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Primordial
When I was a kid I used to watch The Neverending Story an awful lot and one quote in that film has stayed with me throughout my life - “In the beginning, it is always dark.” It’s just one of those bits of brain-clutter that lodged in my memory and never came unstuck.Spore though doesn’t begin in darkness. Instead, if Will Wright had written The Neverending Story, it would have begun with somebody explaining the rules of Geometry Wars and telling you how to use a keyboard.
This is how Spore begins anyway. You choose an empty planet at the main menu, a comet crashes into the ocean and the bacteria spreads. This is how life begins and to hell with what the Creationists say. You’re given a little Pac-man-like amoeba with a fin on one end and a mouth on the other and you swim around collecting red bits of food.
As you collect this food, which comes from seaweed or dead animals depending on whether you choose to be carnivorous or not, you gain DNA points. Collect the DNA points and the meter at the bottom fills. Collect enough and you grow. Along the way at any point you can shape your cellular creature by adding in new genetic traits by mating, taking elements you want from other animals.
And for the cell stage that’s pretty much it. You grow and grow and grow and if you die then you just come back as a new cell in the species you’ve been designing. When your progress meter is filled you get a little chart showing the history of your species as it grew over those millions of years and the game will give you bonuses based on behaviour – be a fierce carnivore and you’ll be better equipped for battle later on when things get more interesting. Either way, it's swiftly over and you're on to the next stage...
Personal
Next up is the creature stage of the game and it’s here where things start opening up. You design a basic creature using some fairly limited building blocks, you give it a custom skin and then you kick it out of the ocean and into the big wide world. Thus far in the game I had built myself a cell with a three propulsion jets, electric attacks and a wicked mouth. I was a member of the Cardiganus species and I was a horrible, aggressive beast mainly because that’s more fun than munching on seaweed and pretending to care about the children.I didn’t see any reason to change in the Creature stage, so I made a creature with a big tail, two stalk-mounted eyes and as toothy a mouth as I could find. You can always call a mate and redesign your species if you fancy a change, but I was happy with the way things were going so I carried on.
In the creature phase though things haven’t changed much from before, they’ve just grown bigger and been given an ethical dimension, albeit a fairly flat one. You still have the progress meter at the bottom and you still have the goal list in the top left, pushing you onwards like an angry parent who wants you to perform small variations on the same party piece over and over again for a crowd of assembled relatives and pay-per-view customers. I had a rough childhood.
There are two basic paths to success in the creature stage. If you’re a carnivore then you just keep biting, punching and spitting. If you’ve gone the herbivore route though then you’ll be lacking in punch and you’ll have to scavenge new traits from fossils and make friends with new species in a minigame that is unfortunately the weakest point of the entire game. It works like this: you click the Social stance and you walk up to a creature of another race. If they sing, you sing. If they dance, you dance. You carry on until the meter fills up and if for some reason you can’t dance or talk and the only thing about you is the way that you walk then you’d better love looking through fossils more than Richard Dawkins on a Channel 4 documentary.
Of course, you can mix your tactics and approaches if you want and there are definite bonuses to doing so, such as being able to heal at friendly nests and recruit allies into your pack – but there’s no huge push to do it. Instead, at this stage of the game most of the real attraction lies in finding new limbs and so on and adding them to your own creature.