SPORE

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All right, according to the EA download manager, Spore releases in two hours (or at least, that's when EA will let me install it), so imagine my surprise that we don't have a topic dedicated to Spore.

So we all know Spore, yeah? You'd have to be living under a rock not to. It's EVO-meets-Civilization-meets-Sim-Life-meets-Electroplankton, from what we've been told, with a heavy emphasis on user generated content. It's the most (over)hyped game to ever exist.

Who's eagerly awaiting the release? Who's lost all interest? And who has already played it? I'll just play along and pretend you people who have played it live in Australia and didn't just download it off of a torrent =P.

I've heard that pirates aren't enjoying it as much as they had hoped, but then they also don't get other users' creations in their games, I hear, so they're missing out on a major aspect of the game it would seem. Anyone care to weigh in?
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
Just so you know, anything labeled with my username should not be approached with anything less than nuclear weapons and hostile intent, because that's what we'll have for you.

Also, I bet you nothing there will be Klingons somewhere in there with in three hours of its release.
Word on the street is that Spore really isn't all that great.

"Overhyped piece of shit" is the callphrase for it. Which sucks because I wanted it really really bad.
author=Feldschlacht IV link=topic=1860.msg29919#msg29919 date=1220805323
Word on the street is that Spore really isn't all that great.

"Overhyped piece of shit" is the callphrase for it. Which sucks because I wanted it really really bad.
This is the internet. Spore could come out and bake you free cake and people would still call it that because that's what they do. Plus, like I mentioned, a lot of the people saying that are the pirates who are playing it without any of the other users' user-generated content.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it was overhyped quite a bit, and probably won't be the best game ever made. But I imagine a lot of what we're hearing about it now is just hype backlash. Which I could've told you a year ago was going to happen.
I don't know man, I go to a pretty big pirating community, where every game that's come out has been pirated by these people, and considering that some games are considered really good, pretty good, mediocre, or bad, I don't think they're being completely biased by saying Spore is really bad.

Because I'm hearing that more and more as time goes on.
Well this thread is a convenient place to see if that's the trend here, too, I suppose, once people start posting their impressions with the game when it releases....in a minute or so.
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
3... 2... 1... It's been out for a whole fifteen minutes already? Damn, I missed it.
It looked amazing for awhile, then over the past few years they totally screwed up every aspect of it. I think that making my own creatures just for myself and "post online" is going to lose appeal very quickly. They should have made the game darker and have include FREAKING MULTIPLAYER. Sure it'd be hard to incorporate, but if they did that, it'd be played for the next 10 years straight.
As a game, its a pretty bad one. None of the phases have any lasting appeal (except possibly the Space phase depending on who your neighbors are and when you get the Uber Turrent)

Thoughts of each phase:

Cell Phase
Probably the best of the bunch, which is pretty sad. Its important in how you design your creature, for example spikes in the right place can help fend off enemy cells. What and where you place stuff, except eyes, affects how you play which is pretty neat. It also means you need to pay attention to how the other cells are designed too so you stay away from their defences if you want to kill them.

There's a few bad design decisions though. You start with about half the parts available and to get the rest you need to unlock them by killing cells or finding them in meteorite peices floating around. Problem is the rate they show up at means that you probably won't unlock them all (from my experiences, 3 Cell playthroughs and out of the six peices I unlocked 4, 2, and 3 from each play through. No unlocked content does not carry through to other games). One you get out of the tutorial but that's it. The Cell phase ends in 20-30 minutes and once you reach the end there's nothing to do except try to hunt down missing parts since you can't collect DNA points anymore and can't keep adding to your cell.

I think the Cell phase was actually too short. I wouldn't have minded staying there a bit longer making the DOOM CELL.


Creature Phase
Remember how you made your cell? That affects that you have available in the Creature phase. Had a Herbivore mouth? Well you only got Herbivore mouths! Same for Carnivore and Omnivore mouths (which in Cell phase needs to be unlocked) and you had to end the Cell Phase with the appropriate diet (so if you have a Herbivore and Carnivore mouth but only eat greens you'd get Herbivore mouths). Same for eyes; There were three eyes in Cell phase and what one you ended with affects what eye trees you have available. Ended Cell phase with the button eyes? Then you got Eye Tree #3, 6, and 9 (random numbers). You could get the "evolutions" of each eye tree but getting a different branch requires luck when finding new parts. A lot of luck. Same deal with weapons: Not having the right weapons in Cell phase means types of weapons start off locked and I never unlocked them during a playthrough of Creature phase. If you have a plan of what you want your creature to look like or do you'd better pick the right parts in Cell phase. I can see that its a "cause and effect" system but prohibiting the player for locking themselves out of something without knowing is a kick in the balls.

Another annoying restriction on making your creature is unlocking parts again. You find them at a much quicker pace than the Cell phase but there's a lot more to unlock. It isn't as bad as the complete blocking using the wrong parts in the Cell phase causes as you can find the starting part of each part tree without too much trouble (except for mouths, eyes, and weapons) and the game favours giving you improved parts of what is on your creature. However because of this I ended up with an excess in DNA points when trying to create my creature since I couldn't add the parts I wanted because I simply hadn't found them yet.

One key difference between Spore and the Creature Creator (CC) from a few months back is that abilities given by parts no longer stack. A quadruped with four legs, each set with a pair of feet that give 2 speed per pair, and a 1 speed fin only gives you 2 speed in Spore while it would've given you five in the CC. You can't compensate for not having the one good part with a bunch of decent parts and I don't know why they changed it.

The actual phase plays out with you visiting the nests of other species and either trying to charm them or kill them to finish quests (although there's only two different quests: "Charm/Kill X number of creatures of a species for DNA points" or "Go to new nest"). It feels vaguely like WoW, and combat is similar but its more like the City of Heroes/Villians game. Overal it isn't bad, although it'd be nice if the ecosystem wasn't so nest-centric. You rarely see any creatures out of their nests doing their own hunting. There's rogue creatures which don't have nests but they're rare and much stronger than anything else (except epic creatures) but they really don't make the planet feel alive. Everything's there waiting for you to find them and charm/exterminate them.

Packs are nice and they make the creature phase easy once you get them. Especially if you can recruit one of those rogue creatures. Larger pack sizes come with the getting the DNA points to make the brain bigger which also increases the creature's health. Too bad the health bonus parts don't scale with sentience though. A 5 health part will always give you 10 HP.

Here you can start seeing what your system looks like. Looking up and seeing various planets that you'll get to check out in the Space phase is pretty neat.


I'm going to leave it there for now. The more I write the more I get off track.
I am about to go get the game myself. I tried out the creature creator and I have to say it looks great and I have fun making the creatures, but they screwed the game up in 2 massive ways.

1) They changed the style into a more toony, almost LoZ: WW style rather than the realistic style they had going from the start. That really takes some away.

2) No water stage. Going straight from cell stage to land I think is a mistake. Not only does it take out what seemed like a cool part of the game, it makes it lack some realism in my opinion.

Either way I think Im still gonna enjoy it, just nowhere near as much,

Funny I feel like this has all been said on another thread, but I really dont care.
Buddy of mine pirated it the day before it shipped. (We have people on the inside. I think ???)

author=Quiversee link=topic=1860.msg29966#msg29966 date=1220822441
I am about to go get the game myself. I tried out the creature creator and I have to say it looks great and I have fun making the creatures, but they screwed the game up in 2 massive ways.
1) They changed the style into a more toony, almost LoZ: WW style rather than the realistic style they had going from the start. That really takes some away.

2) No water stage. Going straight from cell stage to land I think is a mistake. Not only does it take out what seemed like a cool part of the game, it makes it lack some realism in my opinion.


Exactly my thoughts, I liked how it looked earlier. And I wanted a race of death squids.
I've been playing for the last few hours, and my feelings are that it's nowhere near as bad as people are saying it is, but it could definitely do with a bit more gameplay depth to go with all the neat toys in it. But then I didn't see the old graphics and have never felt threatened by cartoony graphcis in the first place. Actually, I almost always prefer them.
Shadowtext, have you reached the Space phase yet? I'm interested to hear your thoughts on it.


If you didn't have to go through the hell of getting a non stop wave of "One of your colonies is under attack/Under threat of a biodisaster!", usually several at a time, I hate you and your good luck. Those things made the Space phase almost intolerable until you get the Badges to buy the stuff to prevent those things.
2-3 years ago when I first heard of it, and saw the preview, I was pretty interested. Now, I think it's crap terrible. The realistic graphics were great, what they have now is crap, along with some other stuff that is crap. Crap crap crap. Crap.
author=AznChipmunk link=topic=1860.msg30283#msg30283 date=1220921007
2-3 years ago when I first heard of it, and saw the preview, I was pretty interested. Now, I think it's crap terrible. The realistic graphics were great, what they have now is crap, along with some other stuff that is crap. Crap crap crap. Crap.

Same here. I played some of it and it doesn't interest me at all.
I heard about it and I was like 'wow!'
Turned out I like it ^^ ...
Because I'm a little kid!
I am on Shadowtext's side for the most part. Although I prefer the realistic graphics, the ones they used didnt ruin it in any way as I originally thought they would. Only one thing ruins the game and that's my comp. I am runniong on the bare minimum quality in game with specifications that surpass the minimums listed on the box and it runs super slow. I cant even play the space stage properly its so bad.

Still, overall I think the game turned out great.... but my special race of flying sea snakes will never come to be. Oh well.
http://antispore.com/

I'm just gonna leave this here before I go to sleep.
Some pompous jackass taking a game way too seriously? Who woulda thought!
My word.... that guy REALLY needs to get a life away from yelling at video games. I have to admit that that is the most insane game-based rant I have ever read.
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