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Complaining fruitlessly about Spore
17 years ago
General
So yeah. I've been playing Spore again lately. And I want to love it SO MUCH. I really do. And I mean, it's oddly addictive, but there's always some stupid thing that seems like it'd be so simple to fix that keeps cropping up and making me hate everything.
Like, I remember bemoaning the fact that you weren't able to beam down onto planets and walk around in space stage .... but oh, wait, I was wrong! You CAN. The problem is that the tool you need to do so, the hologram scout, takes so long to get that I didn't even know it existed. I'm on my third game, I've clocked untold hours in the galaxy, and I JUST NOW realized that the hologram scout lets you beam down onto planets.
It's like, getting tools for your space craft makes NO SENSE. I had to do something like 50 missions for other species to even get ACCESS to the hologram scout, and then I bought it from some tiny spacefaring race with only two planets to their name. How does that even WORK? My race is rated as "omnipotent", yet I have to do strange, arbitrary, unrelated tasks to get access to tools. In any other game you'd have a tech tree or something, and you'd research different paths to get progressively more powerful tools which you can then equip from your own bases, but here it's like ... the REST of the universe has access to everything, but they won't let me use it until I see a certain number of cosmic anomalies, or terraform a certain number of planets, or start a certain number of alliances.
And another thing! I've been playing for all this time, and I STILL can't really sculpt planets to my liking. Yeah, you can buy the basic planet sculpting tools. They're tied to arbitrary goals like everything ELSE you can buy, but at least you CAN get them through your own will. The REST of the tools, the exotic sculpting tools and the planet coloring tools, are apparently just spread haphazardly around the universe. And this pisses me off to no end, because it's like ... Ok, you see a planet with yellow circles around it, awesome, there's something there. And assuming it's not a fake signal and you get attacked by pirates, then there's either a sculpting tool or a rare artifact on the surface. But it's like, the "rare" artifacts are nothing of the sort. 9 times out of 10, it's gonna be a scroll of order, or the fossilized remains of a chew toy, or some sort of geode, or WHATEVER. Which are all useless, except to sell to someone for pocket change. And if it IS a sculpting tool, then half the time it'll be a tool that you ALREADY FUCKING HAVE. What the shit?! This IS a Maxis game, right?! Space mode IS supposed to be kind of a sandbox, right?! Then why the fuck are 90% of the creativity tools more rare than lost relics?!
And then when you do get them, they barely work!! Remember how awesome the terraforming tools in SimCity 4 were? How you could just wave your hand and create huge mountain ranges and craters and canyons? Yeah, sure, all those same tools are in Spore, but good luck using them! You can only use each tool ONCE, and then you have to wait for it to COOL DOWN! What is this, Guild Wars?! Can you imagine trying to do anything in SimCity 4 if each time you clicked "raise terrain", you had to wait for ten seconds?! You'd never get anything done!
There've been, what, three patches for Spore now? These things seem like they'd be so simple to fix. Ditch the cooldown for sculpting tools, don't make it possible for me to get a tool I already have, and make them more common, or at least buyable. Getting tool acquirement to make more sense would be more of a challenge. I'd LOVE to have it so that you could spend spice to research new technologies, but that'd require an overhaul of the entire system. But still, 3 out of 4.
I love this game, I really do, it's just ... it SUCKS sometimes, you know?
Like, I remember bemoaning the fact that you weren't able to beam down onto planets and walk around in space stage .... but oh, wait, I was wrong! You CAN. The problem is that the tool you need to do so, the hologram scout, takes so long to get that I didn't even know it existed. I'm on my third game, I've clocked untold hours in the galaxy, and I JUST NOW realized that the hologram scout lets you beam down onto planets.
It's like, getting tools for your space craft makes NO SENSE. I had to do something like 50 missions for other species to even get ACCESS to the hologram scout, and then I bought it from some tiny spacefaring race with only two planets to their name. How does that even WORK? My race is rated as "omnipotent", yet I have to do strange, arbitrary, unrelated tasks to get access to tools. In any other game you'd have a tech tree or something, and you'd research different paths to get progressively more powerful tools which you can then equip from your own bases, but here it's like ... the REST of the universe has access to everything, but they won't let me use it until I see a certain number of cosmic anomalies, or terraform a certain number of planets, or start a certain number of alliances.
And another thing! I've been playing for all this time, and I STILL can't really sculpt planets to my liking. Yeah, you can buy the basic planet sculpting tools. They're tied to arbitrary goals like everything ELSE you can buy, but at least you CAN get them through your own will. The REST of the tools, the exotic sculpting tools and the planet coloring tools, are apparently just spread haphazardly around the universe. And this pisses me off to no end, because it's like ... Ok, you see a planet with yellow circles around it, awesome, there's something there. And assuming it's not a fake signal and you get attacked by pirates, then there's either a sculpting tool or a rare artifact on the surface. But it's like, the "rare" artifacts are nothing of the sort. 9 times out of 10, it's gonna be a scroll of order, or the fossilized remains of a chew toy, or some sort of geode, or WHATEVER. Which are all useless, except to sell to someone for pocket change. And if it IS a sculpting tool, then half the time it'll be a tool that you ALREADY FUCKING HAVE. What the shit?! This IS a Maxis game, right?! Space mode IS supposed to be kind of a sandbox, right?! Then why the fuck are 90% of the creativity tools more rare than lost relics?!
And then when you do get them, they barely work!! Remember how awesome the terraforming tools in SimCity 4 were? How you could just wave your hand and create huge mountain ranges and craters and canyons? Yeah, sure, all those same tools are in Spore, but good luck using them! You can only use each tool ONCE, and then you have to wait for it to COOL DOWN! What is this, Guild Wars?! Can you imagine trying to do anything in SimCity 4 if each time you clicked "raise terrain", you had to wait for ten seconds?! You'd never get anything done!
There've been, what, three patches for Spore now? These things seem like they'd be so simple to fix. Ditch the cooldown for sculpting tools, don't make it possible for me to get a tool I already have, and make them more common, or at least buyable. Getting tool acquirement to make more sense would be more of a challenge. I'd LOVE to have it so that you could spend spice to research new technologies, but that'd require an overhaul of the entire system. But still, 3 out of 4.
I love this game, I really do, it's just ... it SUCKS sometimes, you know?
I don't deny that it would be satisfying, but it wouldn't be balanced. Thus, cheap selective terraform jammer tech.
It's supposed to expand on the Space stage with more.. hands-on missions. Like, if normal Space Stage is zipping around on the Starship Enterprise and using photon torpedoes on whatever you don't like, then this expansion is the part when Kirk/Picard/etc. go down to the hostile alien planet to investigate. ... .. Like Hologram Scout, only you won't have to work your ass off to get the ability, and you can actually do stuff once you're down there.
No clue if you'll be able to bring a red-shirt with you. I certainly hope so.
I also hope that while you're doing on-planet missions, disasters won't happen.. or will at least be rediculously slowed. Seriously, how much would that ruin the whole "visit the planet surface and do stuff there" missions if, two minutes after landing, your home planet is invaded and you have to go charging back to your space ship?
Kinda bugs me how fast they're coming out with expansions, though. I mean, Spore just came out, what, a little less than three months ago? And they've already got an overpriced parts pack.
Ehhhhh, I dunno. I guess they're just catering towards the casual crowd. I would've loved it if the space stage was just a little more like a 4x game, but that kind of stuff doesn't sell.
"So.. you were just holding out on us so you can charge more?"
Y'know, I was looking forward to SimCity Societies too. Fortunately, a playthrough of the demo drowned my enthusiasm. Man, Maxis just ... they're trying to attract too broad a crowd. Their games have become too watered-down.
More or less spore was rushed by EA and the swaying power of maxis to handle games their own way was kinda limp wristed and restrained.
Water stage anyone D:?
And if you need help and tutorials, there's an entire online community over at www.simtropolis.com, not to mention scores of user made mods and buildings. It's fantastic!
SC4 was the last great game made by Maxis. Sim City Societies and now Spore have really missed the mark as far as I'm concerned.
And of course they failed miserably.
Also the hardest one, but that's why I loved it. <<
And then, whoah hey, I actually had fun! It was weird!
I don't think The Sims lightning will strike again.. honestly I think the sims was a fluke :c
Y'know what bugs me, is that Maxis is probably gonna release a dozen expansions like they did with The Sims. THEN it'll be a good game.
I wasn't going to put this game on my own system at all, given the draconian DRM it has (and I don't like SecuROM v.7). After trying it out on someone else's machine, it was clear to me that it wasn't anywhere near good enough to justify installing it anyway.