West Karana

I was exploring further up the galactic arm that is home to my main system, when after a small gap in the arm (easily bridged by Interstellar Drive 5), I came across a small T1 planet circling a yellow star…

There was no animal life on Earth, but Mercury and Titan both were harboring nests of pirates. All I can think is that pirates wiped out life on Earth.

Would the vanished inhabitants of Earth — the Earthians — really want their planet colonized by two-headed, three-legged aliens with a tendency toward cowardice, bribery and pie?

It was hard to tell what the Earthians had been like. Had they been warlike? A race of peace? Traders? The races in the local star systems venerated the Sol system, and insisted it had always been a dead world, not worth the time to visit or exploit.

We didn’t accept that, and hung in orbit for days while we analyzed the trace elements in the atmosphere, and took jaunts to the other planets in the system, most of which were singularly uninhabitable, unusual for a system of this size. We finally found a signal disk buried deep in the crust of Earth’s moon… it was just a recording of a faint signal playing back on the carrier wave of an almost extinguished warning beacon. We knew what had happened. The Earthians must have been a great civilization and explored the galaxy… but went one parsec too deep into the core.

This wasn’t a planet. It was a tomb.

I promise, after this, no more Spore posts.

The most fun in the game is creating creatures and space ships. Tonight I made a Pierson’s Puppeteer from Larry Niven’s “Known Space” stories — it’s been done by others, but I like mine best. I made Corporal Legs and the spaceship Serial Peacemaker from Howard Tayler’s “Schlock Mercenary” web comic, and a couple others.

I was surprised nobody had done stuff from Schlock already.

Also watched Donnie Darko and the double episode of Buffy at the end of Season 2 where Angel gets his soul back and Buffy sends him to Hell anyway. So I’m in a weird mood.

Baby Diver looks for food, flagella and true love in the primordial goo of Spore’s Cell Phase.

If there’s one lesson to be learned from playing Spore, it’s that you are unimportant, life will go on without you, and your only legacy left to an uncaring universe might be that some bit of you will live on afterward in something — or someone — else.

MMOs and other single player games try to reassure us that we’re important, at the center of the universe. Spore has no such comforts. You’re a faceless minion and you’re gonna die. At some point you have to give up your false notion that you’ll go on forever, and just enjoy being where you are, living in the moment.

Which is a pretty heady philosophy for a game, and not one I expected when I started playing. It took Spore’s Space phase to teach me that.

Finally achieving both hands and sentience, the Driver tribe discovers fire and war.

Each phase, but the last, pulls the camera back a bit. In the beginning, you control a single celled animal, and you can’t see much beyond your surroundings. You have no idea of the nature of the world, or your place in it. Even the jumps in scale as you eat, grow and evolve tell you little. You evolve because you have no choice, and invariably the world you grow into is more dangerous than the one you left.

Once you evolve enough to grow legs (skipping straight from 2D single-celled creature to 3D multicellular vertebrate in a giant evolutionary leap), you climb up on to the land as the first member of your species, but you soon find others. Here, you, Borg-like, kill or impress other creatures so that you can add their parts to your genome. As the other creatures you encounter become more difficult to kill or impress, you head back to the Creature Creator to upgrade your parts, and die to be reborn as something new. The UFOs that hover overhead occasionally, collecting your tribemates or just scanning them, are scary harbingers of doom from beyond the world.

Someday, that will be you up there.

The Driver Tribe celebrates after killing every other living creature on the continent.

After you have found enough parts and impressed or killed enough other creatures, those creatures who have advanced enough discover fire, tools, gathering, hunting and xenophobia. Naturally, your tribe has the plum spot in the center of the continent. Unluckily, though, the five other tribes soon notice the closest tribe to all of them — is yours.

You’re no longer controlling one creature; it’s a tribe of up to twelve now, and a death just means ten food and a click on the hut. Your evolution has halted forever; now your advancement depends upon taking stuff from other tribes. Whether by friendship or war, their stuff is going to become YOUR stuff. And if there are any of them left when you’re through with them, they better be out there gathering your food.

“Flea Gun”, the military land vehicle of my mech-obsessed Tabby civilization.

Once you’re conquered the continent, your tribes folk scampers to the four winds, start up cities, and immediately turn upon each other. Your job is to be the worst of them. Whether by crushing them through paupering them, killing them, or brainwashing them. The phase doesn’t end until every other city is yours — you can’t advance to space hand-in-hand with allies. At harder difficulties, your enemies will almost instantly have advanced vehicles and be cutting you off from valuable spice, and most likely attacking you. To make things even harder, you always start in the center of the continent, so you don’t get a port. This means for quite a long part of the civilization phase, you are unable to claim or defend the offshore spice platforms

It’s really just a game of rock-paper-scissors done up nicely, and soon enough you get to be both the rock and paper and you have the scissors in your sights. BAM! You unite the world, civilization celebrates in a frenzy of non-diversity, and a very fallopian-looking tube pops out a starship, your civilization’s egg to spread your DNA throughout the galaxy.

The Driver civilization remembers its amphibious roots in the design of their first starship, “Bloviator One”, based on the graceful model of a toad in mid-leap.

The Tabby civilization’s starship, “The Long Haul”, with its quantum-ball-of-yarn star drive. This ship is too complex for the Sporepedia to display, apparently…

Once in space, your focus, once as wide as your entire civilization, narrows to just you. There’s no second ship, no fleet, no aid, and soon, no fellow creatures. Having given birth to you, you are soon shoved out of the nest and sent alone into the night. (sings Babylon 5 theme).

The space game looks like a 4X (eXplore, eXploit, eXpand and eXterminate) game, but it’s not. You can explore, but you’ll come across enemies that will follow you home. You can exploit, but it will cost you. You can expand, but you won’t be able to keep what you’ve claimed. And you can exterminate, but there’s always going to be ten races that spring up for every one you kill.

Though, it’s fun to pluck aliens from their cities and plop them down on distant planets. They immediately degenerate into savagery. It’s funny how thin our veneer of civilization really is.

Space is vastly open. You can zoom out your view and see the whole galaxy, with thousands of stars, every one of them you can travel to. And for every one of the stars in the game, there are one hundred MILLION stars in our own, real galaxy. For every star in the game, there are one hundred twenty-five MILLION GALAXIES in our reality. For EVERY star in the game, there are TEN THOUSAND MILLION MILLION stars in our universe.

Kinda hard to believe we’re at the center of everything, isn’t it?

Pursued into the dense core of the galaxy by the civilization that destroyed its homeworld, “The Long Haul LXVIII” delivers a final colony to a lonely, T-1 planet not far from the center of all things, and hides for awhile to gather strength and supplies for its last journey.

Spore doesn’t pull any punches. You can stay near your homeworld and trade with your neighbors, but you are just one ship, and eventually pirates or war-loving aliens will send fleets to destroy you. I would be off trading, running missions or exploring, get an emergency message from the home world or a colony, and run back at full speed to find that a city or a colony had been destroyed. I’d die seconds later to swarms of alien ships (though I did eventually learn how to kill several of them before my own destruction).

Every colony I planted was swiftly destroyed as my enemies caught up to me. My only hope was to get far enough away that they could never catch up. I’d find a nice T2 or T3 world, plant a colony, do some terraforming, contact the surrounding empires and set up trade routes and run some missions, start exploring, and then the panicked calls would come telling of invasion. I would fight off the enemy fleets, but rebuilding was bankrupting me and I realized I couldn’t protect every colony AND my homeworld. Actually, I couldn’t protect any of them.

I bought the best interstellar drive I could find and headed corewards down the spiral arm, leaving bits of the Tabby civilization in my wake. I’d stop at each place for awhile to relax and play and earn achievements, which is the Space phase progression — everything you do adds to your progression.

When the closer colonies would eventually in their turn be attacked, I’d pack up and move on.

Now I’m at my last colony on an inhospitable world, two jumps away from the nearest starfaring civilization, and still only halfway down the spiral arm. I’m out of money, and am going to start begging for work. Part of me wants to travel back up the arm and help the colonies I left behind, or at least gather whatever spice they may have collected before their demise. But traveling to the bones of my own civilization is depressing.

Soon I’ll hear rumors of my enemies catching up to me and will have to go. It’s my hope that I’ll fill up my achievement bar just as I hit the core. And then we’ll see what happens.

I know, you want to see pictures :/ But when I’m home, I’m playing Spore! I’ll put some up tonight. If you have Spore, you can see all my stuff by putting “tipadaknife” on your buddy list. I put Bildo and Darren on, and now I have some of their stuff trundling along in my world. It’s always fun to see a friendly face, though most of the stuff on the worlds I encounter are the things I made in Sunday’s game.

I started last night from the Tribal phase, on Normal mode, rather than Easy which I’d played the first time around. I doubt I will ever play the cell game again, and the creature phase, aside from seeing all the different creatures, was pretty boring as well. The Tribe phase, with its simple RTS, at least has some replay value.

My race was an evolved form of carnivorous cat. Where Sunday’s race was a kind of herbivorous rat/bird mix with violent tendencies, my prey-hunting Tribal Tabbies were as much interested in playing their didgeridoos as fighting. I allied myself with two tribes and was forced to destroy three others — one of which attacked me as I was trying to make peace. I marched into the last tribe’s village as a parade — my villagers playing wooden horns, maracas and didgeridoos as they filed in. I laid a gift basket of food down on their food store, serenaded them with my songs, and entered the Civilization phase in Economy mode.

You can’t build weapons in Economy mode. Your only option is to form trade routes with other cities and keep donating money to them until you can just outright buy the city. Only one opponent was economy (and I took that city quickly). The others were split between military and religious. While I had to keep paying ever-increasing bribes to keep out of war, they were having a merry old time lobbing bombs at each other and occasionally picking off one of my canine Poochinator cargo mechs. And of course all I could do was protest. Well, I did eventually ally with a military empire and paid them to go destroy a particularly annoying empire that kept sending planes to bomb my cities.

I wanted my ally’s cities in the worst way. I managed to get one through economic means, but the other just wouldn’t fall, so now that I had military power from the first of its cities, I used it to attack the other city, which gave me a port. I used my new ships that could actually fight back to clear the seas of all other shipping and take the offshore spice mines for my own.

By this time, the religious Red empire had pretty much taken over the second continent, save only for one cyan city, which hadn’t responded well to five hundred foot high holographic cats yelling sermons at them all day and all night.

Red and I had had some minor skirmishes, but had managed to avoid going to war. I opened up trade routes with two of its coastal cities, and then used my special ability to instantly purchase cities with whom you have trade routes to take them both. This gave me enough cities to use my game-ending power to purchase every city in the world, and so I entered Space phase as a Trader, which has similar powers. I can buy any planet with whom I have a trade route, but they want millions of Sporleons, more than I have at the moment, but once I do, I imagine the conquest of the galaxy will be just as quick as the conquest of the world was, once I got the city-buying power.

I’ve already encountered the empire of my species from the first game :)

Even at Normal level, the tribal and civilization phases were easy. Aggressors were more aggressive, but special moves like being able to outright purchase cities (or in military mode, nuke them from orbit) make it difficult to really get in trouble you can’t get out of. Being an economy civilization meant I was rich and could afford the sort of bribes to keep my city safe while I conquered my enemies by economic means.

I may restart the game once more to go the entirely social route and see how the religious empires work. They don’t get guns, either, so if they try to convert a military city, that city can just bring out some guns and shoot the sermonizers. I guess they might be able to make some headway against economy or other religious empires, though.

I’ll have a better review up in a day or two when I have played through more of the Galactic Conquest game, but basically, here’s what I thought of it.

The game is split into a bunch of stages, most of which are very short. You aren’t in the cell stage for more than half an hour — in fact, it’s really hard to slow things down much. I found it difficult as a herbivorous single-celled animal to find new parts, since I couldn’t kill other creatures for theirs.

You advance to the land creature stage after several evolutions with whatever parts you managed to find swimming in the primordial muck. Unless you always intended for your creatures to look like paramecium with legs, you’ll have to go looking for parts by killing things or waiting for other creatures to kill things and then go rooting around in the bones, depending on where you fall in the meat/plant eater spectrum.

If you’re a herbivore — which definitely ends up being the harder path in the creature stage — you can only advance by making friends with other animals, which means… challenging them to a dance-off.

No, really.

You are judged on your ability to sing, dance, look cute (charm), and pose. The parts you choose in the creature creator influence your ability to tear it up on the savannah dance floor. If you’re really good, you can get some creatures to join your pack, which gives hungry carnivores someone other than you to chew on when Step Up 4: Darwin U reaches its inevitable, disastrous conclusion.

You’ll probably just want to skip having to randomly build your creature from found parts and just use the full creator with all the parts. This leaves you without the Siren Song ability, which calms creatures and increases their receptiveness to your breakdancing.

Next up is tribal. Make your critters stand upright, and give them hands. This and the next few stages are real-time strategy stages. You can either kill all the other tribes, make peace with them, or kill some, ally with some. It’s a VERY simple RTS and goes by quickly. You can slow it down by doing side quests like taming wild animals (which gives an achievement), but there’s little point. How you play this stage sets up the next stage, a 4X (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate) Civilization-like game of worldwide conquest. If you killed every other tribe, you become a militaristic nation. I believe peaceful tribes become religious nations, but I’m not sure.

The vehicles you design in the Civilization will reflect your strategy in the Tribal stage. And the means with which you conquer other cities determine what you can do with them. I defeated half the enemy cities through military means (including one city I nuked because I was getting bored), and then made an alliance with the remaining superpower, and that was that.

It took about four hours to go from a cell swimming in goo to my first spaceship.

After that, the game started its real phase.

Spore is a galactic civilization game. Everything else is just a prologue to it. The first alien civilization I encountered was using my mechs (my land vehicles are giant cat mechs called Ratters — look it up on Sporepedia under tipadaknife) and my Flappers (a steampunk aircraft that looks like a duck swimming through the air). So I thought that was rude of them. I am in the process of conquering them now through economic means.

Is it fun? Well, it’s like any decent 4X game — it’s always just one more turn. Plus, you can design new vehicles and buildings for every new colony, so you’re in the vehicle and building creator all the time.

Spore is really just two games. One is the best introductory 3D modeling program I have ever seen, with support for sharing that is seamless and automatic — there were almost 8 million player created creatures, vehicles and buildings in the Sporepedia this morning. I was enjoying building my new colonies with vehicles and buildings way more twisted than anything I could come up with.

The second game is the Galactic Civilization game. If you like GalCiv or Master of Orion 2 or others of the genre, you will likely want to rush through all the other stuff to get to it. Or just play GalCiv. Well, Spore is somewhat different. You go from place to place and get quests, like kill five floozles on this planet, or investigate strange signals from that system, or mine this much spice and sell it to them over there. There’s also collection quests and a terraforming mini game.

The other stages go by so fast, you’ll miss them if you blink. Granted, I was playing on Easy.

It’s a decent game. For the time they spent, I would have liked to have spent more time in the tribal, RTS phase. Even the strongest opponents fell for the simplest trick — kill an enemy villager with spears, then run back to the home village and pick off enemy villagers as they follow you to retaliate. Leaving the home village so that enemies would send in their villagers to steal your food, and then rush in and burninate their less protected village also worked well.