By Avid Gamer

September 7
Today I bought Spore. All its previews looked pretty good. I downloaded the creature creator demo some months ago and while it was entertaining, the lack of game play dulled things pretty fast. Hopefully the full game has content to actually keep my attention for longer than a few hours unlike the creature creator did. Well, installer’s almost done now, I hope this game doesn’t take over my life or cause me to fail out of school or anything.

September 8
Class is such a waste of time. I think I’ll skip tomorrow to play more Spore.

September 9
SPORE!!

September 10
GODDAMMIT!! After getting my species to the space age and playing for something like 40 hours, the fucking shit game decides to fucking shit on my save file and corrupt it. I searched for the problem on the EA forums and they’re acting as if they don’t even know they released the fucking game. What the fuck? Other forums have the problem listed and people are saying that the game automatically does that sometimes and there’s no fix. I guess I’ll just start over. Fuck.

September 11
Finally fucking got my second species to the space age again. I started playing into the space age and I’m going to go to office hours now to get all the notes I’ve missed this past week. The professor probably didn’t even notice I was out; he was probably playing Spore too.

September 12
FUCK. Again. I swear, I’m giving up on the game. I’m not going to deal with this corrupt save bullshit anymore.
September 13
I’ve put Spore on Ebay. I woke up with a revelation. You know, the game’s kind of fun on the surface but after you divorce yourself from it for a day or two, you realize how fucking stupid it is. Okay, so you start as a cell and swim around and eat stuff. It’s like freeform Pac-Man. Big fucking deal. Ok, so I get to edit what my Pac-Man looks like. Do I give a shit if the game doesn’t work? Has your local Pac-Man arcade machine ever blue screened? I didn’t think so. Then my Pac-Man grows legs. Awesome. Or not. It’s the same freaking thing but on land. I eat fruit or other creatures and try not to get eaten. Why? So I can evolve into a fucking tribe and then play a strategy game? Wait, since when was Pac-Man a fucking strategy game? Oh right, this is Spore. But then why does it look so similar? Now I have to control a tribe and manage resources? Could I have gotten a warning on the box about how I needed a brain and really fast fingers to play the later parts of this game? After surviving that nightmare, you get this sub par version of Civilization. It’s pretty cool except there’s no depth or real thought put into this part of the game. It’s as if the makers half-assed this whole gig so they could sprint straight for the space age of the game. Well, that’s fair, because I did the same thing.

Space: the final frontier. First complaint: my spaceship looks smaller than my shits. It’s this puny little thing with a cartoony laser beam and floats like a UFO saucer. What if you want to make a fucking Star Destroyer? Nope, out of luck. Your ship will still be pathetically small and only have one small laser. And then it seems like every alien race you come across is xenophobic so you have to spend hours sucking their dicks, or whatever reproductive organs they have, in order to get them to like you even the tiniest bit. Not that Spore was trying to be ridiculously stereotypical, but the main source of wealth during the space age is spice. It’s kind of annoying having to pick up spice from all your colonies manually and then having them make the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs just to make a small profit. Oh, and don’t forget that your save game will randomly fuck up so you can start over with a new species.  Fuck you EA. Next time EA publishes a game I’m just going to download the cracked version with the cleaned up source code that makes the game playable and less shitty. Bah. When’s Fallout 3 coming out? I’ve been waiting for ten years.

By Jonathan Pu

Spore is proof of evolution. That’s right. Spore. It’s an interaction simulation that shows the progression of species as they start in tide pools, grow limbs (or not) to climb onto land, form tribal existences, build up civilizations, and then finally blow up other planets.

I really hope you didn’t believe a word of that first paragraph because if you ever wrote a thesis saying that Spore proved Darwin’s theories, society would shun you, your family and anybody else associated with you.

Honestly though, Spore’s a game currently in development, and has been in production for a long while now. It’s planned for plenty of platforms including the standard slew of consoles, the PC and Mac, as well as other platforms such as handhelds and cell phones. At a recent I-Con seminar on Spore, some details recently kept under wraps were revealed to a small audience. The two main features discussed were the music system in Spore and the spaceship designers.

Spore’s music system is as unique as the game itself. Unlike most games, Spore’s music will be, more or less, completely randomly generated. The music system will key into certain aspects of your style of play to generate music that best fits the culture of the creatures you create. Say you make a militaristic society. Your species will be very rigid in their movements and the layout of cities will reflect this with straight roads. However, the music will key into this as well and align itself to more of a marching beat with a strict tone to it. Also, unlike what’s been come to be expected, the music in Spore will always be changing. Even though the overall tone might stay the same, there’s no strict pattern that’s adhered to. Rather, the music will be constantly generated and you will pretty much never hear the same thing twice.

The spaceship designer was also a big part of the presentation as it was mostly kept a mystery to the public. Much like the other designers for creatures and architecture, the spaceship builder is free form enough to let you build pretty much anything you want and then to color it any colors you desire. In the power point presentation, we were shown a few of the spaceships, of which included a Nintendo GameCube shaped ship. I guess with the Wii taking over the GameCube’s functionality, it seemed only proper to give it some other role.

If you’ve seen any other Spore previews, you already know how exciting this game is without the two aspects I just briefly went over. However, if you haven’t, it’s about time to check it out, seeing as the game’s been in the works for years now. Expect a revolutionary evolution this September 7 for PC and Mac gamers (pfft, a Mac gamer?!) with the title coming to other platforms shortly thereafter.