GameLog Page

Please sign in or sign up!

...blogs for gamers

Find a GameLog

... by game	... by platform

[ advanced search ]

HOME	GAMES	LOGS	MEMBERS			ABOUT	HELP

dkirschner's Spore (PC)

[December 1, 2012 04:02:00 AM]

I am so disappointed with Spore. I waited years to play it and it is one of the most dull and boring games I've ever sat through. It's basically trying to be 5 games in 1. I've just made it to the 5th and hope that there is some redeeming thing in the space space. The other 4 stages are:

Cell - This is Feeding Frenzy, Osmos, every game you've ever played where you become the biggest fish in the pond by eating smaller things and avoiding bigger things. It was alright, but I was still interested at this point. Also, it took like 15 minutes only.

Creature - This one was agonizing. I hated it. You've evolved legs, had a nest with a few other creatures like you, and had to go around the map collecting, I don't know, mutations or body parts or something, and either making allies or enemies with the other small groups of creatures. Some are more friendly than others and some are outright hostile. But the way to become more friendly is through a horrible repeat-after-me minigame. You have to mimic the actions (sing, dance, charm, pose) that the other creatures do. So you're just doing 1...3...1...4. or whatever few hotkeys for the actions over and over and over and over and over and over and over. You get more admiration from the creatures if you perform the actions better than them, meaning your sing/dance/etc. skill is a higher level than theirs. It was so bad.

Tribal - This was a stripped down version of any RTS game you've ever played. You get a city hall and 6 units (upgradeable to 12). One is a chieftain, who serves no special purpose, and the others are identical to one another. You can upgrade a couple weapons (torches for destroying buildings faster, scepters for healing allies). And again, you can either be friendly or hostile, and you win when you destroy all enemy city halls or get an allied victory. It was ridiculously basic and took no more than an hour.

Civilization - This one took me just over an hour, but I wasn't paying attention to the screen half the time. You have 3 (wow THREE!!) types of units you can make in this lame attempt at the game Civilization. Your goal is again to either take over all enemy cities or ally with enemies to win. It's so unbelievably basic again. I have no idea what they were thinking.

And then I'm at the Space stage now, where hopefully I get to do some more interesting stuff, but I'm not banking on it. So far I control a space ship and have been doing pointless quests for Ground Control like beaming up some creature on my planet and putting him in my city to be probed.

There are a few neat things. The creature creator is awesome. If you like to build things, you can make some crazy looking ships, buildings, and especially creatures. The infinite content is cool, so your planets will be populated from other players' creations. Maxis themselves have like 1600 creatures in the game already. The game concept is neat, the evolution is neat. You carry over your creature's traits. The more aggressive you are, the more warlike your groups will be in later stages of the game. Or that determines their stats or something. Even though I was completely warlike by the end, after being bored with being a peace-loving herbivore early on, I still won the Civilization stage by allying with my enemies just because I was super rich and paid them.

So yeah. Wow. Just wow.