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In which I fall in love and fall out of love again because wtfff
This is, for once, not a post with anything to do with a) XMFC, b) fic, c) writing in general, or d) emo blubbery depressive whinings.
#
So someone in one of my chats linked to tje EA Origins store, where the downloadable-content games are on brief sale. I weakened and got Spore.
Spore is an evolution simulation game where you can control, to varying extents, the behaviour and looks of one particular species, starting at a pseudo-microbial level and evolving through different forms that then become land-based, and then that species' civilization and society.
It breaks down into five stages: "cellular" (I use scare quotes because the first action at that stage, eating, differentiate between plant material and meat blobs, so the scale is arguable), creature, tribal, civilization, and space.
The cellular level is the least complex, in that all you're doing is swimming around eating things and trying not to get eaten. It falls short of being mind-numbingly dull because you can "mate" (which even at the "cellular" level involves making hearts at another member of your species and then laying an egg) and tweak the appearance and capabilities of the offspring. You have limited "funds", so you aren't going to end up with something that has sixteen eyes and rings of cilia and five mouths, or whatnot; but as you progress you get more options for what to add, including various sorts of movement boosters, several types of mouths that determine what kind of food you can eat, a few types of eye that are cosmetically different but functionally the same, and some "weapons": spikes, poison jets, and electric bulbs.
And you can position things howeverthehell you want. For efficiency, I generally have a "front" with mouth and spike, eyes somewhere or other, movement boosters along the side and back. The cost of an item gives you either one central or two mirrored (the difference is cosmetic), and is fully refunded if you remove the item either.
At a certain point your creature evolves to land status, and it moves into the creature stage.
This is the best one IMO.
There are gameplay aspects: find food as needed; encounter other creatures (that grow in health/attributes as you progress) that you either socialize with to become friends, or attack in order to make that species extinct; find new evolutionary parts and upgrades, often by looking at skeletons of long-dead creatures; mate and breed; follow your species as it migrates from home to home.
These are in some respects mindless/rote. If you decide to befriend a species, you do A; if you decide to kill them, you do B. If you see a sparkly skeleton, you click it. If you get a hunger warning, find something to eat. But progression is measured by number of species dealt with, regardless of how you deal with them, and the only reason you can't just move onto the next stage without evolving is that you need the upgrades to your stats in order to deal with higher-level species.
The fun part, for me, is customization.
Each time you breed, you get to tweak the creature. (Or, since breeding isn't mandated, each time you want to tweak the creature you need to breed, but that's trivialities of phrasing.) You are limited to a certain extent by "currency" (which you get by doing the game's various tasks, kind of on a quest model) and by what you have discovered -- but the possibilities are practically infinite.
There is an element of customization that affects gameplay. Do you go for feet that are better at dancing (one of the ways you socialize), at speed (run away!), or at charging (a type of attack)? Do you go for hands that are better at posing (social), health (survivability), or strike (attack)? Do you use a mouth that is better at singing (social), health, or bite (attack)? Do you add weaponlike parts, that allow you to charge, or strike, or spit at a distance?
Your gameplay choices affect your choices here, and your choices affect your customization. If you want to be able to sneak in and steal upgrades from skeletons and run away, you customize for stealth and speed, although that is a limited-use route. If you want to fight everything you come across, you customize for weapons and attacks and health. If you want to make allies instead, you want the full range of socialization methods, the higher the better. If you want to do some of both, you need a balance.
But there is also an element of customization that is primarily aesthetic. The different parts have different looks to them, insect and lizard and primate and amphibious and general mammalian and swine and birds. You can have a ton of limbs (as many as you can afford at least), four, two, one, or none. You can have multiple mouths; hell, you can -- for the price of one mouth -- put symmetrical mouths at the end of arms (I did that for a while just for the lulz). You can add wings, that allow some amount of jumping and gliding.
Your creature is, by necessity of the way the build-up works, bilaterally symmetric, but that is the only requirement. It can be whatever you want, within the limits of what's available. And there are coloring options that range from wacky to ones that mimic earth creatures, any color you want (most of my creatures so far end up purple for some reason).
...and if the game let me, I would be content to play an infinite creature-building level, exploring and doing wacky new designs. But the game doesn't let me, because the game wants me to move on to the tribal stage. And by "wants", I mean that it starts spawning creatures that can squish me with a thought, so that it is no longer possible to remain alive enough to do stuff. Trust me, I tried. I got thrown about by a giant dragon thing. I ran the fuck away and went to tribal stage.
Which is where it started to go downhill.
(Well, technically, I started one game with an herbivore that started to resemble Jar-Jar a bit too much; started a new game with a carnivore that died every time I blinked, in the creature stage; started a new game with an omnivore and decided that gigantic mosquitos are way too freaky; started yet another new game with what eventually resembled a Jurassic Park velociraptor, sort of.)
#
So. Tribal stage: you are now a tribe, yay you. You have a hut, where you can design costumes for your creature (the look of the species is fixed once you move out of creature stage, but there are now clothes), and where, as you acquire resources, you can arrange buildings that provide new tools. You start out with one of three musical instruments, and one of three weapons.
At first, you are the Special Snowflakes that are the first to be Sentient Zomg, which gives the tribe some time to build up resources, both foodwise and weapon/instrument-wise, and also gives the player some time to adjust to the controls. It's no longer single-creature-focused camera and controls; instead, the camera is independent, and you select one or more members of the tribe and tell them what to do.
Other species start becoming sentient and forming tribes as well, and you progress through the level by dealing with these tribes in a parallel way to how you dealt with other species on the creature level -- namely, attack or befriend -- but because you are Sentient, it is more complicated. To befriend, you play music and hope they like it. To attack, you ... attack. And hope you don't have any tribe members die, because making babies is very inconvenient (this is sarcasm. you click a button and the egg rolls out of the main hut).
You can also fish, domesticate animals, blah blah blah. More options for what to do.
And then, once you have allied-with-and-or-exterminated all of the tribes on your continent, you move to Civilization. Where, for no apparent reason, your tribe decides to build a city hall. And then religious land vehicles, with some balance of speed and health/firepower and religiosity. You use these vehicles to go out and stake your claim on spice geysers; as more Civilizations develop, you also use the vehicles to either attack neighboring cities, or convert them (religiously of course, wtf). Meanwhile you are also building a city, consisting of some measure of houses (which allow more population) and factories (which bring income but make the people sad) and entertainment centers (which make the people happy shut up I didn't write this).
Once you have presumably allied-with-and-or-exterminated all of the cities on your continent, you move into the space age I guess? idk, there's a wiki but I didn't read that far because I am never likely to get that far.
Here's the big problem I have:
ALL OF THE STAGES ARE DIFFERENT GAMES.
There are consequences of the sorts of actions you take -- although the game didn't actually elaborate on this, it took reading the wiki to figure it out. If you are carnivorous in cell stage, you get an ability in creature stage that allows you to roar like a scary thing, as well as particular offense- or defense-related abilities in later stages. If you are herbivorous in cell stage, you get an ability in creature stage that allows you to mystically make friends more easily, and healingy abilities in later stages. Added on to that, if you arenice social in creature stage, you get a tribal ability that helps you increase relations with your neighbors; if you are nasty all about the killing, you get a tribal ability that does fire bombs; if you walk a middle ground, you get a tribal ability that does ... something. /tilts head in bemusement at wiki/ Each stage has consequences for later stages.
But.
The abilities that you built up in creature stage? Health, speed, jump, attack skills or socialization skills? Seem to have no bearing on later stages. Once you shift to tribal, the stats -- gathering ability, more health stuff, socialness, combat -- are entirely contained in the clothing you choose. And once you shift to civilization stage, the stats are more along the lines of happiness and income.
And the "skills" that you hone in cell stage (...eating. and sometimes ramming things) have nothing to do with the skills that you hone in creature stage (one on one interaction between creatures) which have nothing to do with the skills that you hone in tribal stage (micromanaging a tribe of up to 12 individuals) which have nothing to do with the skills involved in civilization stage (sim city, basically), and I'm sure those have nothing to do with what you do in space.
And the creative aspects change completely. In cell and creature and tribal stages, you generally build for stats, using leftovers for decoration. You get to civilization stage and all of a sudden you are given instructions to build a "city hall", with eleventy billion options and no apparent functional difference and there are different costs for parts but you're not told what the parts do or what they mean or what significance they hold (as far as I can tell everything including the fucking doors are purely aesthetic) and sure you could get creative with it but, especially the first time you hit the civ stage, you don't know what else you're going to need the money for, and buildings aren't as fun as platypus-billed bipedal lizards with fairy wings and a long tail with a frond on the end of it.
And ... okay, really, the cell stage was an okay predecessor for the creature stage, and I can kind of see the connection between creature stage and tribal stage, but then all of a sudden it's SURPRISE YOU ARE NOW PLAYING SIM CITY CROSSED WITH CIVILIZATION. GO.
I was never any good at Civ, for the record. I adored the early parts, with the exploring and the barbarians and the random finds. Once it got to the point of Egyptians building the Great Wall of notChina and using tanks to mow down phalanxes... yeah, I was never good.
This is, of course, a large part of the bitterness. I was happy with the early stages of Spore; I was having fun; and then I was dumped into something that is drastically different and also I don't like.
(And am not good at. The game was all "ok now with one of your vehicles selected, click another city to convert it." I did, and my vehicle got blown to pieces by the bazillion turrets they had managed to build while my vehicle was crossing the terrain. "ok," said the game, "get your vehicles near one of your cities to heal." Which would be all well and good except that I NO LONGER HAD ANY WAY TO CONTROL THEM. I could select them, looking all pitiful and low on health. I had no controls. Probably they had been taken over by the city I was trying to convert.)
Oh, and that's another thing. In creature and tribal stages, it's fairly easy to tell where you stand with a rival species, because there's a smiley face scale: red angry face means they'll attack you on sight, orange kind-of-miffed face means you can try to talk to them but it probably won't end well, yellow :-| face means they're ambivalent, blue (nfi) smiley face means they like you, and green smiley means they're your Ally. And the things you do will nudge that scale in one direction or another.
In civilization stage? Gone. I can see the city's happiness level? I think? unless that's their status with me? Do I go after the red frowny face because they aren't happy with the way things are so I'm more likely to win them over, or do I avoid the red frowny face because they hate me? Do I avoid the green smiley face because they are happy and therefore less likely to be converted, or do I go for them because they like me?
CONFUSED ISA IS CONFUSED.
(Also, apparently, very very wordy.)
To sum up: I am more or less okay with having purchased it at the sale price; I would not have been happy at full price (never mind that I probably wouldn't have taken a chance on it at full price so wouldn't know anyway); and I may continue with the tactic of "start game, play til it gets boring, kill, start new game, etc" until the novelty wears off.
(I know there is a separate "creature creator" game, which may be more to my liking, since it sounds kind of like a sandbox sort of deal, but I really don't want to give any more of my money to the franchise, even at sale price. CRANKY ISA IS... well, you can probably figure it out.)
#
So someone in one of my chats linked to tje EA Origins store, where the downloadable-content games are on brief sale. I weakened and got Spore.
Spore is an evolution simulation game where you can control, to varying extents, the behaviour and looks of one particular species, starting at a pseudo-microbial level and evolving through different forms that then become land-based, and then that species' civilization and society.
It breaks down into five stages: "cellular" (I use scare quotes because the first action at that stage, eating, differentiate between plant material and meat blobs, so the scale is arguable), creature, tribal, civilization, and space.
The cellular level is the least complex, in that all you're doing is swimming around eating things and trying not to get eaten. It falls short of being mind-numbingly dull because you can "mate" (which even at the "cellular" level involves making hearts at another member of your species and then laying an egg) and tweak the appearance and capabilities of the offspring. You have limited "funds", so you aren't going to end up with something that has sixteen eyes and rings of cilia and five mouths, or whatnot; but as you progress you get more options for what to add, including various sorts of movement boosters, several types of mouths that determine what kind of food you can eat, a few types of eye that are cosmetically different but functionally the same, and some "weapons": spikes, poison jets, and electric bulbs.
And you can position things howeverthehell you want. For efficiency, I generally have a "front" with mouth and spike, eyes somewhere or other, movement boosters along the side and back. The cost of an item gives you either one central or two mirrored (the difference is cosmetic), and is fully refunded if you remove the item either.
At a certain point your creature evolves to land status, and it moves into the creature stage.
This is the best one IMO.
There are gameplay aspects: find food as needed; encounter other creatures (that grow in health/attributes as you progress) that you either socialize with to become friends, or attack in order to make that species extinct; find new evolutionary parts and upgrades, often by looking at skeletons of long-dead creatures; mate and breed; follow your species as it migrates from home to home.
These are in some respects mindless/rote. If you decide to befriend a species, you do A; if you decide to kill them, you do B. If you see a sparkly skeleton, you click it. If you get a hunger warning, find something to eat. But progression is measured by number of species dealt with, regardless of how you deal with them, and the only reason you can't just move onto the next stage without evolving is that you need the upgrades to your stats in order to deal with higher-level species.
The fun part, for me, is customization.
Each time you breed, you get to tweak the creature. (Or, since breeding isn't mandated, each time you want to tweak the creature you need to breed, but that's trivialities of phrasing.) You are limited to a certain extent by "currency" (which you get by doing the game's various tasks, kind of on a quest model) and by what you have discovered -- but the possibilities are practically infinite.
There is an element of customization that affects gameplay. Do you go for feet that are better at dancing (one of the ways you socialize), at speed (run away!), or at charging (a type of attack)? Do you go for hands that are better at posing (social), health (survivability), or strike (attack)? Do you use a mouth that is better at singing (social), health, or bite (attack)? Do you add weaponlike parts, that allow you to charge, or strike, or spit at a distance?
Your gameplay choices affect your choices here, and your choices affect your customization. If you want to be able to sneak in and steal upgrades from skeletons and run away, you customize for stealth and speed, although that is a limited-use route. If you want to fight everything you come across, you customize for weapons and attacks and health. If you want to make allies instead, you want the full range of socialization methods, the higher the better. If you want to do some of both, you need a balance.
But there is also an element of customization that is primarily aesthetic. The different parts have different looks to them, insect and lizard and primate and amphibious and general mammalian and swine and birds. You can have a ton of limbs (as many as you can afford at least), four, two, one, or none. You can have multiple mouths; hell, you can -- for the price of one mouth -- put symmetrical mouths at the end of arms (I did that for a while just for the lulz). You can add wings, that allow some amount of jumping and gliding.
Your creature is, by necessity of the way the build-up works, bilaterally symmetric, but that is the only requirement. It can be whatever you want, within the limits of what's available. And there are coloring options that range from wacky to ones that mimic earth creatures, any color you want (most of my creatures so far end up purple for some reason).
...and if the game let me, I would be content to play an infinite creature-building level, exploring and doing wacky new designs. But the game doesn't let me, because the game wants me to move on to the tribal stage. And by "wants", I mean that it starts spawning creatures that can squish me with a thought, so that it is no longer possible to remain alive enough to do stuff. Trust me, I tried. I got thrown about by a giant dragon thing. I ran the fuck away and went to tribal stage.
Which is where it started to go downhill.
(Well, technically, I started one game with an herbivore that started to resemble Jar-Jar a bit too much; started a new game with a carnivore that died every time I blinked, in the creature stage; started a new game with an omnivore and decided that gigantic mosquitos are way too freaky; started yet another new game with what eventually resembled a Jurassic Park velociraptor, sort of.)
#
So. Tribal stage: you are now a tribe, yay you. You have a hut, where you can design costumes for your creature (the look of the species is fixed once you move out of creature stage, but there are now clothes), and where, as you acquire resources, you can arrange buildings that provide new tools. You start out with one of three musical instruments, and one of three weapons.
At first, you are the Special Snowflakes that are the first to be Sentient Zomg, which gives the tribe some time to build up resources, both foodwise and weapon/instrument-wise, and also gives the player some time to adjust to the controls. It's no longer single-creature-focused camera and controls; instead, the camera is independent, and you select one or more members of the tribe and tell them what to do.
Other species start becoming sentient and forming tribes as well, and you progress through the level by dealing with these tribes in a parallel way to how you dealt with other species on the creature level -- namely, attack or befriend -- but because you are Sentient, it is more complicated. To befriend, you play music and hope they like it. To attack, you ... attack. And hope you don't have any tribe members die, because making babies is very inconvenient (this is sarcasm. you click a button and the egg rolls out of the main hut).
You can also fish, domesticate animals, blah blah blah. More options for what to do.
And then, once you have allied-with-and-or-exterminated all of the tribes on your continent, you move to Civilization. Where, for no apparent reason, your tribe decides to build a city hall. And then religious land vehicles, with some balance of speed and health/firepower and religiosity. You use these vehicles to go out and stake your claim on spice geysers; as more Civilizations develop, you also use the vehicles to either attack neighboring cities, or convert them (religiously of course, wtf). Meanwhile you are also building a city, consisting of some measure of houses (which allow more population) and factories (which bring income but make the people sad) and entertainment centers (which make the people happy shut up I didn't write this).
Once you have presumably allied-with-and-or-exterminated all of the cities on your continent, you move into the space age I guess? idk, there's a wiki but I didn't read that far because I am never likely to get that far.
Here's the big problem I have:
ALL OF THE STAGES ARE DIFFERENT GAMES.
There are consequences of the sorts of actions you take -- although the game didn't actually elaborate on this, it took reading the wiki to figure it out. If you are carnivorous in cell stage, you get an ability in creature stage that allows you to roar like a scary thing, as well as particular offense- or defense-related abilities in later stages. If you are herbivorous in cell stage, you get an ability in creature stage that allows you to mystically make friends more easily, and healingy abilities in later stages. Added on to that, if you are
But.
The abilities that you built up in creature stage? Health, speed, jump, attack skills or socialization skills? Seem to have no bearing on later stages. Once you shift to tribal, the stats -- gathering ability, more health stuff, socialness, combat -- are entirely contained in the clothing you choose. And once you shift to civilization stage, the stats are more along the lines of happiness and income.
And the "skills" that you hone in cell stage (...eating. and sometimes ramming things) have nothing to do with the skills that you hone in creature stage (one on one interaction between creatures) which have nothing to do with the skills that you hone in tribal stage (micromanaging a tribe of up to 12 individuals) which have nothing to do with the skills involved in civilization stage (sim city, basically), and I'm sure those have nothing to do with what you do in space.
And the creative aspects change completely. In cell and creature and tribal stages, you generally build for stats, using leftovers for decoration. You get to civilization stage and all of a sudden you are given instructions to build a "city hall", with eleventy billion options and no apparent functional difference and there are different costs for parts but you're not told what the parts do or what they mean or what significance they hold (as far as I can tell everything including the fucking doors are purely aesthetic) and sure you could get creative with it but, especially the first time you hit the civ stage, you don't know what else you're going to need the money for, and buildings aren't as fun as platypus-billed bipedal lizards with fairy wings and a long tail with a frond on the end of it.
And ... okay, really, the cell stage was an okay predecessor for the creature stage, and I can kind of see the connection between creature stage and tribal stage, but then all of a sudden it's SURPRISE YOU ARE NOW PLAYING SIM CITY CROSSED WITH CIVILIZATION. GO.
I was never any good at Civ, for the record. I adored the early parts, with the exploring and the barbarians and the random finds. Once it got to the point of Egyptians building the Great Wall of notChina and using tanks to mow down phalanxes... yeah, I was never good.
This is, of course, a large part of the bitterness. I was happy with the early stages of Spore; I was having fun; and then I was dumped into something that is drastically different and also I don't like.
(And am not good at. The game was all "ok now with one of your vehicles selected, click another city to convert it." I did, and my vehicle got blown to pieces by the bazillion turrets they had managed to build while my vehicle was crossing the terrain. "ok," said the game, "get your vehicles near one of your cities to heal." Which would be all well and good except that I NO LONGER HAD ANY WAY TO CONTROL THEM. I could select them, looking all pitiful and low on health. I had no controls. Probably they had been taken over by the city I was trying to convert.)
Oh, and that's another thing. In creature and tribal stages, it's fairly easy to tell where you stand with a rival species, because there's a smiley face scale: red angry face means they'll attack you on sight, orange kind-of-miffed face means you can try to talk to them but it probably won't end well, yellow :-| face means they're ambivalent, blue (nfi) smiley face means they like you, and green smiley means they're your Ally. And the things you do will nudge that scale in one direction or another.
In civilization stage? Gone. I can see the city's happiness level? I think? unless that's their status with me? Do I go after the red frowny face because they aren't happy with the way things are so I'm more likely to win them over, or do I avoid the red frowny face because they hate me? Do I avoid the green smiley face because they are happy and therefore less likely to be converted, or do I go for them because they like me?
CONFUSED ISA IS CONFUSED.
(Also, apparently, very very wordy.)
To sum up: I am more or less okay with having purchased it at the sale price; I would not have been happy at full price (never mind that I probably wouldn't have taken a chance on it at full price so wouldn't know anyway); and I may continue with the tactic of "start game, play til it gets boring, kill, start new game, etc" until the novelty wears off.
(I know there is a separate "creature creator" game, which may be more to my liking, since it sounds kind of like a sandbox sort of deal, but I really don't want to give any more of my money to the franchise, even at sale price. CRANKY ISA IS... well, you can probably figure it out.)