I, like many, had high hopes for spore.
I agree, that perhaps we shouldn't have put so much stock in an early alpha build that was, as said "held together with bubblegum and bailing wire." and from 3 years before release. But, all the way up until release, that was the single most descriptive, lengthy and detailed thing we were given to look at. Each following release of information was tiny, only showing a small section of the game and only a few minutes at a time. (And, I should add, without any of Will Wright's trademark Carebear infused charisma.)
I think it might be slightly unfair to compare a final game to an early blurry video from 3 years earlier, but in this case, I think we can afford to be slightly miffed.
Like a few others, I just recently went back and gave spore another try. It's sat, gathering dust on my hard drive since release. I could never bring myself to uninstall it. As I played it, I was less disappointed than I was at launch. I got all the way up to the beginning of tribal, ran into a problem where I saved at an inopportune time and had to restart tribal. I finished tribal and ran into a crash as I was in the building designer transitioning to Civ. I haven't started it again since, it's been a few days.
Now that the disappointment has mostly(but not entirely) worn off, I can look at it with different eyes. It's not a bad game. I hesitate to call it good and it's not great, but it's definitely not bad(occasional annoyances and crashes notwithstanding).
Cell is fun, for a while. There are a few different ways to play that game and they all have merits. Sometimes it's fun to simply kill everything in sight, eating their flesh. Others it's more fun to play cat and mouse, with yourself as mouse looking for green cheese. Still, this section of the game is short, and as such, doesn't really wear out it's welcome too much.
Creature is annoying. There are only two ways to play this game. Both are fairly boring and very annoying. It's treated exactly like an MMO, which, to some people that's okay, but I dislike it. It's even worse, since, in this case, the MMO has a VERY linear quest progression and as said before there are only two classes to play. (3 if you count simply trying to play both classes at once.) At this point, I can't see myself running through creature again, which kind of limits the rest of the game since special powers available in later stages would be lost.
Tribal seems very simple... too simple, even. I'm not asking for a lot, but something other than "click to make baby... click to attack/friend other tribe... repeat..." It seems... tacked on is all I can really offer. Still, it's short enough that it just starts wearing out it's welcome when finally it lets you move on.
That's where I stopped. I'll refrain from speaking of the final two stages until I've looked at them again, but I might simply forget about them. I wanted to work up to space again, see if I could have fun with it, but I'm getting bored and I have other games I"d rather look at at the moment. (Thank you Humble Indie Bundle.)
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Topic: spore (Read 4840 times)