The Day After Spore

Well, Spore is just loads of fun. It came in the mail yesterday and I managed to get to space colonization level by the time I went to bed at four in the morning. I'm happy to report that my race of "Bumbles" is doing very well, though they had a little trouble in the civilization stage. (I had to bribe a couple of nations heavily before conquering them in order to recover from early mistakes.)

I'll publish my Bumble creature to the Spore community as soon as I get around to firing up the game again. (I need to finish making choices for my logo.) My EA handle is, surprisingly, "Icaruspassion."

By the way, the game is impossibly cute. It's really cute. I'd read before getting it, that the game play is pretty simple. And that's true. More than anything, Spore is for people that want to spend hours customizing not only their creatures, but their entire civilization. In the civilization stage, imagine a Real Time Strategy game where you've custom designed all your buildings. Of course, you can chose pre-made buildings and vehicles from Maxis, or from other player creations that have been published, but the real fun is designing your own.

You can even design your own national anthem.

And the tools you use for design are very, very easy to use. More than anything, that is the real power of the game. The only thing I would have liked to see are some better textures for buildings.

It's perhaps a little sad that a game that took over five years to create can be beaten in a full day. However, the game isn't about winning, it's about creating a community. And I suspect we'll see some really neat things come out of the Spore community.