TOM FRANCIS
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Field Studies 6: The PC Gamer Sporecast

Update: I’m a complete fucking idiot. The image that was the whole freaking point of this post was still set to Private on my Flickr account, so I’m guessing no-one saw it. Here goes:

The PC Gamer Sporecast

If you’re playing Spore this weekend, I made a thing you can subscribe to to get awesome stuff showing up in your game. Sporecasts are hand-picked collections of content, and they’ll take priority over random stuff when Spore is populating the galaxy.

I don’t really gain anything from people subscribing to this – if it were fame, love and comments I were after, I’ve already got those by making a pathetic toaster as my first ever building.

Sporecasts are just a way for uncreatives like me to feel like they’re contributing to the Spore community. Unfortunately the tool for making them is terrible right now, and flat-out refuses to acknowledge the existence of most buildings, vehicles and spacecraft, so I’ll have to add some of my favourites of those later. This is also why the vast majority of Sporecasts out there are just three or four shit monsters.

Not in the PC Gamer Sporecast, or any Sporecast, because Spore’s Sporecaster sucks.

ZomBuster’s behatted Antlion is in there, and I ran into him at the Space stage yesterday. I struck up a trade route with their race, but then one of my allies – the moustache bananas – started invading Antlion worlds. Naturally, their whole race had to die. I roped an Antlion ship into helping me – they’re nasty black Piranhas in my game – and went on a rapid bombing run to systematically exterminate every city on every planet in their empire. They surrendered pretty early on – I’m playing as the Stompwings, who achieved Galactic God status long ago – but I kept on bombing. I’m not sure if I mentioned, but I really like bombing.

Tip: get the Shield module for your ship as early as possible. It’s not some shitty 20% defense for 10 seconds, it renders you completely invulnerable for several minutes, enough to lay waste to an entire planet.

Field Studies 5: My Spore Review

After some dillying, my Spore review for PC Gamer UK went up today. I went at it with more or less the opposite mindset to most of the reviewers I’ve read. Not:

“Okay, this is supposed to be a big deal, but does it really provide a long-term challenge as a serious game?”

But:

“Ooh, what’s this?”

I didn’t give it a special license to not be a game, in fact I’m pretty hard on the ways in which it fails as one, but I bore with it as much as any other game that isn’t trying to scratch the normal itches. It seems mad to me to compare it to Civ, Diablo, Warcraft or any other Platonic form of the genres it borrows, because it’s so obviously not about those mechanics. The point of comparison, if you really had to make one, would be Second Life. And it fares rather well.

We have a little piece of page furniture in PC Gamer reviews that is widely resented among the writers, and often a pain to do: the Thumbnail Review. I thought Spore would be a particularly daunting one to summarise in a few words, but it turned out to fit easily:

“Simplified and misbalanced, but a jaw-dropping safari through the human imagination.”

I knew some mags and sites would damn it with the mild praise of a score in the seventies – in fact I thought more would than have. But to me, anything under ninety percent seems criminal and absurd. How could you possibly suggest this experience is optional, or merely decent? It is unprecedented, wild, hilarious and compulsory.

A lot of people have the game now, so footage is cheap. But here are a couple of things not many people are likely to have yet:

Field Studies 4: Vu To A Thorough Game Demonstration

They’ve finally put together a trailer that explains the game, lightly blows the mind and is friendly to people who don’t yet know why they should care.

Will Wright also gave a typically smart, funny talk about what people have done with the Creature Creator so far, measuring their creativity in God Units with sacrilicious results.

Then Gamasutra interviewed Civ IV designer Soren Johnson, on his role trying to ensure Spore will satisfy the hardcore gamers. At length. It’s like one of my interviews before I have to cut 90% of it.

But most excitingly to those of us who already know everything it’s possible to know about the game, is a bunch of stuff we didn’t know about the game. Producer Thomas Vu falteringly reveals that Spore has eighteen different editors, including one for music.

The game footage is fantastic too. On his way to befriend a village of dinosaurs, he passes a tribe of big ugly black critters being terrorised by a single enormous Cthulhu in the background. Then the dinosaurs give him a ten! When Spore’s art style took a turn for the cutesy (a shift which Soren talks about in the Gamasutra interview), I don’t think my fears took into account the possibility that I might actually find it cute.

I’m now counting the days till I can play this properly, which happily, even the Grumblegut (above) could do on the fingers of one foot.

Field Studies 3: My Pretties

With a game as flexible as Spore, experimental gamers like me have a really hard time getting past the stage of “Ooh, can I do this? What do you do about it if I do that? Won’t it break if I try this?”

Spore endures this process with increasing weariness: “Yes, you can do that. If you do that it will look weird. Yes, you can break me. Yes, if you really try, you can make a creature that clips through itself and can barely walk. Are you happy now?”

Then the question becomes, “What’s the most unusual thing I can make without breaking it?” Leafing through other people’s creations is a good cure for that: some of them are so inventive and ingenious that you start to realise you’re probably never going to be recognised as the Da Vinci of Spore, the game’s defining renaissance God whose creatures display a perfect fusion of art and science.

So my creatures start out defiantly unconventional but rather lacking in personality, and gradually the emphasis shifts from freakish limb structures to more expressive faces, configurations that animate interestingly, and pretty colours.

Palm Face

Who says limbs have to be on the body and facial features on the face? After making the Palm Face, an ambulatory tree that grows features instead of leaves, I do. To strangers in the street I say it, shaking their shoulders and frothing.

To try any of these in-game, right-click the small image and save it to your My Documents\My Spore Creations\Creatures folder.

Loomosaur

Let’s try a really thin body! No, boring, let’s try a really fat one! No, boring. Okay, how about fat, then thin, then fat, then thin. Then each fat lump could have a single, giant feature dangling from it. And the whole thing could bend dangerously forwards, and be supported by a million increasingly huge legs.

Horncrested Bristlefrog

What happens if you make a creature with a spiral spine? And distribute its face across disparate lengths of the curl? Then add a load of spikes? This guy didn’t really come together until I made his front paws hand-like, which gives him a puppyish scampering gait. It’s quite hard to give non upright creatures arms that look like they’re part of them, and that didn’t really work until I made his biceps as thick as his back leg thigh, so that the three limbs look like trunks from the same stem. The ‘stripe’ pattern option in Spore’s paint mode really did me proud, too.

Eyestalker

This time I wanted to make something jungle tribes might have legends about, and which sort of stalked about the place like a walking bat. It didn’t really look imposing enough until I discovered you can have really fucking huge spikes, and once Eyestalker was done that inspired a flurry of aborted creatures who had nothing going on conceptually except a lot of really fucking huge spikes. None, predictably, were worth saving.

Malevolent Stomptrunk

This started when I tried just inflating a thigh until it resembled an epic banana, then wondered if it was possible to make a creature that would suit. I also wanted something that never smiled, frowned or laughed; that would only survey all before it with a nameless besnouted malice. This pose doesn’t really show that off.

Once I’d finished, I was suddenly struck by the fear that I might have subconsciously copied a creature I’d seen somewhere before to a shameless extent. Does anyone recognise it? I’m thinking something from Star Wars or Futurama, but it’s not coming.

Goggleshark

The eyes-as-hands notion didn’t really work with the Eyestalker, but I thought I’d see if it worked better as the whole focus of a creature. Finding the slider that created that enormous drooping rictus of dismay immediately made the face work, but I actually abandoned the whole thing when I couldn’t come up with an inventive leg system. I only just came back to it, now more or less relieved of my fixation with making pointless overcomplications of conventional limb structures, and tried just giving him comically puny legs at the base of his lean abdomen. The resulting gait is hilarious and fits his excitable face exactly.

Like Malfunctioning Eddie, Gogglesharks are easily astonished.

Previously: Sporepedia, Best creations.

Field Studies 1: Sporegasm

No-one seems to have noticed except Eurogamer, who failed to link it, but Sporepedia is already publicly accessible. This is the online field guide to all the creatures people have created with Spore, and the source from which the game will eventually populate the planets you play in with AI-controlled versions of the races people have made.

Right now it’s mostly Maxis folks and a few journos creating, and I think we can conclusively say Maxis are better at it. If you stumble on a Horncrested Bristlefrog up there, though, that’s my first proper stab.

The incredible thing about Sporepedia is that those thumbnail images you see are the creature files. Drag that image right from your browser to the game window, and it loads that creature in all its scampering glory. The creature’s DNA is actually coded into the metadata of a 25 kilobyte PNG image.

It takes a long, long time to get the test-the-limits urge out of your system – which is probably why they’re releasing the editor so far ahead of the game. Because you don’t really appreciate how exciting a prospect Spore is until you get past the “Can I break it?” phase (yes, oh God yes) and create something you truly love. The more personal a protagonist is to you the greater your invest in its plight, and it doesn’t get much more personal than a species you’ve hand-built from clay and vertebrae.

Next: Best creations, My creations.