Spore: Mac Gaming Evolves

Since it seems to be a common belief that video games are to Mac users what telephones are to the Amish, it’s refreshing to see a technological design visionary like Will Wright acknowledging that gaming is just as sought-after, if only less accessible, for Mac users as for PC junkies. To that end, he has taken one of many pioneering steps with his newest brain child, Spore, in releasing the game simultaneously for the PC and Mac –- as a single hybrid DVD.

Spore is best understood as a combination of five separate mini-games, or “stages”, each of which is at least functional, if not always particularly compelling on its own. These stages are plastered together using slideshow cut scenes, and the end result is a bit of a jarring journey that nevertheless allows you to follow the existence of your Frankensteinian monster babies from glorified plankton to space-faring civilizations.

Because the five stages are quite distinct from each other, I have split this review into sections to address the stages separately before I comment on the game as a whole. Spore is a massive world, and my journey through it to bring you this review has been long and challenging. Even so, I may still have only scratched the surface. Now, I invite you to join me as I share the tale of my experiences…

“Waiter, there’s a bug in my primordial soup!” – The Cell Stage

Spore starts with the aptly named “Cell” stage, where you bear witness to a particularly durable meteorite that manages to survive a brush up against a blazing star, only to shatter pathetically when it crashes into the ocean of an unsuspecting planet that, in my case, was called “Snorp”.

Squishy Sheds its Shell

Moments later, deep in the primordial seas of Snorp, a fragment of the space rock splits open to reveal… a tiny squishy thing! Once little Squishy shakes out of its asteroid shell, you gain control and begin navigating through the gelatinous environment. If you’ve chosen to be carnivorous (as I had done), then the object at this point is to hunt for the little pink spongy blobs floating around you (as opposed to the little green spongy blobs that your vegan counterparts will be harvesting).

Cells Just

Wanna Have Fun

Once you’ve collected enough DNA points to fill up the DNA bar at the bottom of your screen, you’ll be asked to call out for a mate in order to consummate your readiness for transition to the next evolutionary stage in the game. After watching Manfred and Manuella engage in a PG-13 love dance, you (Manfred that is, which can be a bit distressing for male players) will lay an egg and proceed to enter another creation tool set.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully completed the first of five evolutionary stages in Spore! By this point in the game you will have grasped almost all of the major gameplay elements that will occur again and again throughout the rest of the stages, only on a different scale.

Disco Diplomacy – The Creature Stage

You regain control of Manfred at a nesting site where you and all the other little Manfreds live happily together in a family group. You basically have two choices when it comes to how you deal with another species at this point in the game: you can either kill and eat them (assuming you’re strong enough), or you can engage in a cross-cultural game of Disco Simon Says. More on that later.

Luckily, as the proud creator of a carnivore, your only real choice is deciding which of the available species Manfred is going to commit culinary genocide against.

Combat in Spore resembles the combat in turn-based games in the sense that all it really consists of is you clicking the opposing creature repeatedly to unleash your attacks while your opponent does much the same thing against you. This continues until one of you dies. Your number of attacks and their strength are dictated, as are many other things, by the parts you chose to put on Manfred.

Manfred Sneaks up on a Skeleton

Once the tribe is completely eliminated, you are considered victorious and awarded with a number of DNA points that varies according to how difficult the creatures were to kill compared to your strength. And yes, to be perfectly clear, you have to eliminate all of the offending creatures in order to win your reward – there’s no Noah’s Ark business happening on Snorp, it’s all or nothing.

But what happens if you encounter a species of creature and don’t feel like eating them? Well, the two of you can engage in what can only be called a cheap disco parody of Simon Says, where your opponent will make a friendly gesture at you (again dictated by the body parts you’ve chosen) which you are then expected to repeat back to them. Possible exchanges include singing, dancing, and posing. After you’ve exchanged a few rounds of such pleasantries and filled up both ends of a little meter that appears, Spore considers that you’ve impressed your opponent. Now you get to do the same thing with three other members of the species in order to secure the alliance.

Disco Diplomacy

Progression through the rest of this stage essentially entails more of the same, with occasional pauses to add more parts to Manfred and the odd “migration” where your entire family of Manfreds spontaneously leaves without you while you’re out hunting and you come home only to find that you have to trek halfway across the planet to catch up with them.

Sporadic Strategy – The Tribal/Civilization Stages

When you reach the Tribal Stage, you’re ready to outfit Manfred with clothing, armour, and other such accoutrements of tribal culture. This includes jewelry, by the way, in case you male players weren’t already gender-confused enough after so much egg laying.

Manfred's Mariachi Barbeque

The Tribal Stage and onward is where we start getting into a little more complexity in terms of the gameplay. If you’ve ever played a Real-Time Strategy game like the Civilization series or Age of Empires, then you’ll recognize the basic mechanics of what you’re seeing in Spore from here on in. The issue is that they’ve taken that formula and stupefied it down to the point where it’s annoyingly superficial for players who, like me, are used to the in-depth and glorious scope of RTS games like Supreme Commander or even StarCraft.

Tribes Clash in Battle

Obviously, Spore is not trying to make a full RTS out of its individual later-game stages, and comparisons to the titles I mentioned above are not only unfair but also misguided. Nevertheless, the execution feels somewhat stunted and unsatisfying for those who are used to this style of gameplay on the scale provided by those classics.

In all honesty, it becomes quite difficult to judge Spore accurately beyond the Tribal Stage because it’s hard to be sure when it’s taking itself seriously and when it’s just throwing up copious amounts of cute aesthetics and brilliantly-executed procedural environments to distract us from the fact that the underlying gameplay is surprisingly hollow.

Once you hit the Civilization Stage, you’re put in control of things from a scaled-back, more god-like perspective that removes the more close-up interactions with your creature. This is actually an important problem because, in doing so, Spore ends up denying you one of the principle appeals of the game and, not least of all, one of the main distractions from the shallow gameplay.

The Birth of a Civilization

For me, as soon as everything was scaled back and I was left with nothing but the ambiguous civilization of Manfreds to look down upon, I started to miss those nights by the campfire with Chief Manfred, and I felt a lot of Spore’s charm drift off into space, where I hoped to regain it…

The Final Frontier – The Space Stage

Stars, Asteroids, Black Holes, Oh My!

The Space Stage has an advantage over the Tribal and Civilization Stages in that it actually feels like a culmination of all the gameplay elements that have led you to this point. There really is a lot to do here – the terraforming, exploring, and large-scale expansion elements are both engaging and entertaining, while still maintaining the cutesy Spore aesthetic – and, more than any of the other stages, Space will keep your mind suitably occupied with interstellar tasks.

Which brings me to the negative aspects. For some reason, a number of Spore players (including this one) encountered a bizarre quirk of the game’s AI engine that spontaneously decides to hike up the difficulty when you reach the Space Stage. Even on the highest difficulty setting, it’s really not a challenge to get through the earlier stages of Spore – it’s a happy and carefree experience.

But then suddenly, when you reach the Space Stage, you’re plopped into a universe where aggressive enemies will systematically kick your ass(es) and consistently outperform you with superior firepower, accuracy, range, and, most annoyingly, numbers. There is an endless supply of things that want to kill you in Spore’s space, and when you and your allies are being deliberately creamed by a force triple your size and then pirates show up on top of that, it sort of makes you wish that Manfred had never crawled out of Snorp’s oceans to begin with.

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One of Many Planets

Spore and the Evolution of Mac Gaming – The Verdict

Reaching my quota of allowable installs, thanks to EA’s idiotically draconian DRM scheme for the game, I managed to install and play Spore on a Mac Pro, a Macbook Pro, and a PC desktop to judge the performance differences between the platforms. The Mac Pro and PC both ran spore at the absolute highest settings without breaking a sweat, and even my two-year-old, 15″ Macbook Pro ran it smoothly at the high quality settings. I did not experience a single crash on any of the three systems over the hours of testing, which is impressive in itself and serves as a testament to the engine’s brilliant engineering. We should thank Maxis for putting in the time to make the Mac version every bit as polished as the PC one in terms of execution.

On the topic of EA’s marketing disaster of a DRM system, I could spend a whole new article discussing just that. But I don’t have to because it’s been discussed before. Suffice it to say that the entire concept of such rigid restraints is self-defeating because it alienates legitimate customers. Pirates aren’t going to stop pirating because of a DRM system on the legal copies of the game. Thilo, the author of the article at the second to last link, summarizes:

“News flash: Pirates don’t convert. They are stubborn and ruthless. Hence the term “pirate. ” [sic] They steal games. If they can’t steal a game, they steal it from a friend. If they can’t steal it from a friend, they steal a different game. Half the fun of playing a game is stealing it.”

As of this article’s writing, it appears that EA has finally relented to the righteous pressure of their former fans and planned to remove the digital incarceration system they attached to Maxis’ poor game. Also at the time of this writing, the Spore v1.01 patch has been released, but only for the PC. Us Mac folks are still waiting, but Maxis assures us that we’ll get our patch soon.

Setting aside all the minor quibbles, Spore is a game to be appreciated and admired as an adventurous step forward in procedural game design and large-scale mechanics. It is ultimately an ambitious and successful science project, and should be understood as such. Having said that, actually playing through Spore can be tedious and unfulfilling at times specifically because it feels more like a science experiment than a coherent gaming experience.

To wrap up, even with its truly brilliant art direction, impressive sound design, and compelling concept, the fundamental fact of the matter remains that Spore is marketed as a video game, not an experiment in gaming technology, and the experience of playing through the fragmented sections can be unsatisfying, disjointed, and tedious – words which should not have to be used to describe something that’s meant to be fun.

Fresh audiences may find themselves drawn into an interesting and pleasing world that offers a simplistic gaming entertainment; however, audiences going in with the high expectations nurtured through years of waiting and watching and re-watching every tantalizing video and announcement will likely be left mildly disappointed.

So, after all that, what’s the verdict? I give Spore three and a half evolutionary stages out of five.

Pick up a copy from your nearest gaming retailer or buy and download it online, then play through it yourself and let us know what you think of Spore!