Spore
Binding : DVD-ROM
ProductGroup : Video Games
Manufacturer : Electronic Arts
Brand : Electronic Arts
Label : Electronic Arts
Publisher : Electronic Arts
Model : 15352
Platform : Macintosh
Studio : Electronic Arts
ReleaseDate : 2008-09-07
Lowest Used Price: USD $22.99
Lowest New Price: USD $34.11
- Epic journey from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and outer space exploration
- Play any way you choose in the five evolutionary phases of Spore: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space
- Grow, evolve, interact with and battle other cultures, and conquer the planet
- Visit literally millions of planets full of other player's creations
- Single-player game provides unlimited worlds to explore and play
The creators of The Sims present the next big bang - SPORE. Create your unique creature and guide it on an epic journey through a universe of your own creations. Play any way you choose in the five evolutionary phases of Spore: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. How you play and what you do with your universe is entirely up to you. Spore gives you a variety of powerful yet easy-to-use creation tools so you can create every aspect of your universe: creatures, vehicles, buildings, and even starships.
PC Minimum - Windows XP/Vista, 6 GB Hard Drive Space, 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent, 768 MB RAM, 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 Mac Minimum - Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher, 4.7GB Hard Drive Space, Intel Core Duo Processor, 1024 MB RAM; ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
Amazon.com
Create universal wonder in Spore, an exciting new simulation game that lets you develop your own personal universe. Work your way through five evolutionary phases, including Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization and Space, that offer unique challenges, thrills and goals. For example, you can start in Cell and nurture one species from a simple aquatic organism all the way until it becomes a sentient life form. Or you can jump right in and begin building tribes and civilizations on multiple planets. What you do with your universe is totally up to you.
The powerful creation tools of Spore are easy to use, allowing you to effortlessly design every aspect of your universe. Creatures, vehicles, building and even starships are all within your grasp. While Spore is a single-player game, your creations and other players' creations are automatically shared between your galaxy and theirs, offering a nearly limitless number of worlds to visit and enjoy. You can also go online to view the incredible things other players have made and can even pull those items into your universe. Spore gives you the chance to make worlds and beings that evolve, grow and delight you every step of the way.
SPORE CREATURE CREATOR
Finally all that hard work creating the perfect being can be put to good use. Import creatures that you created with the Spore Creature Creator and watch them live, breath and thrive in the full version of Spore.TAKE YOUR SPORE ONLINE
While Spore is a single player game, your creations and other players’ creations are automatically shared between your galaxy and theirs, providing a limitless number of worlds to explore and play within. Internet Connection Required.Minimum System Requirements
This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac)- PC Minimum - Windows XP/Vista
- 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
- 512 MB RAM/768 MB RAM
- 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
- The latest version of DirectX 9.0c
- Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1
- At least 4 GB of hard drive space, with at least 1 GB additional space for creations
- Mac Minimum - Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
- Intel Core Duo Processor
- 1024 MB RAM
- ATI X1600 or NVIDIA 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
- At least 4 GB of hard drive space, with at least 1 GB additional space for creations
- This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac), or the GMA 950 class of integrated video cards
- For computers using built-in graphics chipsets under Windows, the game requires at least:
- Intel Integrated Chipset, 945GM or above
- 2.6 GHz Pentium D CPU, or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent
- 768 MB RAM
Requires Internet Connection (2009-02-25)
This game requires an internet connection to play. Unfortunately, my computer doesn't have one. Another $50 coaster.
When I start the game, a window pops up and it says, 'The game cannot start. The game needs access to the internet to verify ownership of this game. Please ensure that your computer is online and try again.'
Good for quiet creative types (2009-02-24)
My daughter doesnt like fast paced games. She liked creating the creatures and running around and such.
As far as the game being hard to beat... it is cake actually kind of pointless if you want to play in any way like a "power gamer." Winning the game is not fun, but if you just like to fiddle around in a low-stress fun environment then its great.
Unusual And Fun (2009-02-24)
This game isn't just really fun it's educational too, because you evolve from a miniscule cell to a leader of a space exploring empire! There are 5 different stages; Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space. You get LOTS of different parts to use in your cells, creatures, outfits, vehicles, and buildings. Overall it's an outstanding game.
If there were no space stage, this game would actually be better. (2009-02-21)
Wright's previous Sim games all simulated a particular activity with remarkable aptitude and clarity. Spore, much to my surprise, simulated nothing. Perhaps this should have been expected. After all, the pre-show hype for Spore promised a game of such magnificent scope as to encompass all of existence as we humans know it and dwarf all other games in its wake. Indeed, this is exactly the premise of Spore. Yet, most games with such ambitions fail spectacularly, and sadly Spore is no exception.
To put it more clearly, while trying to simulate everything, Spore ended up simulating nothing. There are five stages total. I admit out of hand that some of the stages are actually rather fun. The cell stage is fun, if only for the first 30 min or so. Controlling a little cartoon cell around a fluid environment hunting other cells and organic matter appeals to the purist in me. There is no complicated fluid dynamics; I am rather not certain how any game can possibly simulate that and remain fun. There is no convoluted food chain. Your mouth determines what you can eat, and your weapon determines what you can kill. About halfway through the stage, that would be everything and everything. After blissfully swimming through the stage, collecting body parts along the way, the stage is over. Even though I felt like I didn't do much, it was still over much too fast.
Not to worry. The creature stage is a step upward. I feel this is one of the two most fun stages of the game. It is precisely the cartoonish animated characters that has vexed some other players that appeal to me. Despite their simple appearance, the creatures of Spore are delightfully animated. They seem to have an expression for every emotion reasonable in a game. The exaggerated way these emotions are expressed only adds to their entertainment value. Although the gameplay itself is painfully simple, it fits the whole motif of fish out of water very well.
Even if you want more activity, there is no need to worry; the tribal stage beckons like a bright shining light that is civilization. With a handful of buildings that can equip your creatures into numerous professions once they become village people, the tribal stage offers quite a bit of flexibility while remaining fun and straightforward. It's actually not unlike the creature stage where you have to befriend or kill other creatures. Now, though, you get to wear tribal cloth and war masks, so you can sing or bite or dance or claw in style.
Unfortunately, the merit of Spore ends here, anywhere from 3 - 10 hours into the game. The next stage, civilization, is a terrible disappointment. To an experienced strategy gamer like myself, this stage has no strategy involved. After spending some happy time designing my various vehicles, I found that other than their unique skins, there is very little appreciable difference between the same units of difference civilations or even land/sea/air units, other than the media through which they travel. The ai has no variation or insight in their behavior, blissfully running through a gauntlet of my tanks on their way to convert my spice refinery; this was on the hardest difficulty setting. Provided that I balanced my initial construction well, when money was low, the rest of the stage was just mechanics. I was a little relunctant to conquer the rest of the cities after half on the planet fell to my might because there seemed not much point.
Fortunately, if you have an economic civilization like mine, you can spend a lot of money to buy out every other city on the planet. It's really quite handy. Oh, and you should see the animation for the religious units when they are trying to convert a city...amazing.
At last, all the fun elements of Spore have been exhausted at this point. The space stage, well, is indeed the most complex and unfortunately the most dry stage of the game. You can do a number of things: plant a colony, plan buildings for your colonies, buy and seed structures on your planet, terraform your planet, transport various creatures, kill various creatures, ally or fight against spaceships from other space empires, trade spice... Wow, that sounds like a lot. Unfortunately, all of these activities are only interest the first couple of times. All colonies are constructed in exactly the same way; they have the exact same # and layout of slots where you can build the exact same 3 types of builds. You build structures on planet simply by buying them and dropping them on the surface; there are only a few to choose and once you are a millionaire like me, you can afford to put all structures on all planets that are worth upgrading. Terraforming sounds promising in complexity, but once you play for 10 hours (like me) and get all the tools, a planet can be terraformed from lvl 0 to 3 max in about 5 min. You pick up creatures and objects with tractor beam, kill them with laser. Trade spice...well, you buy it on one planet for one price and sell on another for a higher price, the dreary side of any MMORPG trading system.
After ten hours, the space stage has pretty much played itself out... Additional gameplay involves repeating what you have been doing. Least anyone has any misconceptions, the space stage of Spore strongly resembles the creature stage instead of Galactic Civlizations (the game). Even though you have a space-faring empire, your civilization is only capable of maintaining one space ship at a time. You will fight against multiple enemy space ships though, sometimes upwards of a dozen. You do everything in your space ship but nothing outside of it. Your empire pretty much run itself. The only thing you have to do is plant new colonies. Other empires are either friendly or not. Friendly ones are good are trading spices and buying upgrades for your spaceship. Not to worry, you can get all upgrades at your own civilization for a higher price. For my enemies, I have developed a fail-proof strategy of using allied spaceships off planet, invincibility shield on planet, and mega laser+anti-matter bombs for genocides. I can conquer any system of any civilization in a matter of minutes with nominal loss to myself.
Like I said, no strategy. The bottomline is, Spore is quite a fun game before its self-proclaimed good part. That part, the space age, plays terribly and is a disgrace to strategy gaming everywhere. Before that, continually evolving your creatures and watching them express themselves in simple but animated ways. That is fun for players of all ages. Unfortunately, that part doesn't last.
DRM (2009-02-20)
The DRM in this game is thievery on the part of EA. After three installs you have the privilege of calling EA to fight for the right to play a game you've already purchased for $50. Steal this on Bittorrent, send them a message.
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