Spore - :( (Quite Possibly containing spoilers)

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Christian
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Spore - :( (Quite Possibly containing spoilers)

Unread postby Christian » Sat Sep 06, 2008 2:23 pm

Right

So I bought spore two days ago, and I've been playing it avidly.

I've reached early civilization-mode and I'm a bit disappointed.

It's incredibly hard for me to do a creature that I want to do. I've got to carefully balance interaction with other species' less I plummet into carnivore; I'm trying to be an omnivore as my theme is a race of bird-people. The creature I created with the editor is my goal but... at the moment... It's (near) impossible to make it.

Why?

Because of several reasons:

Bonuses do not stack, so it's pointless designing your creature with things you like unless those are the (much more expensive) later stages. I wanted a parrot mouth for my race, but ended up playing through most of the creature stage with a vulture-like beak. Not fun.

Second, everything's expensive. I need to use a lot of feathers for my creature to look good, otherwise it's just freaky. Now apparantly I've got to put nearly all my "genetic cash" into feathers to even make him look decent! I had to skim and save and try to go with what works, but in the end it turned into a horrible mockery of what I had originally made.

Third, you can apparantly use pre-created creatures from tribal-stage and up. HOWEVER, the wings on my creature got f***ed up somehow and turned in on themselves (if anyone's tried to create a creature with wings, they know how b****y they are in aligning the way you want them) and once you hit tribal, you can NOT go back and edit the creatures biological design.

As the astute reader has noticed, I am aware of the fact that you can import creatures later on. Creatures that break the amount of genetic cash you can spend. I still think it's unforgivable that even once you've finished the creature-stage, you still can't go crazy with details on your creature! D:

Then we've got the whole herbi-omni-carni levels that you've got to watch like a hawk. Again, you can later start any stage however you want ('though you won't of course be getting your 'awesome racial bonuses' you get from starting at cellular), but it still irks me that because I protected myself pre-emptively against some predators, I'm all of a sudden a carnivore instead of a omnivore, and it takes FOREVER to get back up there.

And then there's the fact that you really can't see where on the charter you are once you've gone to the end of a stage without progressing to the next; which ultimately led to a series of saves, check-ups and restarts from me because I wasn't sure whether I'd gone back into omnivore before tribal started.

And speaking of tribal. Apparantly the murder and pillaging of a fellow tribe doesn't really lower your scores here... I had accidently found myself climbing into the green bar (or 'Good') which was to me unacceptable, my race was going to be industrial. So I set out to arm all my villagers with spears, axes and what nots and went to raid a tribe that had, since the very beginning, been trying to pillage me.

I slaughtered them all, set fire to their cottages and danced with glee...

Alas, this didn't lower me one iota on the charter and I find myself becoming religious in Civilization mode!

*facepalm*

This is a whole lot of whining about this game, but I paid for it, and I'm seeing a lot of bothersome things that shouldn't've been overlooked when the game was being designed. They had a long time to go through this, and they've scrapped a lot of what was being promised way back. The tribal mode is extremely limited in what you can equip your villagers with, and the Civilization mode I've only just touched upon, yet it seems at least a little more management-aligned.

To be honest, I had the most fun in the Bacterial stage... and that's saying a lot. Constantly running from the bigger fish while eating the smaller ones was pretty fun.




That's about all I have to rant about now. Everything else aside, my only REALLY BIG ache about this game is what I mentioned, that cheaper stuff don't add up in creature-mode and that you have to pay for every single piece, even if you buy it multiple times. Either one of those would've worked, but now I feel like I finally got my child-sized excavator only to discover that the sandbox is full of catshit...

Okay, a bit harsh, but you get my point. I've been looking forward to this ever since I saw the very first gameplay video. A lot of the stuff promised has been cut, obviously, but I can live with that. I just feel that the game is in some areas WAY too simple yet restrictive. I apologize for the whining, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who don't share my opinion, I just wanted to get this off my chest.



Oh, and I edited some parts 'cause I was angrier when I wrote this than I am now.

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Christian
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Unread postby Christian » Sat Sep 06, 2008 3:24 pm

I'll add that I'm still playing, because I bought the game and I'll be damned if I won't finish it at least once.

A lot of the things I commented on could easily be fixed in a patch as well, so I'm not giving up hope on the game that's topped my Wish-list for so long.

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Unread postby Jak Snide » Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:38 pm

My steampunk shark people laugh at you from their space ship.

For making the creature you want for Tribal stage and onwards...you're going to need to do overtime in Creature. Keep playing past the point where you can achieve sentience. Kill/Befriend the shit out of everything, keep racking up that DNA. Sucks, but what can you do? I can also sympathise with the need to go for stats over looks but, as before, you can fix all that stuff before you hit tribal.

Just so you know, the Space stage is plenty fun. Though being able to design Indoktroplexes and dead-killy tanks in the Civilization stage was also pretty cool.

PS: What's your account name? I'm Snidesworth, for the record.

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PriamNevhausten
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Unread postby PriamNevhausten » Sat Sep 06, 2008 7:53 pm

Hahaha, level grinding =D
"You haven't told me what I'm looking for."
"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
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BrainWalker
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Unread postby BrainWalker » Sat Sep 06, 2008 8:44 pm

This is why I was more excited for the creature creator than the full game.

Never did get around to downloading that, though.
Anime is kind of like fish in that it is better the less "fishy" it is.

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Unread postby Jak Snide » Sun Sep 07, 2008 5:25 am

PriamNevhausten wrote:Hahaha, level grinding =D


Pretty much, though the grinding takes an hour at the very, very most. Also, while doing so for my latest creature I saw a few interesting things. Like a HUGE yet friendly creature I managed to befriend and add to my pack. And a GARGANTUAN one that was going around and eating feasting on whatever it could find.

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Christian
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Unread postby Christian » Mon Sep 08, 2008 12:48 am

I'm Horzish on it.

I've discovered another aspect of Spore that makes it fun; playing together. Strangely enough. :P

There's joy in creating a creature with friends, much more than doing it yourself.

I've reached space age, though, and it only took five minutes before I was overwhelmed and had to turn off the game and take a few deep breaths. I haven't played much of it, but it seems that once again you need to 'grind' repetitive quests for better stuff, am I right?

Either way I finally finished the game, so now I'm going to import my REAL species into tribe or civilization mode and just go on from there.

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Unread postby Jak Snide » Mon Sep 08, 2008 9:01 am

There's a few introductory quests from your homeworld. After that it's up to you. In my latest game I spent my time establishing trade routes, bribing people into liking me and exploiting the galactic spice market to make craploads of money. There's also exploration, colonisation and terraforming and good ol' war. Probably more, too. I suspect a religious species would be able to convert star systems rather than conquer or buy them.

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Unread postby Capntastic » Thu Sep 11, 2008 2:51 am

I don't get why Chris is complaining that the game charts him as a carnivore when he does carnivorous stuff. The perks from the classifications don't even seem that useful.

My only complaint is that the stages are way too short and simple, but I figured that'd be the case since I heard about the game. Overall, I am pleased, and spent something like 6 hours today playing it.

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Christian
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Unread postby Christian » Thu Sep 11, 2008 3:46 am

No no, you misunderstand me. The thing I'm complaining about is the fact that you have to carefully balance between carnivore and herbivore in order to become an omnivore. In order to unlock omnivore mouths, you need to be one; the problem I'm having is that once you've reached the final stage of the creature mode, you can't check your history (you evolve into tribal), so you've got to save, check it to see how far you've gone on either ways, and then quit and reload.

I've already managed to evolve a omnivorous race already, so it's possible, although I somehow turned religious after the tribal stage.

I'm just saying that I'm not entirely comfortable with how sometimes the system is extremely rigid in how you evolve, othertimes the extermination of a single race will send you plummeting straight down into carnivore. :/

Any hows, I'm doing Space stage now. I'm getting the hang of it, and I'm actually enjoying it about as much as I enjoyed the bacterial stage. Lots of things to do I guess.



I think my main beef boils down to the fact that I hyped the game too much for myself. I guess I kinda knew it'd turn out somewhat like this, a simple game with the editors and the different ways to make creatures being the big thing, but I expected more depth in it... :/


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