I recently aquired a copy of the maxis sandbox game "Spore", and i gotta say, its pretty damn epic.
For those of you who are not familiar with it, you begin in the single-cell stage of evolution, at which point you choose wether to begin as a carnivore or a herbivore. once you have chosen, you do your best to attain food for growth, and soon you will aquire the ability to evolve a spike onto your creature (which, in proper scientific fashion [if a bit quick] you edit generationally [through each succesive generation].
you continue to gather food and body parts to survive and evolve, growing bigger and closer to multi-cellular level in a most visually impressive way, until you finally reach the point where you evolve into a ground animal (skipping the fish stage).
You begin your ground stage as a direct translation of your single celled organism into a fully 3D creature, and are almost immediately given an oportunity to change this. As a creature, you must aly yourself with as many of the surrounding creatures as possible, or kill them in a brutal fashion. How well you perform all of this is controlled by what body parts you have, which you can collect a number of ways, from lotting dead animals to completing goals.
you soon develope sentience, and move into the tribal stage, which follows a similar vein to the animal stage, but you now control a small tribe, have a village (which gets bigger) weapons, musical instruments, tools and a RTS style contol scheme. Save the single cell stage, tribal stage is probably the shortest segment of the game, and is relatively easy.
Once you have advanced past tribal stage, you move onto civilisation stage, wich continues Spores amazing levels of customization. you know have a city, and are forced to make alliances and enemies with surrounding nations, choosing to either slowly take over their cities economically, religiously or militarily until only you and you mutual allies remain.
I Its at this pint you realise just how much continuity this game has, the island you began the game on as a simple creature is exactly the same, except it seems to get smaller as you zoom out, and take the further off land masses into account. I also like how you could make and paint your own different buildings for your cities, and the vehicles for them as well.
Once this is done, you move onto the BIGGEST stage of all, the space age. You (once again) design your vessel, except this time you REALLY get to focus on style, as the parts you get to build with are from ALL of the other forms of vehicles from the previous age (I made my ship the Enterprise-D
) and they dont have any effect on the ships functionality.
You begin with some simple missions, mainly to set the groundwork and act as a tutorial, but soon you'll be warring with religious zealots, stoping planetary eco-disasters, carrying out missions, terraforming, colonizing, and finally: Trying to reach the center of the galaxy.
I am currently in the space age, and LOVING IT! The only real downside are the constant allerts and emergencies from your colonies and allies, which make it impossible to actually focus on long or time constrained missions, such as traveling to the center of the galaxy, or trying to find the grox.
All in all, i like spore, and have just realised how freaking long this journal is.
[UPDATE]
I have just reached the center of the galaxy in spore, and while it was cool, and rather funny, i think the reward was a little underwhelming. As for me, i'm going to go shoot some obelisks at planets, and maybe try and find SOL and blow earth up
[/UPDATE]
OTHER NEWS
- i've preordered halo3 ODST
- got gmod and all that jazz on my new computer
- internet is STILL capped
- arms starting to hurt from having them scrape along the sharp edges of my desk whilst typing
ADIOS AMIGOS
Echo-63
Bye All
Neutral
Zest
Sorrow
Spidey Sense
