Hacksaw said:Rippou said:Hacksaw said: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/218-Spore
Yahtzee, ew.
You just do not want to admit he is right.
Short answer, he's not right about everything.
Long answer:
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
On a more serious note, here's my list of complaints:
1-Unlike Master of Orion, there is no way to look at convenient ledgers.
2-Unlike Victoria, the numerous interruptions cannot be readily classified and ordered. Victoria has special interruption messages for hundreds of different kinds of events, but if you right-click on any of them, you can tell the game to stop bothering you with that kind of event, and it *will*.
3-Bizarrely, there is no way for a galaxy-spanning civilization to produce more than one ship. To cruise with a fleet, one must have alien allies.
4- Similarly, one cannot have multiple fleets, or even stationary defense satellites; if pirates show up and raid, one must take one's only fleet across the galaxy to deal with a crisis, not knowing if it is large or small. (This gameplay is not unlike The Sims 2, in which the game often injects drama by forcing Sims to run across the room to answer phones, greet headmasters, etc.)
5-One must earn the badges to unlock necessary equipment -- fine, that's not unlike researching techs in most games. However, once the tech has been earned, one can't produce it at will -- one must wander aimlessly around civilized space, hoping to find a friendly planet that will have an item in stock. If one is buying missiles, one might get ten at a time -- but if one is buying colonization packs, there is usually only one available for sale. Thus if one wants to colonize ten planets in a row, one has to do a lot of wandering, which is likely to take a long time and involve a lot of delays. Build queues solve this problem for most games.
6-The economic element has multiple commodities, but they are just meaningless numbers. (By contrast, many management games have meaningful relationships between commodities and upgrades.)
7-One would hope for multiple save slots within a single campaign. Obviously save files can get big --- but one can have several games, one simply cannot go back and re-do mistaken courses of action. (This is not unlike The Sims 2, in which one can have various neighborhoods, but one cannot save one's campaign progress.)
Anyone who likes the administrative/organizational/management side of gaming might consider playing Victoria or its upgrade, Victoria:Revolutions. Those games have commodities and production as an important aspect of gameplay.
Also, network-building games like Railroad Tycoon 3 are a worthwhile source of fun for many gamers who would like to run a business empire but who lack millions of dollars in real-world capital.
More generally, games like Master of Orion 2 and Spaceward Ho! are classics of 4X in space. Apparently Spore was trying to replicate a very influential comedy game called Star Control 2.
The graphics of Spore in space aren't that big an advance over games like Ascendancy, which came out about fifteen years ago and also offered a 3-D galaxy, customizable spaceships, cool ambient music, etc.
Can you tell I have an unhealthy dependency on 4X games? Clearly I need to get back to healthier habits like anime addiction... |