Spore

By this point, both of my regular readers will be aware of how I feel about PC gaming, and that as far as I’m concerned all you PC gamers need to be sent somewhere labelled as “E3”, but instead replace all the shininess and half naked women (who must surely be upsetting their parents) is replaced by someone better than Paul McKenna, who can then hypnotise you into the normal way of thinking that is “coding does not equal fun; thus patches, installation keys, reboots and constant upgrading and anything else that requires that much work just to play the fucking thing is not fun”. A key example of this is when I recently installed the complete original Sims game, which took me literally an hour and 18 motherfucking disc swaps. Seriously, I changed the discs 18 times, and this was without any hiccups.

One of you two will be thinking it serves me right for wanting to play the Sims, but shut up, it proves my point exactly. In general, PC gaming is about as much fun as PC work, and usually there’s just a spreadsheet splitting the two. Anyway, some time ago, I was told about Spore and promised that one of the selling points of it was it was being designed to run on pretty much any PC. After I spoke to someone more interesting, I was told the really interesting thing about Spore was that it lets you make an alien race, starting from the very beginning as a microbe, then working your way up the evolutionary chain, then the food chain until eventually your alien race ends up with a galactic empire.

Now that I’ve written that down, it’s basically an extended version of the Sims & SimCity; but fuck it, it’s all customisable and shit. Having decided that I’d be more mature and make a race of interesting aliens that don’t look like they’re from Star Trek (or just a race of giant penises), I decided to fuck around with the creature creation tools as much as possible, I wound up with something resembling an understandably pissed off, fat platypus gorilla; then accidentally ended the species’ evolution with something that wouldn’t look out of place in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

At first this filled me with woe for making a creature whose head actually touched its arse if it tried looking up, then I decided to be proud of this monstrosity, partially because I was stuck with it, but mostly because this six-limbed, ugly bastard was pretty much the point of Spore. However, it was at this point I nearly died. I realised that my microscopic, style-over-function, energy saving midget of a PC was running Spore very smoothly, albeit with the settings on low, but frankly, it’s a hell of an achievement for something bought as a complete package with an on-board graphics card. I was seriously expecting it to install, then get a message off EA saying they’d successfully stolen £25 of my money and there was no way for me to enjoy it or get it back.

But never mind my hideous monster, or his space ship which resembles a green USS Stargazer (because it wouldn’t let me make an Enterprise). I’m here to tell you what I thought of Spore before I get far too curious and read up what everyone else thinks about it. I was initially sceptical about Spore, partly because it’s been delayed at least two years, but mostly because it was originally SimEverything; which to me said it was going to be the Sims, but with weird monstrosities.

Luckily I was treated to something a lot more interactive, and a pair of stages that had me rediscovering the word “nomnomnom”. The thing I like about Spore overall, is its simplicity. Even though it was on easy mode (fuck you, I’m getting to grips with something different than I’ve ever played), the controls were kept simple, as was, well, everything else. Click on something to eat it/use it/fuck it, depending on if you’re set to nice or dickhead mode. And that’s pretty much how the whole game plays out, even when you evolve to the tribal, civilisation and space stages.

Having said all that, and the admiration of the simplicity of Spore, I do think that called Spore very flat is perfectly reasonable. While I personally believe that all the needs and desires of Sims is a perfect way to introduce OCD to any given nation; the lack of pretty much everything other than a health meter at any given stage seems like a let down best described by remembering the first time you got Sky TV, then looking through a year later and realising there isn’t really that much on offer. Sure it’s fantastic to start with, and you can never imagine getting tired of it… but sooner or later you’ll realise all you’re doing with your time is neglecting the few friends you have in order to watch repeats of shit 80’s sitcoms and wondering why none of the few hundred channels you pay for shows Star Trek anymore.

Hindsight has once again proven itself to be a cynic’s most powerful weapon, but until I actually reach that level of boredom, repetition and general melancholy, I’m pretty determined to enjoy Spore and the trouser-tightening feeling I get from being given the power to condemn not only a single person, family or even city to hell and damnation; but instead given the power to make a whole alien race’s entire existence incredibly uncomfortable and inconvenient (such as locating said alien’s arse directly about it’s head).

I may at one point try the extreme lifestyle choices – pussyfied vs. the borg – but I’d rather delay it because I seriously doubt these choices work nearly as well as Fable, which for me still has massive replay value even today. Much in the same way that I still love DS9.

Should your short term memory be functional, you’ll have no doubt noticed a recurring Star Trek theme, but what can you expect from a game that gives me the option of making an alien race, then eventually letting me make a galactic empire with the option of designing their space ships? Yeah, I thought so. I’d like to see anyone who made it to the space stage of Spore and still hasn’t made anything the resembles something from a Sci-Fi series/movie. When I find this person, I can bring him to the Manchester University’s science department and have them disembowelled, studied and used as proof of life on other planets.

I’m really just waiting for the Event Horizon piloted by Care Bears.