Spore Editor available June 17th

[SCFalken]

"Ars Technica heralds the coming of the creature editor for the highly anticipated Spore. A previously promised downloadable demo of the creature editor from the September 7th due game, will be available June 17th. Furthermore, a full version of the creature editor will appear as a standalone product at the same time for $10. According to EA 'The demo lets players shape, paint and play with an unlimited number of creatures, using 25 percent of the creature-making parts from Spore. Gamers can then share these creations with their friends, including seamless uploads to YouTube.'"

 

http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars...n-june-for-9-99

 

 

Falken

[Matt Urbanski]

I find myself irritated by Spore.

 

Yes, it's an interesting idea, but is there any reason to think it'll work as advertised?

 

Will Wright basically has one good game to his credit - SimCity. He's not made anything revolutionary (or especially interesting) since, but is afforded this guru status by a lot of people... It's baffling, to be honest. I think Spore is going to sell millions of copies to the "casual" audience, and utterly fail as an actual game - just like The Sims.

 

I suppose the designer will offer some clues, at least.

[SCFalken]

And the inevitable happens:

 

NSFW:

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPKvwd9vJZY...feature=related

 

Falken

[Ssnake]

I haven't played The Sims - not my cup of tea - but apparently it must be entertaining enough, otherwise it wouldn't have found the huge audience it apparently has. If that's "utter failure" as a game design, I'd like to fail that way too. I agree that his other titles - aside from the SimCity series - were rather so-so. Spore is an interesting concept, and if it works as advertised AND if it can sustain a critical mass of users to populate the universe, I'd say that Will Wright would definitely have earned his "game god" status. SimCity was a breakthrough innovation as far as play style is concerned, and apparently The Sims must address some deeply rooted desire among its customers as well. Spore would contribute to the fame by being an extremely sophisticated engine that would cover such a wide span from simulating amoebae to interstellar civilizations.

 

Well, I guess there's only one way to find out.

[Matt Urbanski]

I haven't played The Sims - not my cup of tea - but apparently it must be entertaining enough, otherwise it wouldn't have found the huge audience it apparently has. If that's "utter failure" as a game design, I'd like to fail that way too. I agree that his other titles - aside from the SimCity series - were rather so-so. Spore is an interesting concept, and if it works as advertised AND if it can sustain a critical mass of users to populate the universe, I'd say that Will Wright would definitely have earned his "game god" status. SimCity was a breakthrough innovation as far as play style is concerned, and apparently The Sims must address some deeply rooted desire among its customers as well. Spore would contribute to the fame by being an extremely sophisticated engine that would cover such a wide span from simulating amoebae to interstellar civilizations.

 

Well, I guess there's only one way to find out.

 

The Sims is a toy, not a game. That's all I'm saying.

 

As for Spore, my prediction is that it will completely fail to deliver all the revolutionary fetaures Wright has promised. The bells and whistles will just be skin-deep and underneath, you'll have a simple 4X game that'll barely be influenced at all by the creature designs you come up with. You'll probably be able to take over your planet in two or three different ways (tops) - military, economic, political - and all the reviewers will ooh and aah and pretend there haven't been a dozen games over the last 15 years that did it all better.

 

It will do very well, though - the social networking angle and the ability to make your own crap and show it off to the world pretty much guarantee that.

[Ssnake]

The Sims is a toy, not a game. That's all I'm saying.

You got a point there.

[dejawolf]

well, spores copy-protection seems to have put a dent in the sales figures, there was a lot of rioting and a few petitions signed against spores protection scheme.

[Harold Jones]

I don't see the copy protection hurting sales much, sure the board warriors will scream and cry but the person who sees it in the rack at Target won't know or most likely care what kind of copy protection it has.

[Guest aevans]

The Sims is a toy, not a game. That's all I'm saying.

 

Uhhh...no. The Sims is just not a simpleminded FPS deathfest. It still has the objective of dominating a defined environment and the quality of the player's strategy does affect the outcome.

[Guest aevans]

Except that you don't have to dominate the environment in any way. You can just play - as such its a toy or a sand box game. This is different from games that have say an objective driven storyline in the sandbox (GTA for eg)

 

You still have personal success objectives for you PCs. They just don't involve death and mayhem.

[DaveDash]

No, you could for example spend all of your time walling off sims and starving them to death or using the sims to make movies, etc

 

By that definition all games are toys.

 

I could load up Falcon 4 right now and just try and land on roads. Does that make it a toy?

 

The Sims is one of the most successful PC games ever, except for perhaps World of Warcraft (which, by the current definition, is also a 'toy'). Give credit where credit is due.

 

Just because it doesn't appeal to you, does not damper its success.

 

FYI SimCity 4 was an excellent game. I still get mileage out of that. More milage than say, Operation Flashpoint or Neverwinter Nights.

[Noble713]

Well I spent about 10 hours playing Spore, going to sleep sometime around 0300hrs this morning. I REALLY wanted to reach the space portion of the game (I love 4x games) and I did. The cell game (1st stage) is kinda fun the first time around, as is the animal (2nd) stage. The tribal and civilization stages are just tedious, simplistic RTS games with frustrating controls.

 

I'm really enjoying the space game so far. It's one part Starflight or Star Control with a touch of Master of Orion. Your ship can hover over planets and scan all the lifeforms (individually), abduct them with your tractor beam, and move them to other planets (part of the terraforming process involves importing flora and fauna). This may not sound all that exciting but it's fun in practice.

 

Despite being a warlike race I haven't really engaged in much combat yet so I can't comment on that.

[Matt Urbanski]

Well I spent about 10 hours playing Spore, going to sleep sometime around 0300hrs this morning. I REALLY wanted to reach the space portion of the game (I love 4x games) and I did. The cell game (1st stage) is kinda fun the first time around, as is the animal (2nd) stage. The tribal and civilization stages are just tedious, simplistic RTS games with frustrating controls.

 

I'm really enjoying the space game so far. It's one part Starflight or Star Control with a touch of Master of Orion. Your ship can hover over planets and scan all the lifeforms (individually), abduct them with your tractor beam, and move them to other planets (part of the terraforming process involves importing flora and fauna). This may not sound all that exciting but it's fun in practice.

 

Despite being a warlike race I haven't really engaged in much combat yet so I can't comment on that.

 

So, do the earlier "evolutionary" stages actually have any non-cosmetic influence on the later ones? Not to toot my own horn (since I would have liked to play a game that actually delivered what Wright talked about), but it sounds (based on all the reviews I've read) like the game doesn't actually model evolutionary processes at all - how you design your creature is nearly irrelevant to how the game plays. The choices are both limited (carnivore/herbivore, peaceful/aggressive, war/economics/propaganda) and irrelevant, since no matter what design choices you make, you still get essentially the same options at the beginning of every stage.

[Brasidas]

Interesting game, just played until 1:00 am, and made it to the tribal stage.

 

I thought the cell phase was more irritating than it was enjoyable. The creature stage is interesting, but frauht with peril.

 

If you go carnivore, there is almost no way to make many friends. It becomes very difficult at the least. You end up picking weaker aggressive species to pick on. I'd leave the unaggressive species alone as they would let me near the parts I was looking for. Kind of like a bully partrol, with loot as a focus.

[Noble713]

So, do the earlier "evolutionary" stages actually have any non-cosmetic influence on the later ones? Not to toot my own horn (since I would have liked to play a game that actually delivered what Wright talked about), but it sounds (based on all the reviews I've read) like the game doesn't actually model evolutionary processes at all - how you design your creature is nearly irrelevant to how the game plays. The choices are both limited (carnivore/herbivore, peaceful/aggressive, war/economics/propaganda) and irrelevant, since no matter what design choices you make, you still get essentially the same options at the beginning of every stage.

 

 

The effects are moderate early on, and dwindle as the game continues. The carnivore/herbivore/omnivore choice greatly affects play in the animal stage, but in the tribal stage, it seems EVERYONE becomes an omnivore. How you play all the stages affects whether your race develops along a militaristic, economic, or diplomatic path. At the end of each stage, the game tallies up what you did (you can see a timeline going all the way back to the cell stage) and your actions steer you into a certain category. These categories yield certain special abilities that you can use in the next stage but they aren't very significant.

 

For example, if in the tribal stage all you did was run around slaughtering the other tribes, with no attempts at diplomacy and very little gathering of food, you'd be firmly set in the "predator" category, giving you access to nuclear bombs in the civilization stage. However, I only used nukes once (maybe twice) and simply out of curiosity.

[Noble713]

Alright, I've just been fighting my first space war and it's pretty frustrating. Perhaps I haven't been playing my warrior race properly (I've been exploring, making friends, very United Federation of Planets-y) but I've been getting my teeth kicked in. One race tried to extort money out of me (which I of course refused to pay) and eventually declared war. They show up at one of my colonies with 2 "motherships" which seem to launch 3-4 smaller fighters each. I wipe these out (usually fleeing for repairs at another world frequently) but they just keep coming. How do they replace their casualties so quickly, especially when I have only 1 frikken ship?

 

So I tried going on the offensive. I took 1 allied ship (all that I can lead right now), bought some mini bombs, and set off. Before my ship even reaches the enemy star, I can see their QRF heading to it from other systems. They arrive and start blasting my allied ship. Apparently the few weapons I have on my spaceship DON'T EVEN WORK IN SPACE. I plunge into the atmosphere and start heading for the nearest city. My allied ship tends to die around this time. I've tried using my special ability (it calls a pirate fleet to attack the planet) but it doesn't seem to do much. So now I've got about 4-5 enemy ships up my ass, not to mention flak cannons firing from the city, and my bombs just aren't enough.

 

It's like being the SS Fire Brigade of interstellar space: rush from hotspot to hotspot, get mauled defending something, pull back for R&R, and finish just in time to do it again.

 

 

....so I hopped on Google to find some strategies. This one is cheap, but it SHOULD work:

 

buy 3 atmosphere generators @ 90k each (some races sell them this cheaply, I've found 'em)

beeline for the enemy homeworld, ignoring all defenses

drop the atmosphere generators

 

Watch as the world get's reduced to a T1 or T0 planet, wiping out all but 1 of the cities and crippling the economy (for comparison, my homeworld has 12 cities).

 

Lather, rinse, repeat. Nothing like having your capital planet forcibly terraformed. If you want to be a bit more "in character" you could wait until you have access to Meteor Showers (apparently only takes one), since that is roughly similar to using mass drivers to wreck a planet like we see in so many sci-fi shows and novels.

Edited September 9, 2008 by Noble713

[Lampshade111]

So what is the controversy about it's copyright protection? CD key troubles? I was hoping I might be able to install it on two comps once I picked it up.

[Matt Urbanski]

So what is the controversy about it's copyright protection? CD key troubles? I was hoping I might be able to install it on two comps once I picked it up.

 

Apparently, the game is limited to 3 activations/installs. Which has a lot of people upset, and has generated a drive to hose Spore's rating on sites like Metacritic and Amazon.

[SCFalken]

Think it'll run well on a 2.2GHz Pentium Dual, with 3Gigs of Ram and a GeForce 8800?

 

 

Falken

[Matt Urbanski]

Think it'll run well on a 2.2GHz Pentium Dual, with 3Gigs of Ram and a GeForce 8800?

Falken

 

Should run great: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6197428/i...lated-content;3

[Noble713]

Think it'll run well on a 2.2GHz Pentium Dual, with 3Gigs of Ram and a GeForce 8800?

Falken

 

It runs just fine on my 2.8GHz Pentium 4, 1Gig RAM and GeForce 6200 GTS. It only chugs slightly when transitioning from space to planet orbit.

 

Oh, and I stopped playing it about a week ago. It's just too frustrating being the Interstellar Fire Brigade with a single ship. I switched to a Star Wars mod for Sins of a Solar Empire, and then stopped playing that as well (navigating a large galaxy is a pain, and it just lacked....character).

 

Now I'm working on my own mod for the ancient game Star Wars: Rebellion. Gotta get my 4X gaming fix somehow!