Spore – the first few hours

So, the downside of working for a living and having a wonderful new woman in my life is that sometimes, release dates for games I’ve held quiet vigils for for an alarming amount of time, slip by me.  When I realized yesterday during the day that Spore had been released on Sunday and I was at work – it was a bad bad time. 

On the other hand I was thrilled to find out that EA was offering up my undoing via digital download.  Needless to say, this is how I purchased the game (Steam had never done me wrong I thought).  Here’s about how it went:

Adventures in the land of Digital Distribution:

Holy Facedesk Batman! I have what? 16meg down (thanks comcast)? So you’re taking 2 and a half hours to download a 3 gig game why? (should be about 35 minutes ideally, but lets give them an hour to be sporting).   Well, at least when it’s done it’ll be ready to play like on steam.  No?  Decrypting? What? PC Load letter? WTF? Okay, so your decrypting it… must be like installing it no? it is, after all, taking 20 minutes.  Great. Done decrypting…  let’s play—  unpacking? really?  (watches the premiere of the Sarah Connor Chronicles at some point in this mess).   So we’re done? no? Now I have to install it… and you want me to push the button to do the deed at this point?  Awesome.

Listen, EA… didn’t you ink some deal to distribute Valve’s games in stores? because, you’re really really good at getting discs in stores.  Why not let them return the favor?  Competition is good, but this was really really broken, and the 3+ hours it took me to download and install this game, could’ve been easily spent going to the store and buying the game. 

Spore – Or finding a vein.

It’s a wonder I had it in me to load up the game after my super competitive round of EA’s latest puzzler, but it’s Spore, and I was already pretty committed. 

When you first load up Spore you’re offered a picture of the galaxy.  They definitely want you to play through the whole thing sequentially before jumping around the different parts of the game.  So I started at the cellular level as a carnivore.  As far as I could tell at the time, my two choices were to eat things, or be food, so I went with the former.  (I noticed as I was going along that you can move towards being an omnivore with a nice balanced diet, but I wasn’t exactly playing for finesse: if it swam it was dinner). 

The gameplay of the first part of Spore is essentially a rip of feeding frenzy or Fl0w.  Swim around with your mouse and eat things that are smaller than you while avoiding things (with teeth) that are bigger than you.  It’s relaxing and fun, and as you go along you can find new bits of DNA (which look an awful lot like powerups) which you can use to evolve.  The choices are pretty staggering – electricity, extra cilia for speed-swimming, jet-like thrusters, spikes, more eyeballs, sharper teeth, etc…

Just like feeding frenzy or fl0w, as you eat, you grow and your world expands.  The whole thing has a very simple mechanic, but is just imminently fun.  Once you’ve grown to a certain point you’re given the option of evolving legs and waddling your soggy butt up on land – which takes you to the second stage.

The land stage is fairly similar in its initial mechanic.  You play as one of your creatures.  You wander around looking for new parts (which are found in the skeletons of dead creatures strewn about the map).  There are other creatures all around you, which you can either attack and send on the path to extinction, or ally with, using some combination of dancing, singing, posing, or charming.  All of the other creatures are created by other players out there in the universe, which is undoubtedly one of the best things about the game, and a guarantee that the experience will be unique each and every time you play.  I came up against perfect monkey replicas, extremely well-done red dragons and an unfortunate blob of eyeballs and failed physics that I quickly put out of its misery. 

As you play along this stage, eating or befriending other creatures and evolving your own along the way, your brain keeps growing.  Eventually when you’ve got a nice thick melon, you reach the third stage, which I’ve only just begun – the tribal stage.

Before entering the tribal stage you get one last crack at the evolutionary designer, to finalize your creature for all time and history (and take the recommendation to add some sort of hands, which are, apparently good for the whole ‘tool carrying’ thing).  I won’t say much about this stage since I just started, and was embarrassed by a race of creatures who looked an awful lot like a certain pink dinosaur, when I launched a preemptive attack on their camp… but damnit – they were too. cute. to. live!

Anyway, the game has a near perfect combination of simple yet addictive gameplay, oodles of customization, and the ability to either pick-up-and-play for a few minutes, or a few days.  So far, my only gripe is that the very minimalistic graphics settings do not have my monitor’s resolution… they should fix that.  Otherwise, it is just about everything we were promised and then some.  Go play it.