Spore!

[Deadly_Nightshade]

SporeCraft:

 

 

 

[SteveThaiBinh]

It lacks cuteness. I'm afraid Spore minus cuteness doesn't work. Do the guns works?

[Deadly_Nightshade]

I have no idea, the article did not say...

[Moatilliatta]

Do the guns works?

No. Spore vehicles don't fire from their guns and it looks quite ridiculus.

[LadyCrimson]

...space stage is the best stage/"real" game, or something.

IThe different stages all have something different to bring to the table and they're all lovely and sparkly in their own way (except tribal and Civ which just plain sucks, both of them, sucks.). The reason most people say that the space stage is the most fun is that it is definately the most "harcore" part and will appeal to people who normally play lots of games.

I'm finding I dislike Tribal stage enough to have a difficult time wanting to play to get past it, even tho it wouldn't take that long. I liked Cell stage because it's cute, but it doesn't have enough depth to make it a stage you'd want to play 10 times. Creature stage was more fun, but it's not deep enough to engage the mind for long, either - mostly it's fun because of finding parts and "designing" your creature as you go. Still, of the 3 stages so far, I'd re-play Creature stage far more than anything else.

 

A big quibble that I personally have: No save/exit confirmation message, meaning that if you hit that green arrow by accident, you've lost your progress.

 

On the positive side, I discovered that creatures you make in the editor and saved, have a random chance of showing up in your game as one of the AI creatures. When Tribal stage introduced the first "go befriend this tribe' example mission, I was startled when a creature I'd tinkered around with making popped out of the ground. I'd guess the same applies to the other stages. So if you love to make creatures/vehicles w/the editor, but don't use Sporepedia, at least you'll have some possible "variety" in the game (vs. only Maxis creations) that way.

Edited September 27, 2008 by LadyCrimson

[Moatilliatta]

A good tip for tribal stage is to kill an epic creature as you'll be able to amass enough food quickly to last you the rest of the stage. Unless of course you're a herbivore in which case you're out of luck.

 

How much time have you spent on tribal? It didn't last more than 40 minutes for me.

[Nick_i_am]

What the freak, it's a kiddie RTS, even hard mode is a pile of cake.

[LadyCrimson]

I've probably spent an hour or so. It's easy to play and I know you can get through all the stages very fast, but the first time through I don't like to do that, especially since once you leave a stage, you can't go back and explore w/out starting a new game..and I'm not sure how much I'll want to re-play, yet. Plus, I've only allied two tribes - and beyond that I've done nothing but gather food - yet the progress bar is half full. It happens so fast that I find myself delaying filling the bar because I want to explore the environment I guess.

 

And I'm an omnivore. I got the omnivore mouth part in cell stage and put it on. I was rated a carnivore, so all the mouth parts since have been that, but luckily I never took off the omnivore mouth. So I have two mouths - the omnivore one looks like skinny horns and so I use them as a head decoration alongside a stat-giving carnivore mouth. :D

[Moatilliatta]

I too wanted to delay and explore until I realized there wasn't anything to explore.

 

Exploring starts in the space stage like everything else does.

[LadyCrimson]

True...in Creature stage I wanted to delay so I could build my creature w/some high-level or just cute parts...but after a while I realized/remembered it wouldn't matter in space stage much, if at all. At the moment the main aspect to these early stages, for me, is making sure my actions mean I get the stage-bonus I want.

 

Tho I was wondering if anyone felt like the bonus skills you get for manually playing through the phases was generally worth the bother? I haven't used them at all.

[Moatilliatta]

Stuff that are worth it:

 

Creature stage as predator gives your spaceship extra health. Very good.

 

Civ stage using military or religious means mean that you''l be slightly less bothered by eco disasters/ pirates. Slightly worth it.

 

Edit: The rest are crap.

Edited September 27, 2008 by Moatilliatta

[Moatilliatta]

You do also get a specific philosophy from going through it and some of those effects might be worth it. I've only tried the warrior one and that one sucks.

 

Useful spreadsheet.

[Moatilliatta]

A big quibble that I personally have: No save/exit confirmation message, meaning that if you hit that green arrow by accident, you've lost your progress.

Green arrow? In my game the green arrow symbolises the resume game button and not the exit game button. I also have confirmation dialogues upon both exit to main menu and exit to desktop.

[Nick_i_am]

If you're trying to metagame in Spore you're playing it wrong. Subjectively.

[Moatilliatta]

I realize that it might be news to you, nick, but Spore isn't an RPG.

[LadyCrimson]

Green arrow? In my game the green arrow symbolises the resume game button and not the exit game button. I also have confirmation dialogues upon both exit to main menu and exit to desktop.

I mean in-game, after you've "won" a stage and hitting the button means "automatically take me to the next stage" while I'm hollering "No, no, I didn't want to leave yet, and the save game was from 30 min. ago!" Heh. I don't have any confirmation screens of any kind at all, even for exit to desktop. I don't have the patch, if that means anything.

 

Anyway, I finished Civ and went to Space. Civ was horrible in a "oh god this is very awkward" way. So much so that I went ahead and went Econo instead of Military (so no raid bonus) because it seemed the easiest/fastest. I essentially did nothing but click cities and bribed my way into being allies & thus "conquering" everyone. The early part of the space/tutorial aspects were ok...your spaceship moves very fast at least. I dunno tho...I'm not finding it enthralling yet, but I just started.

 

I like my spaceship, however. I made a whiskered mousey-ship or something.

 

Edited September 28, 2008 by LadyCrimson

[Moatilliatta]

Awesome spaceship.

 

Here is a sort of checklist of stuff that most people (should) find fun in space:

Terraforming.

Exploring.

 

Watching a planet go from an icy ball of death to a liveable paradise is awesome and many of the planets are different or can be made to be different through plants and animals.

 

Exploring is cool if you manage to find the eastereggs or a really wellmade species.

 

There are other joys like uplifting a species only to terraform their planet to a burning ball of magma that has a very cathartic quality.

[LadyCrimson]

Space is visually fun, but I'm feeling frustrated by it more than enthralled.

 

1 - I'm poor. I'm sure the money will come as I figure things out more, but the point is it feels unbalanced because...in the first hour I was already offered the ability to buy a planet - because I said "hey wanna trade?" and did one mission for them - of course the amount to buy was completely out of my financial reach to do and likely will be for a long time. It makes the gameplay feel very lopsided or out balance or something, that they're willing to be bought before I've even made half the amount of the initial starter cash. On the plus side, the Speed Demon trait is one I like. It isn't necessary, I'm sure, but I can't imagine flying around at a slower speed once used to being so fast.

 

2 - I placed buildings on my first colony, then completed another (homeworld tutotrial) mission ... and when I went back to the colony, those buildings were missing and I had to re-pay to put them down again. Since they were expensive and I'm poor, this sucked. I don't know if it was because I'd put them down before I was 'supposed' to and the new mission re-set the planet - either way seems like a bug. There was no raid etc.

 

3 - reading the Spore forums I'm under the impression that what you do in one save game affects the other - ie, if you destroy 'Earth' while playing your "Grog" creatures, if you then load the save game to play your "Bizzby" creatures, when the Bizzby's get to that point in the game, Earth will be destroyed there too. If true (and some people ran casual tests so it seems to be) this also sucks. I can understand wanting to design a game where the whole galaxy is intertwined, but this means you cannot play separate civilizations and count on having certain options available to all of them, if that makes sense. Unless you buy more copies of the game/do separate installs, of course. Maybe there's a way around it, like some techie file-fiddling, but it's a poor concept to not allow for more than one 'galaxy' per install. IIRC, the Sims had a few "neighborhoods" you could play...keeping what went on in them entirely separate. They should have followed that model, because for me, this makes the entire new game/evolve-a-new creature on-a-new-planet aspect pointless. Unless I'm missing a 'new galaxy' type button somewhere? Or they changed it in the patch?

 

Anyway .... again, it's visually fun, and I like the zipping around from planet to planet to explore, even if all the planets basically look the same...there's some silly fun to be had, to be sure, and I think you can safely ignore 'raids' if you want, most of the time (not all the time, but...) so you can explore more if that's your thing, but over all ... meh. The city-building games like Pharaoh do a much better job at integrating casual/simple strategy-goals w/the tinkering fun of watching/building an evolution-civilization process.

 

P.S. If I had to score, I'd give Spore a 5.75 out of 10...and that mostly for the creature editor and being generally 'cute'.

Edited September 30, 2008 by LadyCrimson

[Tigranes]

Anyway .... again, it's visually fun, and I like the zipping around from planet to planet to explore

 

By the way, I think this is one of the reasons I couldn't enjoy Spore as much as I might have. (Yeah, it's gone now) Because of my 4-year-old computer spluttering every step of the way, everything was pretty damn ugly. All your creatures and houses would wear butt-ugly pixelated textures, there would be no grass or pretty effects, etc.... and I think for a game like Spore you really need to be able to play on recommended settings.

[LadyCrimson]

The actual space-map where you click to travel isn't that exciting no matter what...bunch of colored dots on black...but yeah, if you have a lot of lag and the pixels look like huge legos it definitely wouldn't be the same, since half the appeal is the 'cuteness.'

[Moatilliatta]

2 - I placed buildings on my first colony, then completed another (homeworld tutotrial) mission ... and when I went back to the colony, those buildings were missing and I had to re-pay to put them down again. Since they were expensive and I'm poor, this sucked. I don't know if it was because I'd put them down before I was 'supposed' to and the new mission re-set the planet - either way seems like a bug. There was no raid etc.

Happened to me as well.

3 - reading the Spore forums I'm under the impression that what you do in one save game affects the other - ie, if you destroy 'Earth' while playing your "Grog" creatures, if you then load the save game to play your "Bizzby" creatures, when the Bizzby's get to that point in the game, Earth will be destroyed there too. If true (and some people ran casual tests so it seems to be) this also sucks. I can understand wanting to design a game where the whole galaxy is intertwined, but this means you cannot play separate civilizations and count on having certain options available to all of them, if that makes sense. Unless you buy more copies of the game/do separate installs, of course. Maybe there's a way around it, like some techie file-fiddling, but it's a poor concept to not allow for more than one 'galaxy' per install. IIRC, the Sims had a few "neighborhoods" you could play...keeping what went on in them entirely separate. They should have followed that model, because for me, this makes the entire new game/evolve-a-new creature on-a-new-planet aspect pointless. Unless I'm missing a 'new galaxy' type button somewhere? Or they changed it in the patch?

The galaxy is big enough that people who aren't crazy won't explore it all and I really don't see how the earth involves options or anything. The Sol solar system is supposed to be an easter egg more than anything.

[Moatilliatta]

Possibly revealed stuff about the first Spore expansion.

[Strix]

Possibly revealed stuff about the first Spore expansion.

 

All links to the expansion have been Google archives and not active pages, this makes me think it was a mistake and not an actual product.

[LadyCrimson]

The galaxy is big enough that people who aren't crazy won't explore it all and I really don't see how the earth involves options or anything. The Sol solar system is supposed to be an easter egg more than anything.

It probably wouldn't bother most players, no. But it does bug me.

 

But one aspect where it might - emphasis on might - bother in a more general way:

 

You and your wife (or kid, or sibling) are playing Spore on the same computer, and you don't want to "ruin" anything for the other person with your actions, since not everyone likes to play the same way.

 

There was one forum post on the official forum where a player said they used their first space-colony race to zip over and destroy/clear out most of the planets anywhere near his current tribal stage race, or something to that effect...with the result that when that tribal race went to space themselves, they had almost no invasions/alerts/issues. That's fine if you plan/want it that way, but it might be annoying if you weren't aware. So what you do in Space stage w/one planet/species can potentially dramatically effect another "planet" you're also playing - especially if you chose to play planets that are very close together on the galaxy map.

[Aristes]

Yeah, a disappointing game altogether, although I did have fun playing it. I don't regret the purchase. Hell, I normally don't, but I wouldn't actually recommend it to anyone. I do wonder if anyone can answer this, though:

 

Does the game end in the space stage when you fill up all the bars and get the title of "omnipotent" or whatever? I mean, you can keep playing, but it that just so you get more badges? There's also the task to find the Grom (or Gron or whatever it is) empire. I've found them in one game, but stopped playing when I filled up the bars and became "most supreme god of all somesuch." I figured I could either keep doing quests for them until I could make them an ally or just take a shipload of planetbusters and kill them where the lived and bred. Will that give me any cutscenes or anything, or just more of the same?