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What's really funny is that the torrents are outpacing legal registrations.

stonefox wrote:

It's a funny thing. When will publishers learn that they can never win a DRM vs. hacker war?

That almost sounds like a military axiom.

I was looking forward to this game. But they really dumbed it down over time, and the DRM issue is just unacceptable. If they back off of the intrusive DRM, then I'll think about it. It is too bad that EA did that.

Got the game recently and it’s fairly fun. After going though the hoops for the legal version, I'm kind of sad I didn't pirate the thing. Oh well, that will teach me to buy an EA game.

Regardless, let me give a brief review of the game so far.

The Game is broken down into several stages. The first is the primordial soup or water stage. The second is the land stage where you finaly grow legs. The third stage is the tribal stage where civilization starts to set in (sort of). The fourth stage is the modern stage where you got cities and what not. The final stage is space where you begin exploring the galaxy.

The primordial soup stage that you start in is actually kind of boring. You start off as a little bloby creature after choosing to eat plants or meat. The whole point is to swim around and eat without getting eaten. Although there is no penalty for death (almost anywhere in the game actually) so getting eaten is more of an inconvenience than anything else. As you eat, you get DNA dollars (or some other kind of scoring system that I can't remember the name of off hand) that you can use to buy genetic upgrades whenever you mate (hit the mate button). All in all, its kind of boring but it also only takes about 15 min so its not that bad.

The land stage is where things get interesting. You grow legs and build a nest on shore. Form there you are off to meat up with other species. You can either attack them with the various attack forms you can give yourself or you can try and befriend them with a little mini game. The mini game is dependent on genetic traits too though so you have to design your creatures properly to do it well. You can gain access to new genetic traits in a number of ways. One is eating creatures that have them. Another is befriending creatures with interesting traits. The final way is to find them lying around on the ground (in skeletons of dead creatures). In either case, you gain DNA dollars in this section by allying with other creatures (wining the social mini game 3-4 times) or by forcing a species into extinction (killing off 5ish members of their species). The only down side to this stage is that it is where you shape the physical appearance of your race for the rest of the game. With that being said, the traits you give your race (hands, mouths, feet, etc) all have stats associated with them. So if you want an alligator mouth, you can have it, but you are stuck with the stats that come with it and you can't improve it unless you want to put on a gorilla or a shark mouth. So this tends to limit creativity somewhat. In addition, your choice of diet in the first stage also limits what types of mouths you get. For example you have to be a carnivore to get a shark mouth.

The next stage is the tribal stage. Here you learn to use tools and go about beating (or befriending) the other species into submission. This functions like an RTS game. You have to harvest food (pick plants, fish, or kill animals) and you use the food to build structures in your village. You can then equip your villagers with a number of tools from horns and flutes (social things) to fishing spears (for better fish harvesting) to axes, throwing spears, and torches for burning down your neighbors' houses. At this point, you no longer can change what your race looks like; however you can change what their tribal cloths are. Again the cloths have stats associated with them so some are better than others. At the end of the stage, make sure you change out your outfits to whatever you really want because they are fixed for the rest of the game after this point.

The next stage is the modern era. At this point several cities pop up all over the world and they are all full of rival factions of your species. You now have to go about uniting them. You can (in theory) do this via military conquest, economic pressure, or religious conversion. However, your previous actions in the game greatly shape what options are available to you at this stage. I had gone the carnivore / warrior tribe route in the previous stages and found that I really couldn't do much on the economic or religious fronts at this stage. Oh well, conquest is fun. In this stage of the game you have to design lots and lots of different things. First you design your land craft (I made a bad rendition of a dark eldar raider), your sea craft, and later your air craft (did a rather good rendition of an eldar falcon...need to figure out how to take pictures of it since you can't get to the "test drive" mode in the vehicle creator like you could in the creature creator). The creators here are a bit more flexible. Instead of spending DNA dollars, you are just set with a fixed amount of creation points (which is plenty to get whatever you want). In addition, while the parts have stats, they just adjust the %of speed, health, and attack power you have compared to each other. So putting on a new gun ups your damage some and lowers your health and speed a bit. This system makes it a lot easier to get the look you want along with the stats you would like. You also have to design building for your guys. You need to make a town hall, a house, a factory, and an entertainment building. All the building building (hehe) can get a little tedious and I started to slack off a lot after the third one. Once you get into the real game, it’s another RTS style affair (well mostly). You build land and sea craft (once you are able to) and go out to claim “spice plumes” (yes they went there). The plumes set your base income and that’s modified by factories in your city. Eventually you’ll be able to build aircraft (which rock) and go about world domination.

Once you’ve conquered the world you move on to the space stage. You start of by designing your space ship (mine looks a bit like the imperial shuttle craft from star wars). There are no stats associated with anything at this point, so you are free to run wild with the creator. There is a limited amount of creation points to work with, but I only used up about half of them making my ship. The space stage is the longest and largest stage of the game. It plays a lot like star control 2 (if you remember that). You can run missions for your home world or for other alien species you run into. You can go about colonizing other planets (actually you more or less have to). And you can go on military campaigns against other races. Running missions gets you paid as well as improving your relations with other races (if you are running missions for them). Once you’ve got decent relations, you can set up trade routes or ally with the race. Trade routes don’t seem to give you money, but once they’ve been running for a while, you can buy the solar system from the aliens (for way more money than I’ve ever been able to get). If you ally with a race, you can get them to give you one of their ships to go with you. It’s really helpful in combat to have wingmen. The down side is that allies call you in when they get attacked and you will occasionally be called in to help with pirate attacks or to solve ecological disasters that show up. Trade is a very viable option. Every colony you have will produce spice. There are several different colors of spice (my empire produces red, blue, yellow, pink, and teal spice). The different spices have different values to different colonies and races. As you adventure around, you get “badges” for accomplishing a whole slew of things (terra-forming, fighting, trading, upgrading your ship, traveling long distances, encountering aliens, scanning planets, and much much more). The various badges open up new equipment for you to buy for your ship. You can get bigger cargo holds, more health, more energy, better weapons, different terra-forming equipment and lots of other things. The last thing to touch on is combat. Combat only happens on planets. Once on a planet, you can fly around in the atmosphere and fight either air/space craft or attack cities. You select weapons from your weapon menu and just point and click at the enemy. Annoyingly enough, I found combat isn’t very interesting. You either fly in and you and the enemy zap each other till one is dead (often you since you usually don’t have buddies) or you fly backwards shooting missiles while the enemy chases you till they die. Missiles have the longest range and only travel so far before blowing up so if you move backwards, they run into your missiles and you get away from theirs. The really really annoying thing about combat is that when enemy ships get low on health, they will often run away. When they do, they fly around for a bit and if you don’t blow them up, they regenerate back to full after about 10 seconds. Distance doesn’t make any difference and damaging them doesn’t reset the timer (I’ve been lasering guys when all of a sudden they just pop back to full health). I haven’t finished the space stage of the game yet but despite it’s short comings, I’m enjoying it.

So all in all, if you can get past the annoyances, spore can be a very fun game.

I lost interest in the space stage. I’ve gone back and started a few new creature but I don’t really see the point in playing on past the second stage anymore, to be honest. Beyond the creature creator there isn’t a lot of game going on.

The gameplay is pretty superficial in each stage. The first stage plays like the simplest of point and click shooters. It becomes fun when you start upgrading your little critter, so he takes on a life of his own. The second stage is somewhat similar to WoW, albeit much simpler (and thankfully much shorter ). There isn’t really of skill or strategy in this section, but it’s fun because it works with the fantastic creature creator.

The problem comes when you graduate to the tribal stage, which should be after about an hour of gameplay. The tribal section is a light RTS game, harvest food to get more guys, overcome other tribes. Your options are limited and the decisions are generally pretty obvious. There’s no creature creator to save this section though, you get to add bits and pieces of clothes to your creature but they’re kind of limited and don’t make much visual difference to your creatures as they run around the game world.

The next section is civilisation, and this is another light RTS section. Once again there’s few options and the right choice is generally pretty obvious. You hardly even see your creatures anymore, instead you get to design some buildings and vehicles for them, but you have to squint to notice your artistry, and the speed/guns trade-off barely impacts play.

The last section of the game is space. This section is the largest in the game and will take the longest to complete, it’s also probably the worst designed. The strangest choice in this section was in making you a single character. In the first section you were a single cell, then multi-cellular then a full animal. In the second section you were a single creature, who develops to lead a group of critters from your species and possibly others. In the third stage you lead a tribe, and in the fourth you lead a civilisation who eventually triumphs and dominates the whole planet. At which point you move in to space all ready to lead a mighty space empire and end up controlling one dude in spaceship. Albeit one dude in a spaceship who’s the only guy in your mighty space empire that can actually do anything.

Anyway, in the last stage you’re given a bunch of fun toys, zooming around in a spaceship is actually a lot of fun just by itself, and then you start tractor beaming and deathraying little critters, then you start building colonies and terraforming planets and it’s all kind of cool, at least it is the first few times. But then you start with the pirate raids and grinding wars and you start noticing how much time is spent doing boring stuff just so you can get back to the increasingly less fun colonising. At this point I asked around and apparently this doesn’t really change, you never stop putting out scrubfires, you never graduate to controlling a galactic empire, you’re always one dude in a spaceship. So I went back to the start and played through the creature creator stages a few more times.

All very valid complaints. Like I said in the closing of my "review" if you get past the anoyances, it CAN be a fun game. It certainly has it's down points.

All in all though, I must agree with you that the land stage is by far the most fun. It's where you really get a chance to see your creatures develope and afterwards, most of the other creation parts are kind of meh. Making buildings I found to be particularly tedious for not a lot of payback, but every time you plop down a colony you have to set it up with buildings so it's not a complete loss. I actually managed to "finish" the game last night. You do this by getting to the center of the galaxy which (depending on how you do it) can be a chore. Regardless, once you get there, you get a fairly amusing cut scene and then it spits you right back out...presumably to keep playing if you want to. It kind of lacks the feel of an end though so I'm a little dissapointed.

The space stage is cool for a while but it does get tedious at times. Particularly since apparently the event timer is a heart beat thing and when enemies attack, they all do it at exactly the same time every time.

Nice 40k creatures! I love Spore thats amazing game now i have new inspiration to spore warhammer 40k creatures!

I really cant understand why the spore doesnt dont accept my registeration.. And how i can take creatures on sporepedia do i need spore account?

my avatar ...........

Spawn wrote:I really cant understand why the spore doesnt dont accept my registeration.. And how i can take creatures on sporepedia do i need spore account?

As far as I know you can't take them off the Sporepedia. I've never been able to find the download button anyways

I'm about to get a new computer and my girlfriend bought me a copy of spore for when I finally get it. What is wrong with getting an actual legal copy of the game? What kind of loop holes and everything do I need to be jumping through?

Thank you, Pheonix. I've been waiting for someone to actually talk about the game instead of the avatar creation. It's already 2000% more appealing... but I'm still happy with SupCom.

love the hive tyrant