Spore

[kane_magus]

Quick Spore update before I head to bed.

Played through the Tribal phase. It was pretty much just a slightly more complex version of the Creature phase, though with less extensive creature editing. The singing/dancing/charming/posing was simply replaced with flute/maracas/didgeridoo. Again, I did the whole pacifist "make friends with everyone" route.

Civilization phase was just a really half-assed RTS. There might be more to it, I don't know, but I mostly just blazed through that as quickly as possible by converting all of the other cities with "Religious" wins. Which means that I sent an assload of ground vehicles (later replaced with air vehicles) to their city and proceeded to fire huge beams of energy at their city while summoning a gigantic, translucent construct of my creature in the air, which then sang... or preached... or whatever. Whatever it was, it was in Simlish. Then I just repeated this with the next city and so on.

And now Space phase. Okay, I've only played this for a little bit and did a few missions, but... yeah. It looks like this is where the real meat of the game begins. I think I agree with Rock, Paper, Shotgun*** when they say that the first four phases are more or less merely elaborate character creators for the Space phase (which is weird, because from Civ phase on, you hardly see the creature you spent all that effort building up in the previous three phases, which may be why I didn't really care for it all that much).

I need to play it a little bit more before making a final decision on the game as a whole. So far, I've just gone to another planet and learned about the Grok or Groz or whatever they were called, fought a few unmanned drones, and traveled to another star system to place a single colony on a planet there, all of which were part of the missions assigned to me as part of what I'm guessing is the tutorial phase of the Space stage. But if the Space phase keeps up with that and gets more involved, then the game will probably ultimately end up in the thumbs up range, as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, and take a wild guess at what my spaceship looks like. (EDIT) Because EA is shit, that link doesn't work anymore. (/EDIT)

Really, the moment I was floating there, above OtakuWorld, in the EnterpriseIndependence, listening to my short custom-made Spore version of Magus's theme, that was a crowning moment of awesome. The first time I got my space ship out to galaxy view and zoomed all the way out, this was another such moment.

*** - Also, about that Space Rangers 2 game mentioned in that RPS article? It's pretty awesome as well (what little I got to play of it before Spore got here, anyway).