RSS

Tag Spore

I Give It Two Flagellae Up

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , September 18th, 2008 @ 12:14 pm

My copy of Spore arrived several days ahead of schedule last week, and I’ve had a chance to spend a few hours playing with it…though not nearly quite as many hours as I had anticipated…so I was going to offer up a few of my own observations until I watched this very funny video review. The guy talks very, very fast and with an English accent, so you might need to listen closely, but it’s worth it. (The review only lasts a little more than 4 minutes, even though the clip plays for well over 10 minutes. The entire second half is a very long ad for another EA video game, so just skip it).

Actually, I like the game quite a bit better than this reviewer does, but I don’t disagree at all with the way he sizes it up: it is nowhere near the Epic Game Of Everything that we were promised for four years, it’s really just five little games (each one of which bears a strong resemblance to some other well-known classic video game), all of which suffer for having to be simplified and compressed to fit the overall premise of the game. One also senses the not-so-subtle hand of the marketeers at Electronic Arts trying to cram this game into the suddenly-hot “casual gamer” category, when the real audience for Spore was actually the hardcore god-sim player like me. They really really really wanted this game to be another “The Sims”, and have shoe-horned it into that niche kicking and screaming. So, there are some genuinely inspired elements to the game, but also a lot of things that were obvious compromises between Wright’s developers and EA, and a fair number of things that come close to ruining the whole thing. A lot of reviewers have just plain decided that it isn’t worth the $50, including the guy in the video. Personally, I wish the developers would release a sort of “unofficial” Spore that is closer to the original ideas that Will Wright had, and distribute it in some Open Source/GPL way that let the hardcore gamer community turn it into something wonderful. I’m not gonna hold my breath for that, though.

Charlotte loves to sit with me and kibbitz as I play the game. She tried the first stage (the little micro-organisms that got spun off into their own Nintendo DS game), but she got extremely upset when her little pink critter started getting chased by a bigger critter with lots of spiky bits and a big beak, and so prefers to just watch me rather than play it herself. That, to me, says that trying to market this game to the casual game crowd is misguided. It was nice for the two of us to sit side-by-side and play, but now I won’t even consider buying the Nintendo DS version for her.

EmailStumbleUponRedditFacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Related Posts:

ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE!

By Brian Filed in Misc Tagged with , , , September 8th, 2008 @ 2:14 pm

Spore was officially launched yesterday, a couple of weeks ahead of the announced release date. That’s most likely because it had alread found its way onto every major BitTorrent site on the Internet last week, and Electronic Arts wanted to be sure they could sell one or two copies before the entire world had downloaded it for free. Even moreso once the word-of-mouth started making the rounds. Quite a few people are unimpressed, saying that the game is too easy and becomes reptitive quickly. That’ll drive off the hardcore gamers fast, and those are the people who usually buy the game the minute it hits the shelves. Here’s Wired’s review as an example of the typical complaints I have read so far today.

So they’ve made a gamble: let the hardcore people download it for free and get the negative w-o-m out of the way as quickly as possible so that the “casual gamer” market will still buy it a month or two months or six months down the road. Ever since the Nintendo Wii proved that you didn’t have to kiss gamer ass to sell gazillions of units, there’s been a lot of interest in ways to capture the imaginations of the people who don’t buy the latest-and-greatest hardware and games. Personally, I don’t know if Spore is the right game to be trying this tactic. The SimCity series of games is the ancestry of Spore, and SimCity was not a game one picked up casually. Will Wright’s team got lucky with The Sims as a simpler way to re-imagine some of the concepts behind SimCity, and Spore incorporates many of the ease-of-use UI elements they developed, but still involves a lot more commitment than making your Sim go pee every three hours.

A lot of the let-down comes from the sheer unsupportable hype that has been swirling around for years. From the now-famous videos of Will Wright demoing the game at an E3 convention almost four years ago, it seemed like he had really come up with the ultimate game, and nobody did anything to disspell that impression, particularly as the release date slipped further and further away. My guess is that the demos we saw in 2004 were of a game that was nearly ready to ship with much more complex gameplay, but changes in the world of video games compelled EA to push Maxis to make changes again and again to try to live up to the rise of social networks, lessons learned about the pitfalls of MMORPGs, and the new “casual gamer” model. So the game was probably dumbed down a couple of degrees, and the interactivity model changed up a bit, all without disrupting the hype surrounding the few details that would occasionally slip out.

Having pre-ordered my copy ages ago from Amazon, I am content to wait until I get mine in the mail about a week from now. I’ve been waiting this long, what’s another week? It’ll give me the chance to read everyone else’s reviews, gripes, and suggestions, and if there are any presently-unknown bugs, there’ll be the chance for someone to find and report them. A lot of people are particularly unhappy about the digital rights management scheme built into the game — the infamous SecuROM software. They’re talking about it over at Slashdot, which has a link to a story about how some gamers are giving the game bad ratings at Amazon to try to drive down sales because of their displeasure with the DRM. The inclusion of SecuROM is not new news, so I don’t know what people are in a dizzy about it now, and the necessary cracks are available right along with the game itself at the usual places. I’ll be downloading the crack at the first sign of trouble from SecuROM, I can tell you that much.

Based on the complexity and depth of the SimCity series, I was sure that once Spore came out I’d be holed up in my den all winter with it, but it’s looking like it will not be quite the timesink I originally expected. Even the whispered rumors of Civilization V say it’s more than a year away, and I am really in need of a replacement for CivIV for a while. Looks like Spore won’t keep me going that long, but I hope I get at least a few weekends’ entertainment out of it.

EmailStumbleUponRedditFacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Related Posts:

They Came From Outer Space

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , June 19th, 2008 @ 2:43 pm

As you may know, on September 7th, Spore, the most highly anticipated computer game of the last five years will hit the shelves. Sometime shortly there after, when my pre-ordered copy shows up on my doorstep, I will disappear into my Fortress of Solitude with it and may not be seen again for months. Unless it sucks, in which case I’ll re-emerge almost instantaneoulsy, but let’s not even consider that possibility right now.

A couple of months ago, Electronic Arts and Maxis, the company that is actually developing the game, announced that they would whet everyone’s appetite with an early release of the module of the game that allows you to design the beings that will populate the game world for you. And so earlier this week — Tuesday, in fact — they made a limited version of the Creature Creator available for free and also started selling the Creature Creator as a stand-alone item on sale for $9.95. (Why you would spend $10 on this is beyond me; they won’t give you $10 off on the final game if you buy the CC module, so why not just play with the limited free version and save your cash for later?)

Hundreds of thousands of eager fans (myself included) have downloaded the Creature Creator in the last three days, and over 300,000 player-created aliens have been uploaded to the game’s database. And can you guess what the most popular type of alien is?

Yep. Giant penises! Hundreds of different variations on penis-shaped, penis-headed, penis-talied, or penis-covered creatures just waiting to be played with. There are also creatures that resemble two people engaging in sex, the occasional naked female, and, of course, a walking, roaring animated representation of the Goatse man (or, at least, his most famous pose).

The fad has even generated its own name: Sporn. Ain’t life grand?

EmailStumbleUponRedditFacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Related Posts:

Return Of The Zombie!

By Brian Filed in Media Tagged with , , , , , , , May 9th, 2008 @ 2:49 pm

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the name given to all those unpopular and generally ineffective technologies used to try to prevent people from doing whatever they want with their digital content (movies, games, music, etc.). Security guru Bruce Schneier wrote this piece all the way back in 2001 entitled “The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention”, which pointed out that all DRM schemes can and will be broken, and the only thing imposing DRM on customers does is to treat them like criminals. Nevertheless, DRM technologies continued to be a way of life with digital content until last year, when Apple went out on a limb and offered DRM-free music downloads from a major record label (EMI). Shortly thereafter, Wal-Mart demanded DRM-free music from their suppliers, and before you could say “Metallica Sucks” DRM was virtually gone from every record label.

But while the labels acquiesced on DRM, the RIAA has not stopped their witch hunt for “pirates”, and this Ars Technica post quotes the technical chief at the RIAA as saying that DRM will rear its ugly head yet again, especially as people stop buying single track downloads and/or CDs and move to subscription services. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow didn’t mince words about this:

The RIAA believes in “intellectual property,” which is a fancy way of saying: they believe that they get to own property, and you have to rent it. The bits on your hard-drive belong to them, and that means you have to install DRM that lets them control your PC so that you don’t do bad things with their bits. In the information age, “property” is the exclusive preserve of giant companies that can afford to register copyrights and sue to defend them, while the rest of us get to sharecrop all our embodiments of their property, from furniture to t-shirts to music to games to cars to PCs.

Meanwhile, on the software-and-games front, BioWare, the producers of the game Mass Effect said that the PC version of the game will use a DRM technology called SecuROM (which is well-known and despised by gamers everywhere for causing their games not to run) AND an activation system that will require the computer to validate itself online every ten days. But what really has people shooting steam out of their ears is that the guy who said this also claims that the very highly-anticipated game Spore will feature the same activation/validation scheme.. Les, who blogs as “Stupid Evil Bastard”, is so pissed off that he says he might not even buy Spore as a result, and my friend Solonor isn’t pleased that if he goes on a long business trip and shuts off his PC, his game won’t work anymore.

My online friend Art Wells said it best over at The Site Which Must Not Be Named:

You don’t buy software. You rent the right not to be sued or prosecuted for using it.

EmailStumbleUponRedditFacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Related Posts:

While You’re Waiting For Spore…

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , March 10th, 2008 @ 2:28 pm

September is a long time away for those of us awaiting Spore. Which reminds me…at the Apple event last week, EA announced that they would also have an iPhone/iTouch version of Spore similar to the version they’ll be releasing for the Nintendo DS.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to tell you. Last time we heard from Captain Sig Hansen of the F/V Northwestern, he was in hot water for letting some Russian hoodlum use his name and his ship’s name to market some frozen crab legs.

One thing you can say for Sig, he’s always looking for a new way to make a buck. Now the deal is that he is involved with a video game company to make a “Deadliest Catch” video game. The player would get to choose between several “Deadliest Catch” ships (including the Northwestern, natch) and act as one of the deckhands. The idea is that you’d have to set and pull pots while braving the conditions on the vast Bering Sea during king crab and opellio crab seasons. I don’t know how fully formed this idea is, but it might be fun on the Wii, where you could actually physically interact with the game. It might all just be wishful thinking — there’s quite a lot of time to sit around and think once the crabbing’s done, I’ll wager. The new season of “Deadliest Catch” starts next month, in case you’re wondering.

EmailStumbleUponRedditFacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Related Posts:

Do You Hear That?

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , February 12th, 2008 @ 1:44 pm

That girlish high-pitched squeal of joy you might have heard far off in the distance was probably me.

I just got the e-mail from the Spore website with the official release date: September 7.

There had been a lot of speculation that the game was going to ship sometime in the spring, and the pre-order page at Amazon even gave a March shipping date, but then there was word from EA that the game would be held off until late fall.  So early September is a pretty good compromise between the best and worst case dates, I think.

And that low murmur you can probably detect?  That’s the sound of hundreds of gamers whispering "Please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck…"

UPDATED:  Les at Stupid Evil Bastard passes along this link to an interview with Wil Wright as to why Spore has taken so damn long to finish.

 

EmailStumbleUponRedditFacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Related Posts:

Big Boy Toys

By Brian Filed in Links, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , October 26th, 2007 @ 12:00 pm

Pardon me for a bit while I indulge in some electronic gadget fanboyism.

1. Les, the Stupid Evil Bastard, linked to a quick article in Joystiq that quotes uber-game-developer Will Wright as saying that his long-awaited game “Spore” is “about six months away”. That more or less jibes with the March 3, 2008 release date Amazon is quoting on their pre-order page, depending on how exact you want to figure that date. I’m still skeptical that we’ll see it much before Christmas ’08.

2. Dave Zatz at Zatz Not Funny has been following the trail of the elusive Comcast-TiVo DVR for a couple of weeks and says it is now actually being installed for some customers here in New England, but he can’t figure out exactly where. I went to the Comcast page he links to and put in my ZIP code, but I can’t get it yet either. There has been buzz that the official public rollout will begin next week.

3. I’ve been holding off on giving much serious thought to buying a high-def DVD player while the format war between HD-DVD and BluRay rages on. My hope had been to find a reasonably-priced multiformat player so that we could watch either one. Gizmodo says that Samsung is bringing out a combo player in its highly regarded line of players, and that it can even be upgraded to the new BluRay BD 1.1 profile, which most current BluRay players don’t support. But the damn thing has an MSRP over the magic $1000 mark. Meanwhile, Toshiba is selling HD-DVD-only players at Wal-Mart for under $200, and you can buy a Sony BluRay player for under $500, so it’s cheaper to buy two machines.

EmailStumbleUponRedditFacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Related Posts:

Spore Forever?

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , June 21st, 2007 @ 12:08 pm

Not quite six weeks ago, I posted about Electronic Arts hinting that the release of the highly-anticipated Wil Wright game “Spore” was going to be pushed back to late 2008.

Now comes the news that EA has pushed it all the way back to “sometime in 2009″. The game industry mags are speculating that the delay is so that the game developers can do console versions, since the market for games that only play on the PC platform continues to shrivel. Given the complexity of the game as it has been demoed to date, that’s no small challenge, I’m sure.

There’s also the outside possibility that this game will simply never materialize, a la the infamous “Duke Nuke’m Forever” which has been “in development” for 10 years running with no release in sight. Seems to me I have been reading about “Spore” since 2003, and a push-back to 2009 makes for an awfully long development process, even for a game that everyone has already chalked up as “great” before even playing it.

*LE SIGH*

I guess I’ll just have to spend more time with my new Nintendo DS Lite (Fathers’ Day gift, dontchaknow). I hear Sid Meier’s going to make a DS version of Civilization IV!

EmailStumbleUponRedditFacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Related Posts:

What’s That Sound?

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , May 11th, 2007 @ 12:42 pm

Khaaaaan.jpg

It’s the collective shriek of millions of gamers reacting to the story that Electronic Arts is pushing off the release of Will Wright’s new game, Spore, to late 2008.

I am one of the shriekers. We’ve been reading about this game and getting the occasional glimpse at it for several years now, and at the electronic games shows last year, Wright and EA were saying it would be released in time for Christmas 2007. But EA’s latest financial report indicates that now they’re not anticipating releasing the game for a full year beyond that.

These kind of deeply immersive games are few and far between. Civilization IV has been out for a couple of years now and there is another expansion pack for it coming soon, but adding a few new scenarios to a well-established game like Civ is usually not worth the asking price. And, honestly, I am tired of Civ IV and want to move on to something else. If Spore is only half the game Will Wright has promised it will be, it will still be groundbreaking. But I guess we won’t know that for sure until AFTER Hillary beats Rudy next year.

EmailStumbleUponRedditFacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Related Posts:

All Original Content Copyright © BrianKaneOnline
All Other Content Copyright © Its Original Authors

Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress

Switch to our mobile site