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[Deon]

It's not always needed. I looked how SR are played at my friend's computer and immideately've bought it. This is what friends/reviews/youtube are for .

[Sean Mirrsen]

Yeah. LRC excluded, our game makers rarely make awful games.

[Deon]

Well, they rarly make grand games too (and, in fact, any; our game industry cannot compare to the giant western game-machine). But there are some and they are beautiful .

[Asheron]

they rarely make grand games too

One word:

Tetris. 

[Tormy]

I usually download "preview" versions first (and they hardly inspire me to do it with their DRM system) and if I like it I buy the localised licensed game. It saves a lot of my nerves.

Yeah not a bad idea actually, however I must say, that I never EVER made such a mistake before what I managed to do now...
[IE: All games what I bought before were all enjoyable to a degree, even if I dropped them after a few weeks..]

[RedWick]

I wonder if, by being aware of and playing games like DF, we end up being spoiled by offerings like Spore because we know how much better things could be (ie, strong gameplay over interesting visuals)? 

I think I would've enjoyed it if the game had the progression of SimEarth: cellular (spread over the oceans of the planet and develop into a multi-cellular form), creature (fill up the land and become more intelligent), tribe (populate uninhabited lands [stone to iron age in SimEarth]), civilization (wars and energy managment [atomic to nanotech]).  Going into space would just be icing on the cake after all of that.

Regardless, I picked it up and I'm having fun with it.  I can see scads of places where it could be improved, but I'm not letting that stop me from enjoying it.  But, I'm pretty easy to please.

[Cthulhu]

If I let criticisms get to me, I'll hate it, I almost hated Emery's most recent album because of criticisms, and it's at least almost as good as their other stuff.  If I can get past the criticism, I'll probably like it.

You know what would rule?  SimEarth, completely unchanged, but with good graphics, and maybe the ability to follow your guys through space when they exodus, watching them meet(Procedurally generated) aliens, maybe fight, it would be epic.

[McDoomhammer]

I wonder if, by being aware of and playing games like DF, we end up being spoiled by offerings like Spore because we know how much better things could be (ie, strong gameplay over interesting visuals)? 

An intriguing question.  I'm going to go with 'no', but from a couple a different angles.

The first is a 'definitely not' because I heard of Spore before DF.  They promised us it would be amazing.  They didn't deliver.

The second is a "Yes, sort of, but not really", because you're exactly right about how something as deep as DF affects one's expectations of everything else.  The trouble is, I'm starting to think that no, DF isn't spoiling us... DF is how it should be.  90% of everything else just sucks.

Which, naturally, is what a spoiled person would say.

[Mephansteras]

I know DF spoils me. I look at the depth that it has, and look at other games, and go "But Dwarf Fortress has it!"

Good example is MMOs. How many MMOs out there have a backstory for EVERY SINGLE NPC. I don't know of a single one, although I haven't played all that many. In DF, if I go talk to a guy in the town, he'll tell me how he was a hunter for a few years, and then a fisher, and now he farms for a living. And two years ago this giant ate his mother. And so on. And he's not a major person, he's some random peasant. But the game knows who he is and what he's been doing. And, yeah, right now there isn't necessarily any point to talking to the guy, but it still gives the game depth. I miss that in other games. And when I see a game with a multimillion dollar budget and a team of 10 programmers, and they can't do what DF does...it's hard not to look down on what they give me. Pretty graphics or no.

You know what would rule?  SimEarth, completely unchanged, but with good graphics, and maybe the ability to follow your guys through space when they exodus, watching them meet(Procedurally generated) aliens, maybe fight, it would be epic.

That would rock!

[MeshGearFox]

From what I can gather people aren't dissapointed that Spore's not SimEverything. They're dissapointed because it's a bunch of mediocre clones of better games, akwardly glued together?

Почему у вас есть так много хорошие игры в россии I guess Space Rangers makes up for Tlon (and if that was a grammatically correct sentence, my mind will be blown).

"In DF, if I go talk to a guy in the town, he'll tell me how he was a hunter for a few years, and then a fisher, and now he farms for a living. And two years ago this giant ate his mother. And so on. And he's not a major person, he's some random peasant."

I think this is the biggest difference between a lot of go anywhere, do anything RPGs and Dwarf Fortress. DF uses all of this procedurally generated, random, whatever stuff to make the world more detailed and interesting -- essentially, there's not pre-set story, but one actually IS created because the game keeps track of all of this historical crap. Whereas, in something like Daggerfall, you're just offered a bunch of random quests and they rarely matter.

I mean, look. If you want to roleplay that you're seeking vengeance because a troll killed a bunch of people from a town, you're not going to have to be pretending all of this elaborate backstory stuff actually happened. They troll really DID kill your past five characters.

I mean I guess you can say that in summer, what Dwarf Fortress does -- and since it keeps coming up, Space Rangers 2 -- is that not only does the game let you do whatever you want, it also REACTS to you doing this in a far more significant way than "Way to go, champ! Your rank just went up with Guild X!"

In regards to games spoiling one, though, Ultima 7 did that a lot. After playing U7 and going back to, say, Oblivion, my immediate response is "What do you MEAN I can't interact with every single object, no matter how unimportant it is?"

By the way, SimEarth had SNES and TurboGrafix ports, both of which had improved graphics over the PC version and some pretty good music.

[Duke 2.0]

You know what would rule?  SimEarth, completely unchanged, but with good graphics, and maybe the ability to follow your guys through space when they exodus, watching them meet(Procedurally generated) aliens, maybe fight, it would be epic.

 Like Morrowind with the Oblivion physics engine? Man, that WOULD rule.

[Areyar]

Even sim Earth had it's problems...
might have been my crappy gaming, but I had serious trouble with tectonics swallowing all my land and with monocultures of maple-like trees taking over my ecologies.
tried to create a pondscum/watercress plant, but it just didn't propagate. (only in various experimental settings)

It did alot of things right though, such as the first sentient to arise halting evolution of competitors, as happened with Us and our relatives. (As opposed to spore, in which each tribe is a seperate race.)
Although with current increases in computer power, it shouldn't be such a big deal to allow occasional multiple sentient species to coexist.

A Sim Earth with Spore graphics would even have been more acceptable than vanilla spore. I wouldn't have paid as much for it though.


I usually 'preview' games in an illegal fashion as well, even civ4!
But I ignored all the warning signs and clung to the promise and the thought that WW would want to do a real sim-X game in the spirit of simcity and simearth after the shallow Sims series. Never again.

EA's targetgroup for simgames obviously is teens and kids, of which there is a fresh crop every year, no need to foster client loyalty or a fanbase: spending big money on advertising makes sure the unknowing fresh ones will buy into the hype each time a sub-par shallow piece fluff comes out. 

Errr.... anyhow, sorry about all that negativity. betrayal hurts.

[Makrond]

If something is disappointing, we must just be looking at it the wrong way? 

Say you were promised a hundred dollars, but instead you got ten rupee.  What other way is there to look at it?

I wasn't saying that you were wrong because you hated Spore. There was, I thought, an implied Mileage May Vary. I was merely stating that perhaps, if you approached Spore from a different angle - for example, what the game actually is, rather than what you wanted it to be - then you might find it somewhat more enjoyable. You may not have noticed the trend, but many people posting in this thread who liked Spore have basically said that it's not as great as everyone made out, but it's got some entertainment value, if only for a few days.

Anyway, that's my opinion. In case this gets misinterpreted again, YMMV. Now I'm off to play Spore.

[Deon]

The most disappointing thing about Spore if I throw away all the promises they've made and all my expectations is that I was tired of it in 2 days. I mean, really, I like to play games of different genres, but it's a really rare case for me. Well, another game is Prey which was beaten by me in 1,5 days on each level of difficulty. And I quite enjoyed it, it just didn't make me to replay it again after those 30+ hours. But guys, Prey was a SHOOTER. What is Spore then?

[Sean Mirrsen]

Spore is a jumbled mess of linear minigames strung together with content editors.