Has any single videogame been so relentlessly hyped prior to its release as Spore, the latest brainchild of SimCity creator Will Wright? This game has been in the news for years because of its raw ambition: Wright said it would simulate the entire history of life on Earth, from cells flagellating in the primordial soup all the way up to space travel. (He originally called the game SimEverything.)
Can anything actually live up to that standard? If Spore is our test case, then the answer has to be no: For all the work that went into this intricate and complex simulation of life, I never found myself gripped by the simple gameplay. But this isn't to say it's not fun to see what happens when you open up and start poking around in this game that bills itself as "your own personal universe in a box."
In fact, with all the real-life evolutionary science that went into the making of the game, I feel like I've actually learned a few things during my time in Spore's universe. Here are 10 of them.
10. Life began when a geode carrying a bacterium struck Earth.
Done. I'm sick of all of these arguments about how life began. Wright's theory seems as plausible as anything: Skillions of years ago, an asteroid hit Earth, and it contained an adorable little big-eyed, single-celled creature whose name, in my version of events, was Spike. I named him that because of the razor-sharp poking appendage that I attached to him as soon as he could mutate.
You'll spend the first half-hour of your Spore experience in the "Cell stage," swimming around in the aforementioned prehistoric bisque. You spear other lifeforms, eat their carcasses to earn DNA points, then mate with another bacteria and produce offspring. At this point, you jump into one of the game's much-lauded Creators, in which you can add new body parts to your cell. Some are vital for survival, like spines and electric tails, and some just look cute.
The Cell stage doesn't last especially long, which is good because it ends right around the time that you figure out it's not very much fun. It's kind of like Pac-Man except with no power pellets or clear goals, and eventually Pac-Man grows legs and walks out of the maze. But the decisions you make during the Cell stage are important, because ...
9. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Before you even begin the Cell stage, you have to make a decision: Is your little guy an herbivore or a carnivore? This can have lasting repercussions throughout the rest of the game. As a carnivore, the easiest way to get meat is to attack your fellow creatures. This turns your bacteria into kind of a jerk, and when he evolves, he'll be more suited to being an aggressive land animal. Establishing dominance with violence will be easier than trying to reason with other creatures. And if you take this path of least resistance throughout the rest of the game, you'll be a warlike, spacefaring race of jerks in no time, just because your aquatic ancestors went on the Atkins diet eons ago.
8. First, protect your hut.
Take care of your home before venturing out into the world. Once I'd reached the Tribe stage of the game, in which my little tribe of sapient Spikes had developed crude weapons and loincloths and were domesticating stupider animals, I discovered that I had to go out and attack neighboring tribes to wipe them off the continent. But I got cocky after an early victory, and sent my whole village out to raze the next tribe. Big mistake: Another tribe came over and sacked my village, and the Spikes were no more. I had to start the entire stage over again: This was how I found out that Spore has no auto-save feature, and that you have to manually save your progress. What's more, there's only one save slot, and you can't backtrack – which means that your decisions become finalized once you commit to them.
7. Didgeridoo = friends.
Everybody knew one guy in college who played the didgeridoo. Admit it, though: Even though he looked extremely silly playing it, weren't people just drawn to him? When I restarted the Tribe stage after being wiped out, I thought that perhaps I should actually try to make some friends this time around. So when I built up my hut again, I skipped adding stone axes, and added digeridoos. I equipped my tribe with them, sent them over to the neighbors' place and played them a song. This, as suspected, made them love me, and soon they were bringing me gift baskets.
But my brief flirtation with pacifism was not to last. For just as I was planning to walk over and perform for another tribe, they declared war on me. Actually, every other tribe declared war on me. And so just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in to a life of crime. Speaking of which ...
6. Sometimes you have to kill babies.
Look, I don't make these rules. But as the old saying goes, if you want to make an omelet, you have to murder a few babies. In the Creature stage of the game, when you're trying to make other beasts extinct without dying off yourself, your pack of animals has got to kill a certain number of them. All things being equal, do you think we're going to try to take on the alpha male? Hell, no: Babies have much fewer hit points and don't fight back.
Murdering the innocent is also an excellent strategy in the Tribe phase. Tribal babies, like human ones, aren't good for anything other than filling diapers for the first part of their lives. But if you're raiding a camp, you still need to take out the babies, because if you don't, they grow up and try to kill you. Also see: the first 10 minutes of The Godfather: Part II.
5. Strip clubs make successful wars.
By the time I reached the penultimate Civilization stage, I knew that the namby-pamby vegetarian pacifist approach to world domination wasn't going to happen for me. And so although I could have attempted to make friends and allies with other nations via economic or even religious means, I knew that my destiny was to go to war. And go to war I did, designing vehicles with lots of guns on them and sending them off to bomb capital buildings and such.
Unfortunately, I played the Civ stage all wrong. What you're really supposed to do is build up your cities first, adding homes, factories and entertainment until the cities all generate the optimum amount of profit to fund your war machine. If you expand too aggressively without doing this, you'll find that you have a lot of enemies and no money to actually fight back with. (In this case, you might hope that you didn't save your game.)
Before you can place any buildings into your cities, you'll be whisked into the building editor. This is just as intuitive and robust as the Spore Creature Creator, allowing you to make any sort of architecture you can imagine with a few mouse clicks. But what's even more innovative is that it's also very easy to not make something of your own. With one mouse click, you can seamlessly log into the "Sporepedia," a constantly growing online catalog of other players' creations. Players can tag their creatures, vehicles and buildings, so finding a structure you like is as easy as entering "strip club" into the search field.
4. Parenthood is gratifying.
I didn't sit down with Spore's Creature Creator and labor over Spike for hours. He grew up organically from the Cell stage to Civilization. I only added body parts when I wanted to upgrade him and make him stronger. But it says something about the appealing nature of Spore's creators that even I (who ordinarily could not care less about such things!) spent a few minutes here and there making cosmetic changes to Spike every time he evolved – straightening his spine, making his eyes round and expressive, giving him a big wide mouth. Eventually he looked sort of like a red-and-white-striped Yoshi from Super Mario World.
And it pleased me to no end when I started a new game and it automatically imported my creation into the worlds, and I could see little Spikes that I designed running free about the planets of the new universe. Since Spore automatically uploads your creations to the central content servers, Spike is going to start popping up in other people's games, too. And just by clicking on him, they can leave comments to tell me how much they love him.
3. Your children don't have to look kind of like Yoshi.
When I realized that I'd screwed up on the Civ stage, I decided to move on to the final phase of Spore, space exploration. You don't have to finish each mode in order to go to the next. Since I had to start a new game, I decided to jump into the Sporepedia and seed the new galaxy with other players' creations.
I searched for "Mario" and found that, of the 5 million or so creatures and objects that other players had already created, there was no shortage of red-hatted mustachioed guys. So I named my planet "Mushroom Kingdom" and put a race of Marios in charge. When I visited my home colony, I opened the music editor, which is just as intuitive and clever as the object makers. Dragging musical notes up and down, and using my scroll wheel to change the notes' duration, I had a passable Super Mario jingle playing in just a few minutes. The editor will randomly generate pleasing melodies, too.
2. Outer space is vast, and it hurts.
Reviewing Spore last week, a New York Times writer called the gameplay controls in the Space phase "carpal-tunnel-inducing." At first I just laughed and thought: "Man up, guy from The New York Times." But I hadn't been playing in space for very long before my arm started to hurt. To move your spaceship around, you have to hold down the right mouse button with your middle finger to accelerate, and use the scroll wheel with your index finger to move up and down. It becomes a pain in the wrist real fast.
The Space stage is where Spore really opens up. The galaxy is enormous – you can zoom out and see thousands of little dots, each of which is a solar system with its own set of planets. I spent hours exploring, trading with other races, landing on planets to landscape and colonize them, shooting down alien pirates that tried to take my planet's resources, and all kinds of other missions. And I barely made a dent. But I don't know how much more I'm going to play, because, well ...
1. Spore is kind of boring.
Spore's creative tools are proving to be very popular – so many people are using it so intensely that the 5-million-creations figure that I referenced above, current as of this writing, will probably be woefully outdated when you read this. And it's clear that lovers of space-exploration games will find a great deal to keep them occupied for a long time. So I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I just don't get the appeal.
Strip away all the truly innovative and occasionally mind-boggling tricks that Spore pulls behind the scenes, and you're left with very simplistic gameplay. Eat these pieces of meat. Click on those creatures to kill them. Click on that city and start an alliance. While I found that Spore got more engaging once I had to think about my actions and plot a strategy, it just barely got as fun as any average, run-of-the-mill videogame.
In attempting to Sim everything, Spore tries to be all things to all people – a strategy that never quite works out the way it's supposed to.
WIRED Creative tools are intuitive and deep, amazing sense of raw scale
TIRED Limited gameplay, some awkward controls
$50, Electronic Arts
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Images courtesy Electronic Arts
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