Spore

With Spore coming back in fashion at my school, I thought it would be fitting to dig it out of my collection to play again. I was amazed by the graphics it was able to present on my current(gaming) computer. It is far better than I’d thought, though Galactic Adventures crashed immediately after the tribal cutscene, which was a bummer.

One of my friends showed me his creature, which was far more aesthetically pleasing than any which I had made previously, which brought up an interesting part of the game which I had always neglected: the appearance of the creature. I realize that many of them are designed to look cool or resemble some real life creature, but I had never tried this approach. My method was always to build something with an overbearing sense of functionality; usually coming out as giant spindly monstrosities which were monocolored.

This time I hope to actually make something worth looking at, which are the only kind of thing for tribal and civilization stages. If there can be a rational behind the design of a creature, how it should look, then I think there should be, after all it is simply ridiculous to make something as uninteresting as many of my early creations were; despite their effectiveness which guaranteed their survival.

With the advent of Galactic Adventures came a new reason to build cool realistic creatures. Though unlike space/civilization/tribal stages it also allowed some of the original anatomical functions which made creature mode so awesome, to come back. The editor of Galactic adventures also made it so much more interesting because it allows you to make whole story lines and plots which make the game richer, it also created an oportunity to make your creature behave like you designed your creatures to. The entire process takes a long time to get right, though it is usually worth it, a deep plot with developed characters can make even the most tired players to find something new and amazing about the game.

I have the entire series of spore PC games, the Cute and Creepy parts pack is somewhat nice, though I’ve not found any justification for my little brother buying it, but of course, if you really want to make as many diverse and different creatures as possible then its good. However the Galactic Adventures expansion pack is a must, it adds far more replayability than the original game had in itself.

Spore may be an aging game, but if you’ve missed it, then I’d highly recommend you find a copy, it is worth playing and while some of the stages are rather uninteresting, they are usually worth playing, they certainly make important changes to the species history, and eventually come to enriching the space stage further.