Half Gamer Half Crab

Ah, the vaunted first post. How to approach it? Well, I'm just going to say hello to you, whoever is reading this down the line and has gone back to see what the first post said. Hello future! Do we have flying cars yet? Also, who wins Superbowl XXXI? I could stand to place a large bet.

Ahem. Yes well. I'm fairly new to this blogging scene so many blog features are going to be added in the future. Please bear with me as I figure it all out.

And now, to business: a post about videogames. Specifically, the recently released Spore, the latest from Will Wright and Maxis, of SimCity and The Sims fame. Now, I expect most are familiar with the premise of Spore, but for the uninitiated you take control of a species, which you design yourself, guiding them from a bacteria in the ocean deeps to interstellar glory. The game leads you through five phases; Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. Going through these phases also highlights my biggest problem with Spore.

In the Cell phase, your adjustments to your creature can have a significant difference. Placing spikes at the front of your creature can have a very different effect to placing them on its side, for example. The differences are not generally too profound, but in this case it feels like a genuine limitation of the gameplay. You can't have too much influence because you exist on a 2D plane.

The problem is that once you move to a 3D plane, which is to say once you graduate to the Creature phase, your options don't increase. In fact, in terms of affecting the gameplay, they decrease - you simply choose parts which affect your stats. Worse, these don't stack. It doesn't matter if you build some magnificent armored beast, her maximum health will be the same as someone who simply puts one tiny instance of the best health boost item on their creature. In point of fact, it makes little difference what kind of creature you design. As long as the parts are there, they will function in the same way. This is a major disappointment to me; I was imagining the fun of trying to design the fastest creature, or a lumbering beast, or the most aerodynamic thing possible, something that could stay airborne forever. All these things are simply the result of which parts you choose. Want to run faster? Just choose better feet.

Moving on from there you enter the Tribal phase. And here customization matters even less. You can essentially add very minor bonuses to your creatures, and nothing else. You choose what buildings your tribe has, and thus what items they can use, but it's very hard to get this wrong in any way - it's very hard to do anything with it at all, really.

Next is the Civilization phase. At this point the editors are mostly superfluous. All you can choose with your vehicles is whether they emphasise speed, health, or attack. When it comes to buildings, you can do nothing. They are preset, and an untextured cube will have the same entertainment value as an intricate skyscraper dedicated to pleasure. You can improve the money production of your cities by ensuring their layout is good, but that's simply a matter of placing your three building types in the right way. There is no sense of the cities belonging, because they are so grossly simplified that they are meaningless - you just need to put the round peg in the round hole.

And then comes space. Even the residual influence you used to have disappears now. You can build colonies in the same way as the Civ-stage's cities, but that is all. Your spaceship - the culmination of your hours of play, the avatar of your entire species and civilization, and the unit you personally control - can be as beautiful or ugly, as well or poorly designed as you like, and it will make not one whit of difference.

The Cell stage is the only glimmer of what Spore should have been. The creators are integral, they have been marketed from the start as such, and to encounter such a neutered set of editors is simply not fun. Will Wright apparently thinks of this as more a toy than a game. I do not understand why it could not be both. Design would surely be all the more rewarding when you craft something you both like and which is effective.

Don't get me wrong; Spore is a lot of fun and I'm enjoying it. But that doesn't reduce my disappointment, and my feeling that the game goes in reverse: It starts at its most complex and retreats to simplicity. The reason I complain is because I was expecting something quite revolutionary, and what we got was a fairly generic creator where you just add certain parts for certain stat effects.