Spore

The Spice of life, says Tom

Don't worry about dying in Spore, as far as I could tell there are no drawbacks to dying apart from a hit to your ego. I thought this was a bit of a letdown as from time to time I simply didn't care if I died as there was no incentive not to, no hit to your stats and no back pacing of your progress bar. The creators of the game have been noted as saying that Spore is for the casual gamer and I can see why, it is pretty easy... until the space section that is (or maybe it has just been my choices in the space section that have made it tricky?). Death during the Space stage is a little more annoying as you won't necessarily spawn on the planet that is being attacked, which means you have to navigate back to defend your colony.

Spore isn't just about the game on your PC. If you navigate to the Spore homepage using your favourite browser you can go to the Sporepedia and look at all of the other crazy creations people have made. I found some amazing creatures like an R2D2 and a great human creature the creator had called Charles Darwin. Also if you sign up you can browse all your creations and create a Sporeblog to show off your favourite designs and other people's content. Taking images and video clips in Spore is easy too; they also have some sort of YouTube functionality built in although I haven't explored that just yet... I've just been way too busy playing the game itself.

Every time you create a new creature, building or vehicle they get uploaded to the Spore database (if you are connected to the net), these creations can then populate other peoples games randomly. Playing through the game myself I seemed to only encounter Maxis creations for a while, but then suddenly I was being attacked by strange and imaginative creatures that had been designed by someone else. A nice feature that lets you find out the username and information they inputted when they made their content is the Spyglass tool in the pause menu. You simply mouse-over the item in question and click it with the tool selected and the information pops up along with a large version of the animal/structure.

The music and sound effects are great, the animals cheer, scream and laugh and the music changes tone when faced with different obstacles or an attack. There is also an option to create your own anthem using a note bar, I'm not too musically minded though and left it as it was, but all these options just add to how you can control most aspects of the game.

Of course there are some bad points to Spore, notably is the absence of a proper multiplayer mode. Even though you end up interacting with other people's creatures it doesn't really matter because they may as well have been Maxis-created and even though the addition of other content in your game is a good idea you really don't care enough whilst playing through the various stages. I can however understand why Maxis didn't add in multiplayer, opting to cater for the casual gamers out there perhaps.

Another area that is a bit of a double-edged sword is the control system. In Spore you could easily go the entire game simply using the mouse. Whilst this works well in earlier sections of the game later on it can occasionally be very frustrating. I found it difficult to fend-off those annoying attacks on my home world whilst flying my ship and shooting my lasers. You can use your keyboard to control your vessel too, but the mouse control is so intuitive that you can't help but go back to the single-handed control method, sometimes without realising so. Again I think that this design choice was taken to empower casual gamers but I just feel that controlling the camera, spacecraft and lasers all at the same time could be a bit of a chore.

With ever increasing concern for the state of PC gaming and the vast amounts of piracy that have swept over the industry like a savage plague it is really no wonder that a company such as EA would want to protect their intellectual property, however this has riled so many people that there is a good chance EA have scared many customers away who might have been willing to pay for a full copy of Spore. The truth is that the DRM (Digital Rights Management) that has been used in Spore was cracked days before the game was even released anyway. It's a shame then that this technology has been used for Spore because those people that have gone on to download 'naughty' copies of the game in protest will be missing out on much of the game's appeal - the user created content that populates your game randomly.

In conclusion then, Spore really is the sum of all its parts. The first four sections could not standalone as a single game, but with the addition of being able to navigate the galaxy Spore pulls us back and keeps us hooked even when there is the gaping hole of no multiplayer mode. Still, I have been back to many of the editors especially the creature creator to make new species and I am also pretty sure I will go through the whole game again if only to create a more impressive species than my first attempt (I have been put to shame by many of the amazing creations on the Sporepedia).

Spore is well worth your hard-earned cash, especially if you are a fan of more casually informed games. You can come home from a day of school or work and just relax whilst creating anything you want; the flexibility really is a huge draw and I don't think I have ever come across a game that lets you wield your imagination in such a convincing way.

Now then, I wonder how EA are going to make 20 expansions for Spore while people keep populating it with their own content? I'm sure Maxis will find a way...

88%

By Thomas Ryan