Spore unleased

I've looked forward to Spore, the new release from Will Wright, longer than any other game I can remember. It was originally announced more than three years ago and news has trickled out regularly ever since then. I finally got my copy on Sunday and, I gotta say, it's pretty stinkin' cool.

I've always enjoyed Wright's games. I played the first version of SimCity on our PC when I was a kid, and I stuck with the series even through the almost impossible SimCity 4. I was hooked on The Sims for quite a while, and it still is the only PC game I've ever gotten Ann to play. I still remember the Christmas break (long before children came along) when we would take turns: one of us would work on house projects while the other would play The Sims. After an hour, a timer would go off and we'd switch places.

Spore is definitely a wide game - spanning the evolution of a lifeform from single-celled organism to galactic dominator - but it doesn't seem to have the depth of something like SimCity. To call it a strategy game, thus putting it in the same category as something like Civilization or Sins of a Solar Empire would be a gross mislabeling. The creation tools are astoundingly complex while still being easy to use. It remains to be seen whether this game will have the longevity of Wright's other works. Will I still be playing it in two months, or six months, from now? Will the user-created content provide enough incentive to keep coming back for more? Will I drop 30 bucks every few months for the expansion packs? It's hard to say. But what I can say is that I wish I could ditch work and go home to play right now!

One editorial comment: there's been a lot of badmouthing of this game because of its DRM process. I hate DRM as much as the next guy. I've never bought a song off iTunes because I felt their process was far too heavy-handed. But knocking this game in general, and specifically the tactic of flooding Amazon's ratings board with negative reviews, is completely uncalled-for. I guarantee you that most of the people who gave it negative ratings never even played the game - they were basing their judgment solely on the presence of DRM. And I would guess that the vast majority of people who buy and play the game legitimately will never encounter the DRM block as an issue. This is another case of the Internet getting people all riled up over nothing.

More details on my creations are forthcoming, but for now, enjoy this little widget showing my first character, the Vengari.