Review or long-winded game guide?

Okay, so, last time I got a bit carried away with my review, I won't deny that. But this time I shall keep it much shorter and more like a review than a 26 page college book report.

Anyways, let's pick up where we left off...

EDIT: Just a forewarning, any posts about religion/evolution that could start a flame war or such will be edited or deleted accordingly. Talk about them if you will, just be careful. The Guardian is watching you, and Deadpool can get here faster than you think if I want him too.

5. The Creature Stage

Once you've sprouted your legs and are ready to take on the surface world, you enter the creature stage. This stage takes you from an arcade-style to a third-person eater. You take your creature around the continent fighting to survive. Except this time, you have two options when encountering another herd of creatures. You can either try to impress them to become allies, or you can attack and drive them to extinction. Obviously this last option is sooner or later going to be a necessity for carnivores if you wish to live. But which ever method you choose, you're going to need a creature that can take on the challenge. As you scavenge the world, you gain new body parts by either killing/impressing "Alpha" creatures, or by scavenging the sparkly golden skeletons of creatures that, well, weren't cut out for surface life. Get bigger jaws for a better bite. Find some fancy feathers that will make it easier to impress other creatures. Maybe grow some wings for a hasty retreat. It's up to you. You'll even have the option to add friendly creatures, whether your species or that of allies, to your pack. They will then help you in your quest for sentience. This stage also has my favorite editor. The creature editor lets your imagination go completely wild building all sorts of wacky creatures limited only by your imagination (and a complexity meter ). As you go along gaining DNA points and brain power, you will eventually become a fully sentient creature and be able to enter the Tribal Stage!

This stage, while very fun, somewhat let me down. It feels like something is missing. Almost like this is only the demo of a real game. But it is quite a fun stage, especially the editor for this one.

6. The Tribal Stage

We now move up to a new stage where you're not controlling just one creature anymore, but rather a small community of the species you created. This stage has a very simple editor. You get to outfit your tribe members with armor to make them more efficient combatants, fishermen, or other such. This stage is one I most anticipated simply because of the fact that it takes you into the genre of RTS (Real Time Strategy for you non-enlightened ones ). Now you take your little band of people and prove yourself the strongest but gathering fruit, hunting, fishing, and interacting with other tribes. Once again, you can either try to entertain and bring gifts to those tribes you wish to ally, or you could just raid their food pile, raze their hut, and kill them all off. As you either ally or conquer tribes, you get a section for your totem pole and your hut will upgrade allowing you to by tools/instruments/weapons for your community as well as the ability to have a larger tribe. Once you prove your community the biggest and the best, you will finally reach the next stage. Civilization.

This stage was quite fun for me, particularly due to my love of RTS games. However, this stage disappointed me in two areas. One, the whole stage is a bit watered down. There's not enough options for what you can do. Secondly, the stage is so SHORT. There's only five other tribes, and if you decide to just impress and ally each one, you should easily have this stage done in less than an hour flat. Other than those two things, I absolutely love this stage.

7. The Civilization Stage

Civilization sucks. Taxes, political debates, crime...

Good thing it's not that way is Spore.

The civilization stage is, well, like a civilization game. Your tribe has now grown to a large city complete with city hall. This stage has the most editors: Town Hall, Factory, House, Entertainment Building, Land Vehicles, Sea Vehicles, Air Vehicles, and you can outfit your civilians with "clothes". You lead your civilization down of of three paths: Military, Economic, or "Religious" (more on that subject below). You organize your city with factories, houses, and entertainment buildings trying to keep your citizens happy while still making an income. You also get to purchase vehicles for claiming spice mines and interacting with other cities. Now is when allies and enemies become a crucial aspect. You can befriend a city to work together with them, or you can go to war with another and have to worry constantly about being attacked. Your goal is to take control of all the cities on the planet either by conquering them (military), trading with them until you have to option to buy out the city (economic), or converting them to your "beliefs" (religious). Once you've taken control of the whole planet, your scientists will make use of their knowledge to build a spacecraft and allow you to move on to the final frontier: The Space Stage.

On my first play through the game, the civilization phase was the first part where I got "stuck", but only for a short while. One thing that disappoints me about this phase is the lack of various species. That's right, every city on the globe, whether under your control or not, is inhabited by civilians the same species as you. It seems to me that since there were various species on your continent in the tribal phase, there would be a variety of species on each of the other ones. Therefore, it seems to me that it would be more logical to interact with other species in the cities of the civilization phase. I find it kind of hard to believe that after your tribe dominated the continent they'd all just randomly split up across the world and form different, competing cultures. This isn't exactly the Tower of Babel, you know. Other than that, my only other complaint is that this stage might have too much of the editors. You can't build a house, factory, or entertainment building until you use the editor to build one. Same with the 9 different vehicles (land, water, and air for each of military, economic, and religious). Sure, you could just use a pre-made model built earlier either by yourself, Maxis, or another player, but then it doesn't have that personal feel. Also, I don't know how it happened the first time I played, but I only actually got about half way done with the phase when it was just my half of the obtained cities vs. the other "country's" obtained cities, and suddenly the leader of the opposition said something to the extent of "WE won! WE've defeated the other civilizations!" I don't know where this WE came in, but I wasn't done yet! Either way, the rest of the stage got skipped because of some un-avoidable alliance. I wasn't done yet, but apparently the game thought I was...

8. The Space Stage

This stage is going to be a bit more difficult for me to review simply because of how VAST it is. The space stage is the last stage of the game and it never ends. If it does, it would take well over a year to play. Once you enter space, you are in a giant sand-box so-to-speak. You can explore the thousands upon thousands of star systems, each with anywhere from one to several planets to explore. You can find new planets in new star systems suitable for establishing colonies and increasing your spice mining income. You can interact with other empires in the galaxy and obtain their systems in a similar matter to the civilization phase. You can use the planet of your choice as a giant easel, coloring, shaping, and altering the environment to your desire. There's an entire galaxy to discover and it's going to take your whole life just to see it all. You can accept missions from both your homeworld and other empires ranging from eradicating a diseased species, locating a lost artifact, destroying an enemy, and many more. You can use weapons to destroy enemies or use your tractor beam to abduct civilians and steal their resources. There's so much to do and see in this stage. Part of the ultimate goal though, is to make your way to the center of the galaxy and see what awaits...

The Space Stage is quite impressive and is quite better than I thought it would be. I've spent a decent number of hours in this phase (though nothing too extravagant yet) and I've barely made a dent. The first time I played through though, I got really confused and it was a bit frustrating as I almost immediately wound up in a war with another empire when I didn't want to. This also seems to be a problem a couple of my friends had on their first play through. So, I skipped on to start another game and upon reaching the space stage, it's been much smoother now that I've got a handle on it all. The only editors for this stage are the "Space Outfitter" to make your creature look like a space-faring civilian and, of course, a space ship builder. These building and transportation editors are much looser than the editors that involve creatures, but while it allow for more customization, it also makes the process a bit more tedious. Also, you can still use the building editors for whenever you establish a new colony on another planet, but I just go and pick out the same one's I used on my home world during the civilization phase. Whatever floats your boat works though. This stage also contains many badges and awards you can achieve by performing certain tasks. Rewards for getting these achievements comes in the form of new tools for you to use depending on what award you obtained.

9. Some General Information

There are a couple other items of interest besides the actual game stages worth mentioning. First, once you unlock a certain stage on one game, you can instantly start from that stage in another game. Also, if you don't feel like playing the game and just want to enjoy making some wacky creatures and such, all the editors are available for use from the main menu. There is the Sporepedia. This contains information of all the creatures that have been downloaded into your game. Obviously the pre-installed ones from Maxis and your creations will be found here. The Sporepedia will also automatically download creations from those on your buddy list as well as any "Sporecasts" you've subscribed to (I personally would like to form a BZP Sporecast containing the creations of any BZPers that play the game). Here you can also view your game achievements as well as those of your friends and information about what buddies have done in their game as well how other players interact with your creations. For example: Within a few hours of playing the game for the first time, my "Takumatrites" wound up in somebody else's game and they decided to eradicate the species. Also, somebody just recently added a space ship I designed to their fleet.

10. Price and Value: Is the Galactic Edition (or either for that matter) Worth It?

There are two different options when buying Spore. The regular version goes for about $50 and the Galactic Edition goes for $70 or $80 depending on where you look (I went ahead and took the chance on the Galactic Edition). What makes the Galactic Edition different has nothing to do with the actual game(as I well knew). Besides the game is included a hard-cover book of concept art, a poster, a 100-page "Galactic Handbook", a DVD of "How to Build a Better Being" from the National Geographic Channel, and a DVD of "The Making of Spore"; all of which is kept in a "Sporeglyphics" hard-plastic case.

Now, I could care less about a poster I'll never hang up and I've never been one for concept art or documentaries on "evolution". The case is rather nice, but the only real reason I went the extra $30 is for the 100-page "Galactic Handbook" and the "Making of" DVD (as I've always had an interest on how games work).

I was terribly disappointed. This 100-page "Galactic Handbook" should have been advertised as something else. How does "OVER-SIZED INSTRUCTION MANUAL" sound!? Everything contained within this so-called "Handbook" can be read in the in-game help! A complete waste of money! You want an actual GAME GUIDE? They should be sitting on the shelf right next to the game for only $10. And it'll actually have something worth saying. The DVD? Not what I was expecting. It was only 30 minutes long and didn't contain that much about actually making the game, the nitty gritty. Mostly just concept ideas and stuff you can watch in videos you find across the internet.

First conclusion? Don't get the Galactic Edition. It's not worth another $20-$30 dollars.

Is the regular worth $50? Well, I don't personally think that ANY game should cost that much, but it's pretty much a standard price these days. And considering EA and Maxis have confirmed that there will be patches/expansion packs (who know if/what they'll be charging though) there's more to come in the future. I'm 99.999...% sure that a floral editor has been confirmed for the future. So, in the end, I don't think it's worth $50, but that's because NO game is worth $50. That said, I'd still pay $50 to get it. I'll leave you guys to make sense of what I said.

11. The Touchy Subjects: Evolution and Religion

These two subjects caused much debating and arguing in the time before the game was released and is still discussed much now. It played a crucial role in my deciding whether or not to get the game. Obviously the game follows the path of evolution, but not the way that Darwin perceived it. According to Darwinian Evolution, "evolution" developed as it did by mere chance. In Spore, you're controlling how your creature changes. So, it depends on how you look at it. Further, it's not as if EA Games and Maxis are promoting "evolution" and saying that it's the explanation to the universe, they've simply decided to use it as a game. We don't believe in "The Force" yet Star Wars doesn't seem to offend anyone's religions, so I don't see why a game using evolution but not promoting it should either. Admittedly, you wouldn't want a young, impressionable kid to play it if you don't want them to be confused about creation vs. evolution, but anyone old enough to know the difference and not have their beliefs "swayed" by the game should be fine.

As I mentioned before, there is also the idea of taking over cities during the civilization phase by "converting them to your religion". Since I haven't actually done this in the game, I can't comment on it all that much, but I see it as mostly harmless. These "religious groups" are basically just zealots and they don't actually say anything about what beliefs their "religion" concerns. In the Space Stage, you'll hear other empires talk about "The Spode" (no, that's not a misspelling ) and such, but besides than the fact that they don't really talk about what their religion involves, you encounter people of other religions everyday. Doesn't mean you agree with them. Besides, unless I'm missing something, you can't join these other religions anyways. Just be nice to them and you'll co-exist harmoniously. Start attacking them and, well, religion or not they're gonna fight back, duh! When I take over their planet by force, they can blather on into infinity about all the bad karma I'll get. I don't care. It's a game. The only bad karma was getting the Galactic Edition.

So, for reasons explained above, I did decide to get the game. I don't believe in evolution, but playing Spore isn't going to make me start second-guessing my beliefs. The religion bits are very vague and besides, like I said, we meet face-to-face with other religions everyday. So maybe that aspect just makes the game a little more "realistic". Well, other than the fact that some six-armed waddly-doo creature with a mouth on both ends and his eyes sprouting from his toes is the one "promoting" it.

12. So There You Have It!

That concludes my review of Spore! So what do you have to say now, Gerlicky?

Oh, and if any other BZPers out there play spore or just use the FREE DOWNLOADABLE[/hinthint] Creature Creator, I'd love to add you to my buddy list so I can start that BZP Sporecast!

May the Spode be with you...[/XD]

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