Spore is about evolution. Or is it?

http://www.slate.com/id/2199922/pagenum/all/#page_start

by robg • 18 years ago

6 8 18 years ago

peregrine• 18 years ago

Wow this guy just destroyed my childhood love of simcity....

geuis• 18 years ago

I bought Spore the day it came out. Played till space stage. It's ultimately boring. The 2 evolution stages are a lot of fun but the game loses depth after that. It's way to easy to conquer the world in tribal and civ stages. Space is little more than making colonies and buying/selling spice for money. The combat system seems like it was added as an afterthought. You can terraform planets, but it's not as cool as it sounds. There's just way too much micromanagement going on. If I'm trying to spread around the galaxy, it's annoying to have to manage riots in cities on various worlds while being at war and trying to stabilize several ecologies by moving the right kind of grass or bush from one place to another. The whole game is just incredibly shallow.

vaksel• 18 years ago

yeah the space stage is very boring after you spend a few hours getting your things together

Trade? I have 4 systems within a short range of my home system, each has every planet maxed out and every colony maxed out. Which means I get 30 items of spice very quickly. When I stopped playing(after 2 days) I had a grand total of 90 million.

Terraforming? I have the maxed out cargo bay and have 50 items of each stage for terraforming. If I run out, I can go to any of my planets and just shoot the beam around getting only those that I like

Battle? I have 5 sidekicks, they are useless though since my ship has something like 11000 health, has the shield option that makes it invincible for a few minutes and has maxed out weaponry. Meaning I can take out another home planet(8 colonies) w/o needing to recharge/heal...takes like 30 seconds to hover over a colony, shoot up the main ring of buildings, and then have them surrender with 3 shots at the town hall.

Customization? Sure its fun at first, but it gets boring fast, by the end of it I just went to the database and pulled out old designs.

Alliances? Also boring, I'm down to only needing to do one mission to get a full fledged alliance and there is only like 3 variations there.

Looking back I'd say I spent more time designing the creatures, buildings and units than I did playing the actual game. i.e. I spent more time designing the town hall in the world stage, than I did actually playing it.

jauco• 18 years ago

Spore contains Intelligent Design elements? How awful! Let's build a computer game in which the player has no direct influence whatsoever!

shaunxcode2• 18 years ago

you've been upvoted because despite your sarcasm I actually think a game where you control some of the initial settings and then sit back and watch mutations/evolution happen would be really cool. More like a digital mutant ant farm.

derefr• 18 years ago

That would be Tiny Crawl World, or one of the related designs: http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=29

(Sean Howard's work is about as close as you'll get to "Game Design design patterns.")

rplevy• 18 years ago

Maybe it's because I live in Massachusetts and not Kansas, but I really deplore the fighting back and forth between armchair (and actual) evolutionary biologists with the anti-science rightwing religious groups. While I am on the side of science of course, it annoys me how counterproductive the whole fight has become. The need for evo bio people to fend off ID types in arguments has made the pro-science public less humble, and less accurate too, because we forget how little we actually know about how evolution works, and instead cling to the politically strongest ideas that science generates. In fact, many fundamental problems that need to be solved are being bullied into the margins by the need to make evolutionary theory seem stronger than it really is. In the last 10-15 years The MIT Press has put out several good books delving into the cutting edge of evolutionary theory, among other things exploring the role of complexity in evolution. It may surprise some that "natural selection" is not universally agreed on, as there is a competing paradigm in which the production of forms is the driver of change, and selection is hypothesized to be a filter, having more of a conserving than progressive force on organisms. The problem is that too many scientists outside of biology assume that the neo-Darwinian synthesis popularized by philosophers like Dennett and Dawkins (also fighters in the battle against religion, not coincidentally), is the one and established view, and allow it to shape the interpretation of results in other fields. Perhaps if we were to ignore the creationists instead of fighting them, then we could acknowledge the primitive state of our models and make some real progress.

Spore is about evolution. Or is it?

Related Stories