Freaking.Space.Lasers

When I was a teen-aged teenager, we went on a school camp to a nondescript bushland area. At some point our group stumbled across a big cliff which pushed out over a large watering hole. Given our age and situation, some people decided to climb up to the top and dive into the water below. A bit later we came across some ambulances. Sometimes things just aren’t as deep as they look - like Spore.

Spore (Maxis - PC) is a god-game by that well-known mad genius, Will Wright - a man who probably knows more about Japanese submarines than you. The premise of the game is simple yet massive in scope: develop from a single-celled organism into a space-faring master race capable of galactic domination. The game is split into 5 stages - cell, creature, tribal, civilisation and space. Each stage is a totally different experience, but all have criteria to fulfill in order to move on to the next one - usually this consists of “eat/kill/befriend/dig enough of X to become the baddest dude ever… and move to the next level”. The stages are held together with short cutscenes, bits of string, and the fact that they all came on the same DVD. So I feel as if I played five pretty good games and they were all called Spore.

The game opens with your single-celled blob emerging from a recently downed meteor. This is your cue to EAT. A top down view of your watery home, the first stage plays much like an arcade game in the vein of Pac-Man or Snake. Thismeans it is funktastically addictive. Guiding your life-form around, getting him to eat either gobs of meat or tufts of… green (depending on your choice of carnivore, herbivore or omnivore), while it attacks or defends itself from other creatures and grows in stature and complexity, is potentially illegal levels of fun. In our household this is definitely the most popular part of the entire game. In fact, the Cell Stage could potentially be a game all on it’s own (something demonstrated by the iPhone version of Spore, which IS just the Cell Stage) and be a great experience. But enough of that…

BAM. Creature Stage. With a click of the button you are transported to the next level - land. Pop a couple of legs on your blob (or don’t) and watch it waddle up the beach to make a nest with it’s inbred children. This portion of the game was most visible pre-launch, especially with the release of the stand-alone Spore Creature Creator. The creature creator is Lego, if the blocks were actually organic flesh bits and you were a batshit insane death god instead of a city planner. Dr Frankenstein himself would have had moral qualms about the whole deal. Making creatures is undeniably mad-scientist-type fun, and will easily eat up too much of your time, as will the creation of buildings and vehicles in the later stages. There are very few limits, meaning your creations are as insane as your mind. Seeing what creatures different people come up with is telling - my humanoid muppet babies are worlds away from my partner’s Lovecraftian spider-horrors.

The system is easy to use even for non-gamers, with only a small set of simple commands and a bunch of large and colourful icons to guide you along. It’s robust as well, every form of creature moves pretty much as it should as long as you follow some version of the laws of physics - and even if you don’t, abortions of form and function will still scrape along the landscape rather well, as they quietly whisper requests for their own death. Outside of the creator (and into the game proper), things get a little more beige. The basic deal is still to eat and grow, although now you also need to befriend or murder other species to move forward, as well as collect the hundreds of new creature parts scattered over the landscape.

By basic deal I mean ONLY deal, because here is where Spore starts to get a little thin. There are some bonuses associated with most of the creature parts on offer, but there isn’t much of a difference between them in the end, aside from what you think looks the prettiest. What this means is that you are sticking legs on a fish, over and over again, until your own face falls off. For the most part the look of your creature is irrelevant anyway, since all the creatures get the same basic move set and do the same basic amounts of damage. And then you use the same moves to kill some dudes (or dance for their love) and then you move on and do the same thing again. The fact that my enormous, six-headed, necrotising caterpillar is as effective as a blob with monkey lips sort of cancels out any sense of achievement. The in-game goals are depressingly easy and shallow too, leaving you playing only so you can make your creature look better at parties. Speaking of which…

BAM. Tribal Stage. Click that button once you’re ready and say goodbye to the creature creator. Your blob is now a social animal and can build huts and make small-scale war, but somehow forgot how to grow extra arms at will. The biology of your species is now set in stone (as if it matters), and you now have a group of little guys to control, decked out in silly looking (but fun) outfits which you can design yourself. This stage plays as a real-time strategy game, getting you to build up your small village and… kill or dance at things again. Really? Come on. You build the right hut to equip a tribe member with either a weapon or a musical instrument (depending on your style of domination) and then slowly but surely defeat the five rival tribes on the map. You also need to collect food to keep your village running - which amounts to little more than using it to make more babies and offering it to tribes as a gift, if you’re a pussy.

You may be feeling disoriented at this point. This is a normal response to Spore’s assertion that you follow it’s orders or… well, quit, I guess. The game is 100% directed, yet has no narrative structure. Will Wright doesn’t put stories in his games, they are “open ended”. He says this is a conscious choice, as he doesn’t believe that a narrative can be effectively inserted into an interactive experience. Since this is done all the time in other games, I can only assume that Will Wright is actually just a bad writer, crying sad tears into his huge piles of money. However, Spore does retain that feeling present in the other “sim” games that you are making your own story. Plotting the course of your little freak-blobs through their various developments, triumphs and massive, deadly failures is an engaging way to spend an afternoon.

BUH-BAM. You weren’t ready? Too bad. Civilisation Stage. The tribe gets together and starts discussing big plans to form a city. Unsurprisingly, this stage plays like Civilization, with your city expanding out (via vehicles) to tap nearby resources and convert or invade other groups. Here you get your first access to the building and vehicle creators, which are very absorbing. You’re given all the parts right from the start, and it is entirely up to you how you arrange them. This actually ate up more of my time than making creatures, and will tap into your designer side (if you have one). Of course, that old song is playing, and once you get out of the creators it is business as paper-thin as usual. Collect, kill, befriend, convert, repeat.

All in all, there’s a lot of fun to be had in Spore, it’s just a shame there’s so much filler in between. The whole game plays more like a toy, offering a bag of tools to mess around with, but very little framework surrounding it. There’s nothing WRONG with this, exactly, but it does seem like an idea that got too big for itself. I would have also liked to have seen the development of the original as-advertised concept - a virtual life and evolution simulator - which was apparently a casualty of the “Science vs. Fun” debate. Science lost, in case you didn’t notice while your were putting a beak onto your creature’s butt-cheeks. Perhaps The Sims is the closest we can get to actually playing with life, for now.

What’s that? You say there’s a Space Stage too? And it’s really detailed and involving? Well fuck you. Maybe if you hadn’t hidden it at the end behind a pile of toys, or even released it as a separate game. But you didn’t, so push off.

P.S. Spore is fun.