Digital Dave

Hey, at least you only had to wait a couple of extra days for Spore. A lot of the time in the Australian market we have to wait at least six extra months.

Spore’s a game I can’t wait to try out myself because I want to see for myself how they’ve implemented the things they’ve done. I think I’ll learn as much from the gameplay elements they get wrong as the ones they get right.

Seems to be a response from a lot of people – no replayability. Odd that, the SimCity games are based around replayability! I’ll probably get it much much later then most people, the DRM thing scares me a bit from my perspective and I have many other things on my playlist.

Oh my… The DRM issue… I really only make a few exceptions, but typically, if a game punishes me for playing it, I will stay away from it. Maxis is lucky that I am a die hard supporter of their work, and I REALLY want them to succeed. One of the few simulation companies that I thoroughly enjoy most of all their work. I definitely despise the thought of ‘Renting’ a game that I pay $50 for. I still play my old, old games from time to time. Most of these companies don’t even exist anymore.

Sweet, I’m glad Jeff’s response helped!

I keep hearing all these disillusioned takes on SPORE, and I have a kind of theory as to why it’s occurring. I can’t say for certain–I’m trapped in Mexico with crappy internet, and so I haven’t been able to buy or download SPORE yet (by download I mean EA’s nifty Command Center Direct 2 Drive thingamabob). But I’ve got a feeling the spirit and purpose of the game has been lost amidst the expectations of being able to create and build.

I’ll write more on it when I’ve actually played the game and been able to prove/negate my theory, but I think it has to do with the fact that *nobody actually understands what the game is about*. But I might just be talking about nothing. I’ll give it a try next week when I purchase it.

Well, I found The Sims tedious after a while – it might be the same with Spore, it might be I enjoy Spore and, like SimCity, go at it a couple of times in depth. I’m not sure, I’ve skirted reviews, I’ll try it late sometime, maybe on someone else’s PC – I do have a lot to get on with like I said – but you bring up good points on understanding the game. It might take a while (the while that game journalists, and the game designers at Maxis have already had), to “get it”.

The DRM thing is, yeah, 100% for me being able to play in 10, 20 years like I’ve done with games I’m playing right now. I don’t trust EA to not pull their servers down sans patch, to be honest, heh. Bigger fish then them have fried, that’s for certain.

The Sims is definitely tedious after a while, which is probably why they are reducing the strain with The Sims 3 (reducing many of the micromanagement aspects).

But I enjoyed The Sims more for it’s building elements. I had a lot of fun spending hours putting together a really fancy house. Maybe I enjoyed it more because I could relate to it. After the house was completed, I’d tinker around with the gameplay elements, but this is where they drastically differ. In The Sims, I had a lot of things to do that required a little strategy.

With Spore’s building elements, they’re much, much less time consuming. I could spend 10 minutes building a really nice character, and then I either have the option to quit, build another object, or get into some gameplay – with the only things to accomplish being: dodge creatures, eat, kill, or make friends. None of these things take that much time to do and in turn makes the game fly.

This is the reason for the DRM: someone at EA looked at the game shortly before launch, and went:

“OMGWTFBBQ!?! We’re going to be ****ed at retail! Every reviwere is going to say -Rent, don’t Buy-, and every full price copy will be back on shelves within 24 hours as a 2nd-hand coopy, with us geting zero revenue. Quick, DO SOMETHING! STOP THE RETURNS! STOP THE 2ND HAND SALES!”

And so … the DRM.

Although, incidentally, hte game is much much longer than you describe, the space stage is a big hunking monolith of … an attempt to clone GalCiv, but inferior, and many years after GC came out.

Although now I’ve got started … Just like the tribal stage is … a very poor, unbalanced RTS clone, by someone who doesn’t play RTS’s much. (and LOL at the fact that if your creature has powerful enough wings, your chieftain flies into space every 30 seconds, preventing you from doing anything until he dies of starvation whilst he orbits the planet).

If you take away Creature Creator, there is No Game here, apart from a bunch of lazy, very poorly tested rip-offs of better games that came out years ago.

I am looking forward to seeing the Cell Stage appear – for free, with badges – on Kongregate, but done better, with more levels to it, and lets you play FOR AS LONG AS YOU WANT, rather than kicking you out just as it stats to get fun.

Will Wright: “We think Casual Games means: give people soemthing that looks fun, and take it away from them the moment they start to enjoy ourselves. We played Bejewelled a couple of times. We felt that was all we needed to know about the industry”

I love that perspective, Adam. I think that pretty much sums the DRM up.

Yeah, I was being harsh with the time, but in all honesty, the majority of the time sink is in an extremely boring galactic fiesta. Well, it’s not even a fiesta. It’s a PITA. But as a carnivore, completely beating everyone to death, the prior stages went extremely fast. Stage 1: 30 minutes. Stage 2: 1 hour. Stage 3: Less than 1 hour. Stage 4: Less than 1 hour. So, rounding up, It took me around 3 1/2 hours to get to the intergalactic stage. I had no interest in trying to “complete” the galactic stage. I spent an hour or two, following pre-selected paths between planets, completed some really bogus missions, and that’s all I could take.