Spored

The latest evolution/civilisation game from Will Wright is called Spore and it has been hyped as a game in which you can design everything yourself from scratch and evolve it through different stages.

You can, there's nothing untrue about that. Here's a quick summary.

The game starts in the cell stage and you are a small 2D creature in the ocean. As you eat plants your creature grows and you start picking up parts which you can add on to your creature, for example spikes, a different mouth or fins. Eventually you are able to add some legs to your creation and can leave the ocean for land.

The next stage is the creature stage where you evolve your creation some more in a generic 3D world by attacking/allying other creatures and picking up parts from skeletons on the floor. As you wipe out other species in the world your sentience increases, signified by a short cutscene showing a brain increasing in size.

You can "mate" with another of your race and this takes you to the creature creator where you can alter the appearance of your race as many times as you like. Once you complete this stage your creature is finalised and you move to the tribal stage.

This stage gives you a small settlement occupied by a chief and some other smaller units based on your creature. You can add some very limited clothing and armour to your race and more of this is unlocked as you conquer/ally other races. Like any resource management game you have to despatch your units to gather food either from bushes or fish from the sea, but thats all you can do.

As you conquer or ally other races you unlock a few extra buildings for your settlement, two of them allow you to equip weapons to your units and two of them allow you to equip musical instruments. The instruments are used during a minigame that starts when you want to ally a race. Wipe out or ally every race and the next stage starts.

The civilisation stage begins with the foundation of a city in a world populated by several factions of your race. You no longer control individual members of your race at this point. You design the town hall with the editor and you can then design a house, a factory and an entertainment building. Factories give -happiness and entertainment gives +happiness. You can also position turrets around your city but you cannot design these. The objective again is to ally or conquer the minimap using vehicles this time.

Depending on your activity in the previous stages your civilisation will be limited in vehicles. If you wiped out everything during your path to the civilisation stage, you will be able to construct military cars, boats and aircraft to conquer by force. If you made peace with everyone you will be able to construct religious vehicles to convert other factions to your own. If you did a mix of both you'll be able to make economic vehicles which are used for trading and permit you to buy out other cities.

The vehicle parts you use each have stats on them, so for example adding loads of wheels on to a car makes it go faster.

By controlling other factions that may be different in stance to your own - they might be military when you're economic - you can design and build vehicles of that type as well. Control the whole map and you move to the final stage - the space stage.

This, apparently, is the main meat of the game. You start out by designing a UFO using any of the parts you've accumulated so far plus a UFO subset of parts as well. Then the objective is to travel around the galaxy in your UFO expanding and conquering star systems and eventually the galaxy by colonizing planets and obliterating races.

Cool.

However there are lots of really unfortunate aspects of this game.

The thing that disappointed me the most is that the end game is the same for everyone. No matter what choices you made or parts you used on your race in the evolution and civilisation stages the end game is just a simplified boring space trade game where you trade "spice" for "sporebucks". None of the units you create feature in the end game at all. The race you created doesn't feature at all. The whole "create your own destiny" thing just does not apply.

During the space stage your colonies are constantly under attack by pirates and other races and since you have to go back and assist them every single time it means that you have no time to explore, terraform and colonise. Being able to explore other planets and find other races was attractive to me, however due to constant attacks on my colonies (usually 2 or 3 colonies at the same time) I just can't do it.

You only get one unit for the end game and whilst you can ask allies to loan you one or two ships to make a small fleet, they tend to die rather fast when confronted by an armada of enemy units.

It is possible to equip turrets on your colonies however they are completely ineffective and serve only to buy you a few seconds whilst you tediously click on each enemy to destroy it, then as soon as you clear the enemies and go back to what you were doing, you're under attack once again.

The only way I was able to counter the enemies was to ally a large civilisation and pay them to destroy my attackers' colonies with there enormous fleets of ships whilst I'm plodding about in my one ship.

This is about the size of my experience in the space stage of this game and I'm bored of it.

I expected the city building to be a bigger part of the game than it is, and I was disappointed to see that cities are a simple circle with around 10 fixed building nodes in it. There is zero freedom to create a city except to change the looks of the buildings which is pointless.

Creating the race initially is fun and the game leads you to believe the changes you make to your race will make a difference. I suppose they do at first, but in the end it just doesn't matter because you don't control individual units and dont see members of your race after the tribal stage.

Spore seems to take the worst aspects of the MMO and RTS genres and put them into a series of 5 boring mini games. If they released this game without a really cool editor and without Will Wright's name attached to it, it would have been a disaster.

Actress loves Coke shocker

So Helen Mirren came out the other day and stated that she used to do lines of coke and loved it. Only a few months ago she was in the paper claiming she used to do LSD as well.

I wonder whether there are any illegal drugs she hasn't done.