SPORE™ a not-so perfect game

Category : annoying + games + software

Since I first learned about Spore a few years ago, I was completely intrigued by the thought of being able to build and explore a completely unique universe populated by other players. This past weekend I finally had the chance to play, and for several days I substited it in place of whatever other titles I would normally be playing. Aside from all of the DRM bashing and multiple stories about the backlash, it’s not as horrible as the ratings make it out to be.

If you can manage to look past that little negative for a moment, Spore is a very wonderfully crafted game from an artistic and technical standpoint. The biggest attraction comes from the fact that nearly all of the in-game creatures, buildings and vehicles are created by you and other Spore players which eventually are redistributed across the virtual galaxy. As far as the game itself goes, you won’t notice many of the rigid rules found in previous Maxis titles which dictate how your game will turn out.

At first the experience is quite enjoyable. But like with any new software release come some unwanted annoyances and other issues which slowly become exposed which can destroy game play, and unfortunately Spore is not immune to either of these problems. It may just be me over-analyzing things, but Spore still feels more like a technical demo than a finished product when you boil down the game play and overall experience. However, Spore is still an early version release so there is still much which make the game feel either very raw and not completely evolved in a few areas.

From the beginning of the creature level when playing on land and into the later parts of the game feels entirely one-sided. Upon reaching land you’re primary goal is to explore and find new parts in order to evolve, all while either eating other creatures or making them an ally. It’s a bit like encountering someone new and deciding whether to make friends, avoiding them or beating them up for no reason other than for your own amusement. In many scenarios avoidance is the best strategy when you don’t have a choice, but for whatever action you take you’re often rewarded with points toward building your creature.

As it turns out, the rewards really come in if you beat up your target or decide to make them an ally as avoidance doesn’t exactly increase your creatures intelligence. But the moment you begin to approach another creature which is not immediately hostile toward you, you’ll often notice one of two things. First if you mouse over that creature you’ll notice a little blank-faced smile with a question mark next to its name showing you that the other creature is naturally curious. Then as soon as you start to approach you’ll often notice that nearly the entire group begins to shuffle away from you if it’s not already fleeing in terror.

To some extent this AI behavior seems somewhat dumb especially when encountering much larger or threatening creatures which are not initially hostile upon approach. Secondly it’s a bit disappointing that not one creature would attempt to approach you first in an attempt to impress you and become your ally. It makes perfect sense for most creatures smaller than yours to flee in terror, but on occasion a change in tactics where contact isn’t initiated by you would be nice as you’re out exploring. This problem seems to occur throughout the entire creature stage and before long you realize you’re doing all of the work when you probably shouldn’t have to.

Transitioning from the creature to tribal and civilization stages, the AI doesn’t change too much but you are approached randomly on occasion. And if you don’t simply decide to completely pound all the nearby tribes or cities into the ground first, there are only a few other ways to make allies without going to war. However it’s still mostly a kill or be killed strategy similar to the creature stage without much advancement other than having weapons at your disposal. I didn’t spend enough time in either the tribal or civilization stages to begin with since my options were so limited and didn’t require any real strategy. It’s really unfortunate as these are both great stages but so horribly dumbed down, they just allow a player to practically breeze right through it without consequence.

When you do reach the space stage, you’re left to believe the primary goal would be exploration since there’s not much left for you to do on your home planet. And if you believed that, then I’m sorry to tell you that you were wrong. On the bright side, other species do engage you a little more by contacting you first. But it’s often to issue threats and extort you out of large sums of money to stop them from attacking your planet or colonies. And as time goes on, each successive demand gets larger before you can no longer afford it and you’re ultimately at war with another empire.

It was amusing the first few times, but eventually it begins to really spoil your game if you’re already surrounded many hostile races and fighting several other empires early into the space stage. And when you’re not at war or trying to explore, you’re finding yourself playing the role of fire fighter, the go-to guy or perpetual baby-sitter as your allies or other colonies are too powerless to help themselves. And just when you thought you’ve patched up that colony and saved an ally, another round of alarms go off and you’re back in the loop. This becomes worse as you explore further and further away, since being unable to save an ally can cost you and possibly make them an enemy if you fail to rescue them.

The big game-breaker comes in the form of Spore crashing for no reason while attempting to do some routine things, like lifting off from your home planet. It’s somewhat impossible to figure out what the rest of the space stage could be like in one of my games because of this problem. But for reasons unknown to myself, Spore just randomly crashes like crazy on its own or when conditions are right. I’ve witnessed crashes upon exiting a few times, but the one that takes the cake is when you’ve just mopped up attackers on your home planet then attempt to head back out into space to explore. Just as your ship begins to exit the atmosphere, you’re back on your desktop with a dialog telling you that SporeApp.exe has encountered an error.

I have been able to reproduce a couple of these crashes on demand and have filed bug reports, but that still leaves me with a unplayable game with no real fix or work-around to the problem in later stages. I’ve double checked and apparently I am not alone with this problem, some have it worse by not even being able to get out of earlier parts of the game due to even more random crashes. It’s a bit disappointing to know that outside of this, Spore is quite a fun game to play and I really would love to continue my epic space battle. But until Maxis and EA can release a patch to fix this, Spore won’t be getting as much play from me.

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I’m back, again. Sort-of.

Category : general + updates

I’ve seriously neglected this space for quite some time, but in my defense I’ve been a little busy. Last month I finally pieced together a new machine from scratch so I can once again play games on a system which can actually display all my games in higher resolutions and detail than before. And now I can also finally get some real work done on a machine that can also cope with more than three applications running at a time. Now I’ll be giving this space the overhaul it deserves.

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The Aftermath

Category : programming + software

Right after I upgraded WordPress to the latest minor version over a month ago, I soon realized that I miscalculated how minor that upgrade actually was.

If you’re familiar with the “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” rule, along with its lesser known clause: “But if you’re going to anyway, try it somewhere else first” I suggest following that rule. But not following either of these rules means you’re going to end up with some problems. Now, I don’t recall 100% what I was thinking at the time but I decided to ignore everything and proceeded with “fixing” it anyway. At first, everything looked good until I decided to run a quick check and noticed a few problems.

Upon initially checking out the site, I realized that my templates were somewhat outdated when I remembered that I had inserted a few hacks to pull data directly from the database instead of using a standard method. This version of WP seems to have changed enough since then and rendered this hack invalid, but things were still working without throwing too many errors so no problem. Then I dug a little deeper and noticed some other flaws and decided it’s time to perform fix number two.

This is when I learned that I had shot myself in the foot twice. The first bullet was blindly fired when I decided to perform an upgrade without testing it on my local machines first. And the second was fired when I realized I had some problems creeping up in all of my templates. I then decided to dig up my old templates to find some bandages. I then quickly emptied the gun in the other foot when I realized my sources were a total mess and I didn’t comment much of anything.

I could have easily spent this entire time repairing and commenting the current templates, but I’m slightly tired of the current theme and want to try something new. And since I’m now out of bullets, I’ve spent most of my free time using the gun to repeatedly knock myself unconscious between rebuilding all my templates and CSS from scratch.

In retrospect it’s not so bad since this forced me into a needed (yet unscheduled) update cycle.

And maybe when I’m done, I could revisit and salvage the current template and make it available for download.

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Happy New Year… 2 weeks later.

Category : general + updates

Yeah, I’ll admit there hasn’t been much activity here for some time. In fact, it’s been too long since I posted something, so I’ll start by saying “happy 2008!”, and I hope 2008 will be a good one. But for those curious to know why I’ve been missing in action, the answer is fairly short I’ll sum it up by saying: being sick on and off for several months while being busy are not a good combination.

So that’s the answer in a nutshell. In fact I’m STILL trying to catch up on mail missed, so if you sent me a message in the past 6 months and haven’t yet received a response… don’t take it personally and think I’m ignoring you. Unless it was life or death or work related, I probably read it and the response is sitting in my drafts folder which has been seriously neglected. But fear not, I’m slowly working through it.

In fact, catching up on my email is listed as part of my personal New Years resolution. Along with pushing more content to this site, and getting some secret projects finished while trying not to kill myself in the process. In the meantime, go check out the update I gave to Unattended.org back in early December while I get my shit sorted out.

More soon, I promise.

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