Friday, April 22, 2016

Spore - 10/20 hours

Not much to report from the last five hours of Spore. I didn't quite like my species traits going into the Space era so I started from scratch. Thanks to the RNG, I was able to get an early economic city in the civilization stage, which was nice. In addition to having a better space-stage benefit, the economic victory just feels a lot more satisfying to me.

The biggest thing I noticed from this pass through the ages was that the Creature stage was not nearly long enough. Every time I leave it, I still have dozens of creature parts left to find and huge swaths of the map left to explore. It's theoretically possible to keep puttering around after you unlock the tribal stage, but I find it difficult to ignore the presence of the full progress bar.

Although maybe that's for the best. Spore has an enviable diversity to its resident creatures, but it's sometimes hard to parse that out from randomness. And because you can recognize it as randomness, that lends its diversity an air of homogeneity.

It's not really a problem for me, because a lot of the Spore creatures look really cool and often the custom creations the game periodically downloads wind up doing some interesting and unexpected things with the base creature parts. You never quite get the endless discovery that's promised, but if you've got an eye for detail, it can still be satisfying to explore the galaxy.

Which is what I'm going to do next. I could probably easily spend 20 hours just on the part of the game where I go back to the cell stage again and again in order to experiment with finding the perfect Spore species, but I'm running out of time and the Space stage has a lot to offer.

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