time. What other games do you know where you can do this:

AND this:

AND this…

AND this…

AND this…

AND… you get the idea.

The Sims 3, with its current two expansion packs World Adventures and Ambitions, represents an enormously diverse experience that is by no means just about telling little people when to go to the toilet. No, what we have is probably pretty close to what Will Wright originally intended when he envisioned the series. A life simulator. A game where the player is pretty much free to do as they please.

If they want to stay at home and concentrate on building a family, they can do that. If they want to go out and explore perilous dungeons around the world, they can do that. If they want to try and prove they’re the best at a tricky profession, they can do that too. Or if they want to try and juggle all those things? Well, they can do that too. Amarysse, depicted above, is a successful athlete, lesbian, adoptive mother to a young child, treasure hunter and local hero in parts of China. And she’s only about halfway through her life. By the time she eventually shuffles off this mortal coil and it’s time for her adoptive son to take up the mantle of her family and prove himself, she’ll have a whole ton of experiences to look back on.

As you may have gathered, I have very much rediscovered The Sims recently. And if you’ve never given it a try, I can highly recommend it, even if you’ve never been a fan of the series before. You will be able to find something in that game for you to enjoy. Even if it’s something along the lines of this.