[ Originally posted here ]

Before I begin writing about the game that has temporarily taken over my life I want to point out that yes I'm aware of EA's SecuROM DRM and how it's completely useless since the game was cracked and torrented the day it first came out in Australia, and I should be mad its a rootkit install that prevents me from installing the game more than 3 times and only allows one account per copy of the game despite the manual saying otherwise and people are all pissed off about it and showing their anger by downloading it illegally and rating it a "1" on Amazon.com.

That all out of the way? Good. Spore is awesome.

When you follow a game from 2006 that keeps getting delayed and delayed you start to build up all sorts of crazy expectations about it. Okay, so Spore wasn't exactly what I thought it would be, and until I got to the Space Stage I'd already found my mind wandering to the possibility of expansion packs. However having come to already own over 20 solar systems and gaining the title of "Omnipotent" in Space as the Great Flomber Empire (admittedly helped along by some money cheats, which amusingly earns you the "Joker" badge) I found myself staring at the "badges" I've earned and the ones I haven't even unlocked yet and realizing there's still so much to do. But I'll get back to that in a minute.

At first my favorite stages were the Cell and Creature stages, and even now I like starting from the Cell phase to build up a new species. After you unlock Space you can start a new game at any stage you want, however I hoped there would be an ability to skip stages along the way, and if there is one I haven't found it yet. In the Cell phase you start, naturally, as a tiny cell in a primordial soup seeded by dormant bacteria (I assume) present on a comet that has struck the planet. You choose to be either a Herbivore or a Carnivore at first but can develop in a way that lets you be an Omnivore. Being Omnivorous is particularly useful in the Creature stage I've found, but you don't have to stay on a single path the entire time. You could start as a Herbivore and become a Carnivore, then you could be peaceful when you reach the Tribal phase. Or you can be a Herbivore throughout your entire animal existence and become a vicious vegetarian conqueror once you start developing society, it's up to you. Whatever you choose gets you a variety of different abilities in the next stage.

These choices will ultimately decide which of 9 personalities you'll have in Space. However throughout the previous stages you tend to only get the option of being friendly or violent with the only middle ground being balancing the two, although you can check your progress with the history button to see where you currently stand.

The Tribal and Civilization stages are alright (the "Civ Stage" quite a heavy tribute to Sid Meier's Civ games), they're very simple Real Time Strategy games which can be kind of boring for hardcore gamers but will certainly engage casuals or children. When I first reached Tribal I considered it the 7th level of Hell, but it's starting to grow on me. I think the worst part about Tribal is you don't create or design anything, you just collect food, domesticate animals, and either kill other tribes or play instruments for them. You do get to clothe your creature for the first time, but you don't design the clothing and the clothing itself is very clunky. You also don't get to individually color clothing (which is odd because later you get to individually color parts of vehicles and buildings) it just picks up the color of the detail texture layer on your creature, so changing the color of the clothing means changing a color on your creature. Where I understand its hard to come up with a system to clothe creatures in a game where you can make any variety of bizarre body shapes I hope they come up with something better in future expansions.

Ultimately, you come to Space, which is an impossibly vast sandbox. How vast? You've seen the images of the spinning galaxy in Spore, right? You can put your mouse over a nearby star and hear a radio signal of alien voices crying out, and then go visit it to see who's there. Some systems are devoid of life but are ripe for terraforming and colonizing, however you do have to build up abilities for both as you go along. At first I noticed a circle around the cluster of stars my solar system was in, and figured I was restrained to this one little area. However as I gained higher levels of interstellar drives I came to realize you can visit every single star in the galaxy. And the galaxy is practically to scale. For reference our galaxy is about 100,000 lightyears in diameter, that's about 500,000,000,000,000,000 miles. I don't even know how to pronounce that number. There's also an achievement for finding the Sol system, the home solar system of Earth, how cool is that? You can also mess around with any of those planets, terraforming them, supersizing creatures, messing with tribal civilizations, leveling intelligent societies to take the planet and system for yourself, turning an entire planet into an animal sanctuary etc. etc. unto infinity, traversing it all with a species you built up from a tiny bug-eyed cell and thus have even a minute emotional investment in.

All the while this galaxy is populated not only by creatures, civilizations, vehicles and buildings that you've made, but that other people have made. Each creature you scan, each species you meet you can find information on, and find out who made it. Like their stuff? Add them to your buddy list, all of their creations will automatically be downloaded for use in your game. Each download is only about 20KB. The game is constantly streaming content into your world every time you log on, it is absolutely amazing.

And that's the thing, games like Spore, which are a little bit more like toys or dollhouses than games, aren't for everyone. But the technology behind this game should be getting everyone excited. As cute and cartoony and simple as Spore appears the technology behind it really has never been done before. Procedural content generation and procedural animation are mind-blowing concepts, it means the game can actually generate planets, creatures, and even animation on the fly. Generally in a video game animations you see for a character are pre-programmed movesets linked together by player action and reaction to the game's engine's physics. Spore is different, the game can just figure out how to make something move, no matter what it is. This means advances in leaps and bounds for the industry, especially if EA is going to shop the technology out to other developers, so even if you never even touch this game it'll have a great effect on your favorite games in the future.

I can also see this game making people think more about evolution and science, which is always a good thing. Sure some evolutionary biologists and the like complain that Spore persists the warped misconceptions of evolution (it happens instantly, even willingly on an animal's part, intelligent species just stop evolving when they build a society etc.) but it could very well inspire some young players to study it.

What I'm even more excited about is this game could inspire a further interest in and understanding of outer space. Creator Will Wright was apparently adamant about having space represented in 3D as its often treated as a flat background in games and film, and the effect is spectacular. To me it's very moving when you zoom out from your planet, all the way out of your solar system, out of your local cluster of stars, all the way out to a view of entire galaxy spinning slowly and serenely to a whimsical little tune, the only indication of your planet left being a tiny sign with a house on it pointing to some indiscriminate blob of nebulae. And then you think, this is how it really is, this <em>is</em> really what we look like from outside of the Milky Way. To me space can be an overwhelming and even scary thing, but to watch that sparkling galaxy coupled with the music just gives one a warm fuzzy feeling inside. In the context of Spore you see infinite potential rather than a bleak abyss occasionally punctuated by cold light, and when you think about the adventure, from a tiny cell to a space-faring empire, you may find yourself musing that it's not only your creature's history but our history as well.

You can find me on Spore as MPSai