Monday, October 6, 2008

Respect the superior race



SPORE, the one, the only, the evolutionary game. The game which can make you smile, make you laugh, and can even tuck you to bed.
A highly anticipated game, Spore started out just fine, great even with a few glitches however, but the game managed to overcome it`s not so nice parts with state of the art possibilities, the illusion of freedom, and a strong hunger for creativity. One of the things i liked most about Spore is that no matter how big or how ugly you are, there will always a creature stronger and another one weaker. Also there are three ways of going through the game : herbivore, carnivore or omnivore. The herbivore part clearly suggests a strong amount of "EMO-l33tness" having to go peaceful on just about every other species or you end up dead. As for the carnivore part, the game just gets easier, you kill everything, you eat their corpses for hit points, and all that stuff until you end up dominating the world. The omnivores tend to be more industrious, and unlike the others, they prefer to buy their opponents.
The game lets you start at the EMO stage, in a small or big pond on a selected planet, you appear. Small enough to eat and ugly enough to be avoided. The first stage of Spore can be compared to a PacMan game, meaning that the only thing you can do is eat shit and/or die.Trying to somewhat represent a "cell`s" life in the real world, but here, the more shit you eat the bigger you get, the bigger you get the more dangerous you are. The way you build your creature isn`t as important as it should be, because you can morph it into a dick, literary, and back at any time you want. Sure the number of legs, teeth, horns and other mutant parts are important, but where and how you place them simply does not matter.
After reaching a certain level, a brain spawns on your creature, somewhere where the head is supposed to be, congratulations, you reached the creature stage. In this stage things tend to be a little more complex, but sadly, they are not. There is only one rule : Only the strongest/richest survive. After the creature stage i climbed on a ladder and reached the conclusion that the fun just ended, and i mean it. Up to the creature stage you create the creature, after that, you dress it up. The tribal stage turns into a RTS, a bad RTS ofcourse, it is short and hardly worth playing. Few moments after and voila, i got to build my own city, fact which sounds good in theory but sucks ball in practice. Designing buildings and pleasuring my Penises, C`OMMON. Here, the goals is simple : kill/buy/convert other cities, in other words, become "the biggest, the best".
Despite the fact that i tried playing it on all possible methods: religious, economic, military; at the last stage it all ends up the same way, an RPG, a BAD rpg to be exact. While the first four stage are short and fun, the last stage involves a series of shitty missions, involving planet coloring, collecting EMO`s from all over the galaxy and blowing up would-be enemies.
It`s hard to believe though, this game promised a lot, but what it really did is quite simple, it put together 5 types of games and the result is clear : BULLSHIT. The fun stages are short and the fucked up ones are long and full of shit.

I guess i should say more about SPORE, more about the "Sporepedia", but when i think that the creator of spore made his money by creating girl-games like The Sims, I rather cut my tongue out. Who knows, maybe Will Wright only wanted to show the world that there`s a little Hitler in all of us.

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