Spore

[Senator]

Played around with it, I can see the fun in it; only 3/4 through the first stage where I am swimming around eating stuff and trying to avoid being eaten.

[Groundhog]

Originally Posted by Senator

Played around with it, I can see the fun in it; only 3/4 through the first stage where I am swimming around eating stuff and trying to avoid being eaten.

That level was perhaps my favourite. Finding and evolving new parts makes a huge difference, which made this level a lot of fun. It's just that this level of the game goes by waaaaaay too quickly.

[gi]

Originally Posted by Groundhog

That level was perhaps my favourite. Finding and evolving new parts makes a huge difference, which made this level a lot of fun. It's just that this level of the game goes by waaaaaay too quickly.

Agreed, played it twice now just to relive some of it and get all the parts. Overall I'm enjoying it, but don't know if it will hold up long term.

[Izulde]

Originally Posted by Groundhog

That level was perhaps my favourite. Finding and evolving new parts makes a huge difference, which made this level a lot of fun. It's just that this level of the game goes by waaaaaay too quickly.

Have you ever tried playing E.V.O?

[Neon_Chaos]

Currently playing through the Space Stage, and it is most definitely the meat of the game.

Can't wait to start up another game from scratch and have an interplanetary war go on between my two creations.

[Coffee Warlord]

I played through till the civilization stage...

...and promptly got utterly massacred by the AI.

[Mustang]

I picked up Spore yesterday and spent a good 3 hours playing at night and made it up to the tribal stage. I think the 8.9/9.0 ratings are pretty spot on although, from a technical standpoint I think Spore is in the high 9.0's.

My biggest gripe is (and this probably strays into the 'hard core gamer' territory) is that there is no fear in the early stages. When I'm a cell and get gobbled up, there is no worries that the game is done or this negatively affects me. There should be some benefit to staying alive and not dying multiple times. I just respawn and continue on. Although, I guess that is technically what a save does so, guess there is no real fear in any game really.

Graphics, while are cartoony, are still nice. Interesting to see your creations or other creations populate the game. In one instance, I created a creature that I tried to make fast as crap and in one part of the game, I saw a herd of them ripping across the screen.

I need to figure out how not to have every creature variation not get saved to my Sporepedia. (I have the 10 variations dropped and while it is interesting to see the evolution of my creation.. I don't want 10 different variations loaded)

My spore id is kerg01 so, if anyone wants to add me. Would be nice to have others ID as for now I have the buddy list turned on just so I don't get a bunch of penises or trains imported.

[Coffee Warlord]

In my limited playing time, I haven't noticed a single penis monster. Quite surprised.

[Pumpy Tudors]

Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord

In my limited playing time, I haven't noticed a single penis monster. Quite surprised.

This is a profound disappointment.

[Mustang]

Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord

In my limited playing time, I haven't noticed a single penis monster. Quite surprised.

I'll only see your penis if you are on my buddy list.









(yes, I intentionally made that sound bad)

[Coffee Warlord]

Originally Posted by Mustang

I'll only see your penis if you are on my buddy list.

Add CoffeeW to your friends list if you wanna see my penis!


...yeah.

[CleBrownsfan]

So is this game worth getting? I've heard mix reviews and still on the fence about getting Spore. I've been following this damn game for at least 2 years...

[Bonegavel]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

I'll be picking it up as soon as I can hit a store. The naysayers aren't scaring me off.

NAY

(probably picking this up tonight)

[Mustang]

Originally Posted by CleBrownsfan

So is this game worth getting? I've heard mix reviews and still on the fence about getting Spore. I've been following this damn game for at least 2 years...

Depends on what your expectations are.

If you liked The Sims, I'd say yes. If you didn't, I'd say no.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by SackAttack

Dolahint: a gamer keeps up-to-date enough with his hobby not to make stupid mistakes when talking down his nose to someone else.

trust me, since i'm one who gets vagina on a regular basis i'm quite fine with not being considered a real gamer.

[Neon_Chaos]

I'm loving the planetary obliteration thingy. (destroys any and every colony on a target planet)

"WAR!? WAR!? YOU WANT TO FRAK WITH ME!?"

(presses button)

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

[Senator]

Originally Posted by Anthony

trust me, since i'm one who gets vagina on a regular basis i'm quite fine with not being considered a real gamer.

The gaming industries loss is the Bada Bings gain.

[JPhillips]

Originally Posted by Anthony

trust me, since i'm one who gets ham sandwich on a regular basis i'm quite fine with not being considered a real gamer.

+1

[spleen1015]

Originally Posted by Mustang

My spore id is kerg01 so, if anyone wants to add me. Would be nice to have others ID as for now I have the buddy list turned on just so I don't get a bunch of penises or trains imported.

My ID is mayser if you'd like to add me. I just added you to mine on the website.

[Calis]

I picked it up yesterday morning with reservations. I figured I'd end up getting it though, but my expectations were low.

They were about correct. I've only finished the 3rd stage, so I can't speak on the space portion and such of the game, so maybe I'm missing out.

The first two stages had some charm. It was fun to try out different parts on my creature and do that thing, but the 2nd stage specifically I was already sick of by the end of it. I can't imagine wanting to do it again. It was a little too repetitive and simple for my tastes.

The RTS stage was pretty cumbersome as well.

So about what I expected. The creation of creatures and such is fun, but the game itself I have no desire to play.

I was hoping for a little more Sims-like approach but with creating and evolving creatures. I was really hoping they'd shoot for an a feeling almost like Creatures. Anyone remember that game? I think a more AI oriented approach could have made it more fun, with you as an outside force shaping up a bit how your creatures evolve rather than just plugging in whatever piece you want.

I don't regret buying it. We don't get many marquee PC releases anymore, and I like to see people take some chances and try different things, but I'm not interested in playing it anymore.

[BrianD]

Does anyone have any comments on the DRM on the game? Amazon gamer reviews are getting slammed with 1-star reviews complaining about the DRM.

[Coffee Warlord]

It's draconian and unnecessary, but it's no more annoying than much else out there (StarForce aside).

[Atocep]

Originally Posted by Calis

I was hoping for a little more Sims-like approach but with creating and evolving creatures. I was really hoping they'd shoot for an a feeling almost like Creatures. Anyone remember that game?

Holy shit, yes. I found that game 10 times more interesting than spore has been. The initial fun has worn off for me and I haven't touched it in 3 days now. Have no desire to either.

[Neuqua]

Well if anyone out there wants to sell their copy cheap, let me know

[JPhillips]

I'll pay a dollar more than Neuqua!

[Groundhog]

Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord

In my limited playing time, I haven't noticed a single penis monster. Quite surprised.

While not a penis monster so much, I did have a mission last night to capture a beast from some planet, and whoever created it did include the detail of a penis in the groin region, so that's a start.

[WSUCougar]

Originally Posted by Neuqua

Well if anyone out there wants to sell their copy cheap, let me know

+1

[Godzilla Blitz]

Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord

It's draconian and unnecessary, but it's no more annoying than much else out there (StarForce aside).

Spore's 3-install limit is over the top for me. I would have bought it if not for that.

[Groundhog]

After playing the Space stage for a few hours last night, I'm unfortunately thinking that a 3-install limit is about 2 installs more than I'll ever need.

Honestly, nice idea, but there just flat out isn't very much to this game. I was playing some DOS space exploration game about 10 years ago that wasn't far behind the space segment of Spore.

The designer tools are fun, but the replay value of the game itself is looking more and more like zero.

[sabotai]

Originally Posted by BrianD

Does anyone have any comments on the DRM on the game? Amazon gamer reviews are getting slammed with 1-star reviews complaining about the DRM.

1,130 1-star reviews out of 1,214 total reviews, most of them about the DRM. I'm guessing the vast majority of people who buys games don't even really know what DRM is, especially the type of people who buy games like Spore (people who buy The Sims for example). Seems fishy to me that Amazon would get slammed with this many reviews about it.

[sabotai]

10 more 1-star reviews appeared after 10 minutes. It's either a trend that people are jumping on (unlikely at this point, IMO) or a group of people are spamming Amazon's reviews.

[Neon_Chaos]

Originally Posted by Neon_Chaos

I'm loving the planetary obliteration thingy. (destroys any and every colony on a target planet)

"WAR!? WAR!? YOU WANT TO FRAK WITH ME!?"

(presses button)

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

I just realized that that special skill (Graviton Wave), was a bonus that was given to my civ for playing the past four stages in a certain way.

I entered the Space stage as a Scientist, hence I got the Gravitation Wave device,

I am definitely loving this game. Everything you do during the first four stages affects how you play your Space game a lot... from the bonuses to the special skills.

Can't wait to fire up another game from the start.

[gi]

Originally Posted by Neon_Chaos

I just realized that that special skill (Graviton Wave), was a bonus that was given to my civ for playing the past four stages in a certain way.

I entered the Space stage as a Scientist, hence I got the Gravitation Wave device,

I am definitely loving this game. Everything you do during the first four stages affects how you play your Space game a lot... from the bonuses to the special skills.

Can't wait to fire up another game from the start.

I'm enjoying this game too. Might not last longer than a month, but it is still fun. A lot of games do the individual pieces better than Spore, but with the more options, and deeper play...etc more fun isn't guaranteed. Spore does have the fun factor for me. I've started over once already once I saw how early actions influence you in the space age.

[Bonegavel]

I'm in the tribe stage now and I will say that it is more interesting than I was expecting but still far less than I was hoping.

There is so much potential in here it is maddening. They seem to have dumbed it down to the LCD it hurts. But hell, I toyed with the sims2 for quite a bit and I'm going to let my 8 year old loose on this and see what she thinks.

It was fun seeing some of my creations from the creature creator in the game. Look for stuff from UncleMatch in your game. That's me.

[Bonegavel]

Dola, i haven't seen how to add anyone to the friends list, but feel free to add me

UncleMatch

[Neon_Chaos]

All the stages before the Space stage are very minimalist. The Space stage is where the real meat of the entire game is

Originally Posted by Bonegavel

I'm in the tribe stage now and I will say that it is more interesting than I was expecting but still far less than I was hoping.

There is so much potential in here it is maddening. They seem to have dumbed it down to the LCD it hurts. But hell, I toyed with the sims2 for quite a bit and I'm going to let my 8 year old loose on this and see what she thinks.

It was fun seeing some of my creations from the creature creator in the game. Look for stuff from UncleMatch in your game. That's me.

[Coffee Warlord]

You know, this game does give rise to comedy gold.

I'm in the creature strage, with my scaled blue flying pygmy demons of unholy doom. My girlfriend walks in while this horror is cutely dancing with another creature.

"Is he dancing?"

"Yep, see, they're cute!"

"...if you say so."

"Fine!" *switches to attack and he and his pack of hellspawn proceed to rip apart the offending beast*

And seconds later, they chase down a terrified little shivering baby creature and rip it to shreds, feasting on its carcass.

"Told you they were cute hon!"

[Mustang]

Originally Posted by Bonegavel

Dola, i haven't seen how to add anyone to the friends list, but feel free to add me

UncleMatch

I haven't looked in the program, but if you log onto spore.com and go to the sporepedia, you can search for a user and then look at their profile and click on the + sign to add them.


Probably a bassackward way, but it works.

[BrianD]

Originally Posted by sabotai

10 more 1-star reviews appeared after 10 minutes. It's either a trend that people are jumping on (unlikely at this point, IMO) or a group of people are spamming Amazon's reviews.

I was figuring that it was a coordinated Fark-style spam, but I was surprised that a campaign like that would get started without people here complaining as well.

[Anthony]

so the meat and potatoes of a game that allows you to start out at the cellular level is actually the last stage in space? that seems counter-intuitive to me. why allow one to start off as a single cell entity then?

[CleBrownsfan]

My Laptop:
Toshiba Satellite 205
1.67 GHZ
2.0 GB Ram
Dual Nvidia GeForce 8600M-GT graphics cards with 256MB each
2GB DDR2-667 RAM

SPORE'S PC SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

# FOR WINDOWS VISTA
# * 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
# * 768 MB RAM
# * A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0


Thanks in advance for any input...

[Deattribution]

Originally Posted by CleBrownsfan

My Laptop:
Toshiba Satellite 205
1.67 GHZ
2.0 GB Ram
Dual Nvidia GeForce 8600M-GT graphics cards with 256MB each
2GB DDR2-667 RAM

SPORE'S PC SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

# FOR WINDOWS VISTA
# * 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
# * 768 MB RAM
# * A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0


Thanks in advance for any input...

I'd think so. With the dual cards, and considerable amount of memory you should be okay. If you're running into problems with other games though, that could be a good gauge.

[Coffee Warlord]

Space will never be the same now that the pygmy demons have arrived.

[Groundhog]

Played around a bit with a peaceful herbivour from the cellular level last night. Was a little more fun than just killing everything but damn if this game still isn't insanely shallow.

[rjolley]

So, is this like Creatures 3 except you can create your own species?

[FBPro]

This is one I am quite tempted to grab, problem is that the only games that EVER hold my interest are sports games......prolly gonna pass.

[Izulde]

This is starting to sound more and more like a game I'd get enjoyment out of at, say, the $20 price point, but at the $50 price point, I'd think I wasted my money.

[spleen1015]

There is some spoilerish details about some of the stages, so if you want to avoid any info, don't read below.

When I first fired up the game, I started as a herbivore. Playing through the cell stage was pretty straight forward and simple. You just want to eat the green stuff, I guess it is some sort of plant. You spend most of your time staying away from the predators. If you want to get all of the cell parts in this stage, you need to let the predators kill things that drop the parts or find meteor pieces to break open yourself. The number of different cell pieces you can get leaves something to be desired. There are only 3 available in each group, eyes, mouth, propulsion, and weapons. Basically all you do in this stage is eat shit and collect body parts that make eating shit easier.

Once you finish the cell stage, you go to the creature stage. In this stage, you are pretty much building your creature. As a herbivore, It seems all there is to this stage is going to other creatures and singing and dancing for them so that they like you. The more you do this, the more your progress bar fills up. You also gain DNA points that allow you to buy better parts for your creature. I didn't get very far into this before starting up a carnivore.

The cell stage as a carnivore is a little more involved because you have to kill things to get your food, unless you want to wait around for something else to do the killing for you. You're a carnivore though, so killing shit is the fun part. Poison is a damn good weapon to get. Once you drain the HP of the other cells, just run into them and they die, turning into food.

Having played through the cell stage as both a herbivore and a carnivore, I see no reason to go back through it. Luckily, once you finish it successful the first time the game doesn't make you do it the next time. I think it is the same way with every stage. Once you reach a stage, you can start a new game in that stage.

The creature stage as a carnivore was basicaly just running around, killing things, collecting parts, making your creature better at killing shit, done. I did encounter a couple of creatures that were stroinger than mine, so I had to avoid them. The tool you use to modify your creature during this stage is pretty much the Creature Creator that was released a few months ago.

After the creature stage comes the Tribal stage. This stage is a little more complicated than the creature stage, but not by much. In this stage, you're controlling a tribe of creatures. You no longer can change your creature's body, but you can put clothes on it. This is kind cool. Each piece of clothing improves your creature in some way. Since I was a carnivore, I chose things that increased the health of my creatures and the attack power.

The more involved part of this stage is having your creatures kill primitive creatures to gather food and using that food to build some simple buildings. You start out with your main tent that serves as the main building of your tribe. Lose your main hut and your tribe is done.

From this tent, you can create other buildings. To gain the ability to create other buildings, you have to destroy the main hut of other tribes. There are 5 tribes you have to deal with. You can either kill all of them and destroy their main hut or talk them into being an ally. Again, carnivore equals kill everything.

As a carnivore, I was only worries about the buildings that made my creatures better at killing shit. It was all pretty simple really. I found a pretty easy strategy that made the stage very easy. I believe I started out able to have 6 creatures. Until I killed 2 of the tribes that's all I had.

Killing the first one was pretty simple. Just run over there with 3 creatures, kill them all, destroy the hut. There really wasn't much resistence. I was getting my crew ready to attack a 2nd tribe when one of them decided to attack me instead. I was able to defend my tribe and that left them with 3 of 6 creatures left. So, I just sent my 6 creatures over to their tribe and decimated them.

That was the strategy. I just wait for a tribe to attack me. After defending aginst the attack, I immediately sent my entire tribe to them and blew them away. It wasn't very hard. After killing 2 tribes, I was able to have 9 creatures. After the 4, I was able to have 12.

Once you destroy the 5th tribe, you advance to the Civilization stage. I didn't play this stage. Once you hit the advance button, you get to design your City Hall and the one ground unit you'll use during this stage. I got through the inital tutorial for this stage before quitting. This stage looks to be more involved than the last.

This is where I am now. I will play further into the game later in the week. Overall, what I have done has been fun, but I don't see how it can be fun more than 2 or 3 times. As has been said already, the 3 stages I have played are very shallow and offer very little replay value.

I knew before the game came out that the space stage was going to be where a large portion of the game will be. I guess I expect the rest of the game to have more to it as well. I'm not ready to say that I am pleased or disappointed. I'll see once I play the space stage.

I hope this post isn't too long. I wanted to give a more in depth view of how the game has been for me.

[Groundhog]

Originally Posted by spleen1015

This is where I am now. I will play further into the game later in the week. Overall, what I have done has been fun, but I don't see how it can be fun more than 2 or 3 times. As has been said already, the 3 stages I have played are very shallow and offer very little replay value.

That's the thing. The pre-space stages are "fun" in a very basic way, but they are comparable to a "tutorial", and the big problem is that there is no actual LEVEL to go along with these tutorials. Your hand is held the entire time through these very basic stages (I think I "died", a term I use loosely given the lack of any negative effect on the game when you "die", a grand total of 4 or 5 times total - the majority during the first stage), and you are barely given enough time to make use of the advances you gain - be they technological or evolutional - before the stage is over and you are on to the next mini-game.

I've played around with the space stage for a number of hours now as well, and there is just so many things lacking from even this portion of the game that are available in other games of this type in terms of economics/trading as well as the combat (not to mention the poor quality of repetitive missions you are sent on) that I'm really struggling to see what took this game so long to create.

I suspect the ratio of time spent putting the various creature/vehicle designers and online portion of the game together, compared to the actual game itself, was heavily leaning towards the former.

The designer tools are great to be sure, as is the online portion of the game, but it's just a shame that there really isn't a "game" attached to them.

Maybe Spore 2 will get it right... (sounds familiar when dealing with an EA title...)

[spleen1015]

Originally Posted by Groundhog

I've played around with the space stage for a number of hours now as well, and there is just so many things lacking from even this portion of the game that are available in other games of this type in terms of economics/trading as well as the combat (not to mention the poor quality of repetitive missions you are sent on) that I'm really struggling to see what took this game so long to create.

I was wondering the same thing last night. I bet there was a time during the project where a major focus shift happened and the gameplay was changed drastically.