Don’t buy Spore.

It’s like a big pile of bugs right now and I don’t see any hope in sight.

It pains me to say this about a game I’ve waited 3 years for. I can get as far as the Tribal phase and then when I go to the “Outfit Tribe” menu, an apparently necessary step, the game hangs. This has happened every time. All day. If you google the problem you find plenty of people have it, but nobody has a solution.

EA isn’t a game company it’s a we’ll sell you a promise of a functional game one day company.

-Kevin

Less Angry Update: Go ahead and buy Spore, but lower your expectations.

I fixed the fact that it was freezing in the tribal stage when it asks me to make the outfits by upgrading my video drivers. Now it works pretty well, it’s not the best running game I’ve ever had but at least it’s not as slow and demanding as the Sims 2. (Update: I see us getting lot’s of google searches about this bug, so let me clarify, go into your video card and see if the drivers are up to date, if not upgrade them, if you meet the min specs for Spore, this should fix this specific problem.)

To clarify what I said above, it’s only as much of a pile of bugs as any other EA game, just google around and see what others are dealing with and make sure you’re willing to encounter those problems. If they seem worth the risk then go for it.

Since my game crashed at the outset of the tribal phase, I can’t speak for it or the civ and space phases. But now that I have it fixed, I’ll update this after playing those.

But the cell and creature phase are very, very lackluster. Each phase only has a small handful of repetative, uninspired things to do. The cell phase is sort of like fLOW if fLOW wasn’t any fun. The creature phase is like a stripped down boring WoW. You have 4 social options and 4 attack options and while the neighboring creatures are all diverse in appereance and movement they are all exactly the same gameplay wise. They are either either neutral and need to be wooed or hostile and need to be killed and you have to be interesting or violent enough in your upgrades to do either.

Past the choice of kill, woo or ignore. There is nothing else to do but scan the repetative landscape for the same foodstuffs you find near your nest and bones with upgrades in them. It’s way too simple and not simple like a casual game is simple, but boring simple.

The crux of a sandbox game is options. Ways to accomplish what you need to accomplish in a variety of ways. The ability to set your own goals and benchmarks. These first two phases are too basic to allow this, but the linear tasks it wants you to accomplish are too boring and repetative to make up for that.

Now if this was any other game and I was just judging levels, I’d say sure, you can’t judge a game by the first two levels. But when we’re talking about required gameplay modes,  it’s a different story.

Thankfully, if by some magic Tribe, Civ and Space are better modes, once you beat cell and creature you can skip these two modes foreverafter. You just make your creature on the creator page and skip right ahead.

That’s my hope for this game that those two modes where just an annoying little tutorial and the following modes are good enough to stand alone as the game everybody has been waiting for.

But all that said, the ability to create more or less anything in your imagination with your creature (and I’m told later, past the bug I had, clothes, tools, vehicles and buildings) is great, I just wish there was something to DO with those creations in those first two phases.

Tags: Buggy Games, EA, Spore, Warnings

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 11:54 pm and is filed under News Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.