Topic: Spore

That's right, 2 and a half years ago tomorrow:
http://www.ozoneasylum.com/27649


Unfortunately I don't have the $50 to spare right now, but I wish I did
If anyone has picked it up, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Is it as good as the hype suggests?

http://www.spore.com/

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Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

i've played through the first two "episodes", and i'm with the 2100+ other guys, who think the game totally sucks.
to make it short: it's just boring. the creature creator is amazing, yes it really is. but that's it. there isn't that much you can do with your creation.
word has it that the last two episodes are more exciting, maybe I can motivate myself for another try.

The Space Between Us | My Blog: lukas.grumet.at

A moderately enjoyable game overall. Lives up to most of my expectations ... until the space stage which is just broken. I'll keep that for later. I should note that I played twice until the status of "Omnipotent" which is supposed to be the greatest achievement in the game so I've seen most not to say all of the game.

You probably already know about the cell, creature, tribal, civilization and space stages. So you must have heard about the 'extra content' that people can make. Just one thing you might not think about: all the content that people can make themselves is just eyecandy and serves no functional role in the game whatsoever. Sure you can customize your own creature but that's where it ends. Custom buildings are just eyecandy and you can fly around the space with a plain brick, it doesn't matter one bit. You can buy stuff for your spaceship such as weapons but guess what, these can't affect your spaceship's look in any way. Overall it doesn't really matter how cool your buildings and spaceship looks since it's a singleplayer game and noone will ever really see your 'empire' in it's 'glory'.

Ok so I said that the space stage was broken. The problem is that you go from the rts kind of civ stage back to rpg kind of space stage. It feels degenerative. You have _only 1 ship_ sure you can add a very limited number of allies' ships to your 'fleet' (better term would be 'party') since they serve as useless satellites and don't help much in real combat. So once you have colonized a number of planets and allied with a number of other races you start to receive all kinds of stupid requests that require your immediate attention. So you'll be flying around in constant grind trying to save everyone. You don't have any sub-space communications so you need to fly over to someone's planet to be able to speak with them although everyone else can call you up from thousand parsecs away. Oh and dialogues just plain suck. There are no real politics that you have seen in games such as Alpha Centaury and the Civ series. You can't declare war (others can), you can't threaten anyone (others can) etc. HUD sucks too, you have no overview of how much spice any of your planets have collected so far so you just have to fly around randomly to find out. Sometimes a planet buys pink spice at a high price, another time you can't find a decent buyer anywhere so that means more flying around in random circles.

I personally didn't find the planet customization much fun at all. I don't mean terraforming, not that this would have been any more fun. I mean the visual customization bit where you can build mountains and color the sky, ground, water whatever etc. Would have been much more fun if you could go back and live on that planet tho huh? But nope. Didn't find any such possibility. You can just bring (a limited number) of animals and plants onto one of your chosen planets, paint it purple and fly around it with your fancy spaceship. How dumb is that.

This game could have lots of potential if a third party developer with half a brain made a complete overhaul mod for it and fixed the fundamental flaws that it has. Also it very much needs a multiplayer mode. Preferably with a persistant world and a low player limit (IIRC Freelancer used to have ~128 simultaneous players max and a persistant world - that was great!).

Now a few positive things. I really liked how your actions in the previous game stage influenced how you'd need to play the next stage. That was cool. All the editors for the creature are pretty cool. What I like is that the parts you add to your creature's body actually affect gameplay and you have to make strategic choices there. Lots of visual variety in the game. It's difficult to appreciate all the little technological innovations they have put into the game since I don't understand them all and frankly they haven't talked about them in much depth either. But there are many and apparently that's where most of the effort went. I hope they'll one day share the technologies that were made for this game so others don't have to spend a decade to do similar things.

I will not touch it, and other games like it, that contain such horrendous DRM.

Simply despicable.

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

quote:

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mas said:

i've played through the first two "episodes", and i'm with the 2100+ other guys, who think the game totally sucks.

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Those 2100+ guys gave the game a one-star rating not because of the gameplay (in fact, most reviews so far have been pretty positive), but because of the horrible DRM. Even though I have been looking forward to this game, I (like WS) will not touch it until they do something about the DRM.

Of course, you're still free to dislike the game, just don't misinterpret all those one-star ratings. It's really just a grassroots movement to get EA to get rid of the DRM.


___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

quote:

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Suho1004 said:

Those 2100+ guys gave the game a one-star rating not because of the gameplay (in fact, most reviews so far have been pretty positive), but because of the horrible DRM.

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nope, only a part of them gave them a one star rating due to DRM etc. there is a big number of gamers who just don't like the way this game turned out and are disappointed because the hype was so big. i've also watched a few video interviews on IGN and gamespot, and they all agree (See arthurio's review). it's a mix of various game genres, but none of these satisfies. the DRM however, is definitely another big contra. i've checked amazon again, and i now see that the majority of the most recent comments lay into this issue. looks like they really screwed it :-/
edit:typo
The Space Between Us | My Blog: lukas.grumet.at

(Edited by mas on 09-16-2008 16:15)

Well, I must I thought it had a lot of potential when it was first advertised a couple years ago... Kinda sucks that it didn't really live up to it

I did go play with the free creature designer, which I think was pretty well done. Unfortunately most of the comments say that was the best part of the game :/

--

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

I've also only tried the creature designer, and after reading all the comments on how awful the game actually is, I've decided not to buy the full game. Aside from the DRM (which is sure to get on my nerves, especially since I usually try to find a way to play a game I bought without having to carry the CD/DVD around), I'm a little disappointed by the technical problems as well as Arthurio's review, which was sort of devastating for me.

The class actions suits are underway:


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/09/26/dlelectronic126.xml

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Lots of eyes watching, awaiting the outcome of that class action suit.

We have been very active and vocal on the Atari forum (and on the NWN+NWN2 forums, respectively, as well as attempting to be active on the ME forum, but that got moved to the Off Topic forum of the Bioware board - where we are still active).

We constitues anti-DRM gamers.

It is about time this got taken to the courts.

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles