Name: Spore
Platform: PC
Price: $79
Rating: 9 /10
OK, let’s be honest with each other. Spore didn’t live up to the intense hype and expectation that surrounded its release.
But that doesn’t make Maxis and EA’s gargantuan PC offering any less of a great game.
It’s a must play, even a must buy.
When I sat down to play Spore I had no idea what to expect.
I knew the game was a universe-creating, online multiplaying adventure, but it sounded downright confusing.
Imagine my relief then, when I installed Spore and discovered a genuinely revolutionary game, full of exciting never-before-seen features and thousands of items, things and tidbits to keep you interested.
As I type this review, my Spore game window is minimized, and I’m in the middle of uploading an in-game video to YouTube.
That’s right, Spore has inbuilt, one-click, YouTube connectivity, meaning you can share your unique Spore creature with the rest of the world.
My creature, Nelgsta, is a happy-go-lucky herbivore. He began his life as a microbe, a mere cell in a tide pool of DNA and genes. To grow and develop, he swam around, eating fruit and plants to fuel his development as a being.
The cell stage was fairly linear. Eat food, find a mate and ‘upgrade’ your creature. Upgrading, or evolving, your creature is something you’ll do hundreds of times on your Spore journey.
Soon after, you’ll grow legs, take over a mass of land populated by developer created creatures and do it all over again.
Then you’ll control a tribe, a civilisation and eventually a universe.
Don’t let the early repetition bore you. Once you progress to the awe-inspiring space stage you won’t have to play through the early stages again.
That said, enjoy the steep learning curve. Every click will teach you something new. You’ll mistakenly discover the photo and video mode and accidentally stumble across a thousand more features.
Don’t forget to send a postcard of your creature to your friends via Spore’s in-game email connectivity.
Spore requires a permanent net connection, a feature certain to impress Telstra shareholders.
And to those aspiring pirates slamming the three strike licence validation, get real!
Who needs to uninstall-reinstall a game more than three times? I had a faultless installation on a low-end laptop on the first go. End of story.
Spore is an amazing gaming achievement. Its five stages are well polished and near flawless. The graphics are sharp, the sounds are cute and sheer size of the game is mind-boggling.
Maxis has progressed in leaps and bounds since The Sims and Spore is a truly next-generation offering.
