Topic: Spore (Read 4390 times)

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I was talking to a friend a few nights ago and we both agreed that where Spore starts to become repetitive, boring, unfun, or whatever is when the game takes the focus away from you actually being your creature, and more towards you just sort of... guiding them. Once civilization hits and you never even control one of your creatures again (I mean the creature itself, not the vehicles), I think Spore loses lots of appeal and the fun factor drops drastically.

Cell and creature are fun though. I like to just explore in creature stage. I like the starting planets, and I like it when they feel very expansive early on.
Last Edit: September 13, 2008, 11:01:10 pm by UPRC
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I was actually enjoying myself with this game! About halfway through the tribal era, it got to me... yeah this is gay.
So, you COULD work on food supply and raise your warriors to fight other tribes (and end up losing all progress if you die) OR learn all the instruments and play a stupid song game three times per tribe to win their hearts over.
Then the city customising was idiotic dull, like Sim City for the A.D.D.
When it came to war time... raise a religious army, and preach to the world. Who needs violence? Spread the good word of Spore to your neighbours.

Then you get a spaceship! What fun. We can make a brand new gummiship that takes three or four mousewheel scrolls to exit or enter atmosphere/solar systems... And then we enter the bulk of the game; playing God.


While this game falls on its face for being at all what it was hyped for, it has kept me entertained for a good few hours, and I'll probably keep playing 'casually' as they apparently want... but man.
The evolution was so gaytardic, to coin the word with Spore random name generator!

Give it up for the Dudesoftians though. The long arms sprouting like antlers from their foreheads was a sweet move in the evolution, and quite humorous when they decided to ignore their torso arms and use the long spider arms instead for all actions. (Learning to use weapons with that sudden spider-arm growth... I laughed).

All in all, if you want to join the unfortunate club I'm in, buy this game. Otherwise find some pirate copy. It's not worth it with all the other games coming out---and FORGET about game of the year award!
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I can sum the entire Spore game up in 6 words "Kill things or dance with them".
No seriously, that is the entire game.

First phase plays like Flow, carnivores eat things, herbivores eat plants. You grow bigger and eat bigger things.
Second phase plays like a very, very basic MMORPG. Carnivores go around killing and eating things to gain exp, herbivores go around dancing with things to earn exp.
Third (tribal) phase plays like "My first RPS" and was proaably designed for 2 year olds to play. It has no depth at all, no units, resource mangement, planning out your base or anything. You make as many unit as possible (6, then 9 and then 12), then either kill things if you are a carnivore, or dance with them if you're a herbivore. This stage literally took me about 10 minutes to do.
Fourth (civilization stage) is basically the tribal stage, only with robots and cities. Make as many robots as possible, and then go around either killing everything, or dancing with it.
Final stage is the space stage, and would you believe it, you either go around killing things (carnivores) or making friends with them (herbivores). This stage contains a little more depth than the others, but the depth is wasted on collecting silly little extras basically (now your planet can have pink water instead of blue water!!!).

This game basically sucks. If you enjoyed playing the Sims you might enjoy this game, otherwise you might play through it once (as the game as absolutely no replay value at all), which will take 3-4 hours at max, then you'll be bored of it and probably never play it again.
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uh, arent most games able to be summed up as "go around killing things"?

mario RUN AND JUMP ON STUFF

note: yeah spore is really vapid and shallow, but now that ive modded the space stage so i dont get "random" events literally every 5 minutes it is pretty cool
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If I wanted a god game i'd play Black&White, which also doesn't live up to the hype but atleast I can actually have fun toying with my worshipers or just spending all my time playing with my avatar thing.

All of it's fun factor is you being a lone creature exploring a world stage. The tribe stage (and civilization stage) probably would've been more entertaining if you could directly control one of them as your personal whatever or have that as an alternative you could choose before you start a new gam (for both civilization, and tribe stage). Adding other things such as resource gathering would make more sense to me and seriously I would've settled for the (atleast) space stage to be about as interactive as the first Civilization game.

And... I had the feeling when they removed blood.
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Damn this sucks guys. I knew it wasn't going to live up to the hype, but I thought it would AT LEAST tide me over until LittleBigPlanet. Instead, I stayed up all night and beat the stupid game. :| Guess it's back to injecting WoW into my gameneed-vein for now.
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Oh right, the only part that a creature needs period is a mouth of some sort or it'll starve to death.

Which means you could make a fleshy ball with a mouth and half ass it all the way to the end, and after beating it I could choose whatever stage I want now and play that stage as long as I like. So MAYBE there is some worth to this game after all.

EDIT: Wheres the natural disastor tag? You'd think that there would be one, considering how important the whole ecosystem thing is for something like this to work.
Last Edit: September 14, 2008, 02:32:18 am by Boulvae
A tool is a tool regardless. I mean if you suck, you suck, and not even the most perfect tool could save you. And if your damn good then even with the worst tool ever conceived you could chug out some high quality shit.
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It's not really a bad thing for a mario or shooting game to be summed up into 3 words because you'd expect those games to be fairly simple. Whereas on the other hand Spore is supposed to be a god/evolution simulator so naturally you'd assume there would be more depth to it than just "kill things or dance with them".
oh i know, like i said it did turn out way too shallow for its own good, but still i found the sum up pretty ridiculous. like, in the space stage, it very much isnt just KILL THINGS OR DANCE (?) WITH THEM, srsly. you do got fighting and i guess dancing if you class crop circles as dancing, but you also got trade and alliances and terraforming and artifact hunting and all that shit too.

in fact i think there is TOO MUCH stuff packed into the space stage, it is kinda overwhelming.

i like these sum ups, tho.
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pretty funny tho how velfarre and jester were the ones most hyped up about this game and are now the only ones defending it.

yea i remember the past how about it.
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Well I was hyped to hell for the game too, and I will defend it but... After the game separates you FROM your creature and just makes you a guide of sorts, that's when the game becomes very bland.

There are freeware games better than Spore.. Pirate this. It's not worth $50 or more. From how much time everyone is spending on the game, $15 or $20 at most would be more reasonable.


Also Will Wright is being an idiot. "We didn't want reception like Half-Life." Okay, Will, so basically you wanted you game to succeed less??
"We wanted it to succeed like the Sims." I liked the Sims. Spore does not even compare to the Sims. At all, Will. At all.
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man saying there are freeware games better than it isn't really defending it.

fuck that's actually a burn if anything.
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More entertaining, at least.. Spore is a blast for me in the first two stages, cell and creature.. But after that, man, I don't know what Will Wright and Maxis were thinking. There's just so little depth and so much room for improvement.
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Whoa whoa whoa... have you guys even made it to the space age? How far have you gotten in that? It get's quite a bit more entertaining and deep compared to the tribal and civilization stages.

Spore is in no way a bad game. The DRM is fucking stupid and the game does not meet up to the hype because there are some bland bits and customization of cities could have been handled better. That said, the product we have isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination. Boring bits, yes. Flawed aspects, yes. Overall though the game rocks.
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I'm really lucky in that I have no time to play this game, so i get maybe 20 minutes of playtime in at a time.

Just enough time for me to start thinking 'wow this is colossally gay and repetitive' but then i have to go do something else.

edit: And it's not even that I'm disappointed. I was looking forward to this game almost solely because of the creature creator and to me the game sucks not relative to the hype, but totally on its own.
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there was probably tons of content cut from this game because they didn't have time to put the finishing touches on them. i'm disappointed that you couldn't make a true flying or aquatic creature.

It's a fun game, but it didn't live up to the hype. but I haven't really played any game that has lived up to hype!
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there was probably tons of content cut from this game because they didn't have time to put the finishing touches on them. i'm disappointed that you couldn't make a true flying or aquatic creature.

It's a fun game, but it didn't live up to the hype. but I haven't really played any game that has lived up to hype!

Going by the quote posted here, it wasn't so much that they didn't have time as it was that they didn't give a shit.
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I believe they actually had stuff finished off but DELIBERATELY cut it to appeal more to the mainstream market.

Also Spore is INSANELY BORING. I can't even get past the second stage without giving up out of boredom. Today was well I did have a fun experience fleeing from a giant behemoth, but then the game crashed. It's just I dunno, I'll give it a few more tries because I hear the later stages are kinda fun, but this is gay. I mean I didn't expect it to be Civ4, but jesus this is just bland. I can't see how the critics can give it more than a 70-80% rating.
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Alright! Well, I have completely ignored the hype for this game, I have not followed it at all. I think I am the only guy that has showed no interest in this game whatsoever since the moment it was announced. Even after watching the hour long tech demo I thought it looked pretty dumb, so this game has not been hyped for me at all and I had no intention of playing it until you all mentioned how much of a let down it was... then I decided to see for myself.

I've JUST got out of the cell stage and messed around a bit as a runaround creature. The Cell stage reminds of fl0w a LOT, as in it feels like it would be a complete rip off if this game hadn't been in development for such a longer period of time. The thing that is REALLY SURPRISING though is how clunky the controls are compared to flow. The creature is awkward to control and not very fluid at all, it felt like fl0w but with horrific "toon" graphics and a bad control system. Also GREAT WORK MAINSTREAM GAME MAKERS THAT I CAN COMPARE YOUR GAME TO A FLASH GAME AND SAY THAT THE FLASH GAME COMES OFF AS THE VICTOR: SUCCESS!

I booted up the creature creator (which i had heard so much about) as a cell and tried to make my little blob more interesting, but save for ADDING A HORN or ELECTRIC ANUS BULB there was not much to do. It was pretty funny that my creature looked almost identical to my brothers when we both finished the cell stage, except for the fact that I had givin my cell BIG HORNS and he gave his like, speed fins.

So I evolved onto land after this tediously long fl0w-a-like and ran around for a bit. Nothing really happened, I bumped into another creature and ate it, opened up the editor and had a REAL PLAY this time. The creature creator tool is pretty neat when you get more interesting parts, and I did make an interesting creature but I invaded some creatures nest and ate them all, I don't want to do this for a long period of time, my DNA bar is going up slowly and I just want to get more creature parts and move on.

This stage of the game is not even as interesting as THE SIMS and THE SIMS is fucking boring!!! Anyway I gave up for a bit at this point and watched Dexter.
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Tonight, I'm going to make the TFT creature.
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I played the Creature Stage on a friend's PC today, and was very unimpressed with the gameplay.  It's pretty shitty that they would put all of this time into making such an elaborate creature creation system and massive worlds yet leave you with like a handful of possible things to do (eat, dance, fuck, kill). It was about the most simple and watered-down gameplay I've ever seen, actually.  Hopefully Space Stage or whatever is more interesting than what I played today, a monkey could play that.

I don't know how Will Wright's gonna say this was geared towards "casual gamers".  That worked with The Sims because it's like playing house on your computer, a lot of people casually enjoy that.  But with the coverage of this game, and a fanbase who was going nuts for a while, you're looking at more than just a casual crowd playing this game. 
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