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.

Rockstar stole my taxi

In the media over the last couple of days there have been several commentators calling for Rockstar's latest Grand Theft Auto incarnation to be banned in the UK after it was banned in Thailand after someone murdered a taxi driver and claimed to have been influenced by it.

According to Captain Veerarit Pipatanasak of the Bangkok police, "he wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game". Fair enough.

Following this, though, the standard comments appear from columnists, broadcasters and self serving do gooder groupies about how kids are being turned into mass murderers by games that feature realism in terms of driving, shooting or explosions.

Even if games are an influence on people, which I suppose in some ways they are, it's as if other forms of "acceptable" media such as books and television are not influential. I mean, those that shot JFK, John Lennon, Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King all had copies of and were heavily influenced by The Catcher in the Rye. Is it banned? Nope. Is there an outcry about it? Nope. They even study it in school in the US.

Movies are full of explicit criminality these days. I suppose they always were. Even at a rating of 12A the latest Batman incarnation - The Dark Knight - features people having their cheeks sliced with a knife and someone having a pen smashed through the middle of their forehead within the first 20 minutes, as well as a far more influential villain in the Joker who makes it fun to blow up hospitals, burn people alive on bonfires, disguise innocents as terrorists to cause friendly fire deaths and induce fear with Catch 22 mind games where the outcome is death if you don't kill loads of other people.

Some say Heath Ledger died due to his role as the Joker which I find somewhat ironic. Without wishing to go into a critique on this film (which I thought was a good film), there were also plenty of incidents of grand theft auto and other crimes involving vehicles as well as weapons including a rocket launcher.

So why then has Grand Theft Auto 4 (a game rated as 18) been slammed constantly by people for being too violent and/or influential when The Dark Knight has just as much violence and is rated as only a 12A?

I believe part of it is down to the antisocial stereotype that comes with owning a games console. Nintendo have broken this stereotype somewhat with the Wii, but it's the only console that is seemingly exempt from it. Its just a shame almost all the games for it are crap.

Since video gaming became mainstream in the mid 1990's with the Commodore Amiga, Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo, there has always been an older generation of people that didn't have video games as a kid and look down at gaming as being a strange solo activity. They have no concept of multiplayer games or gaining enjoyment from playing games that are remotely realistic. Apparently if it's cartoony then it's OK, though.

Well what did they do when they were kids? Play cops and robbers? Do knitting? I dont know but I find both of those strange activities. I suppose that works both ways.

But people of this distant generation seem to think that in order to play GTA 4 you have to have ambitions similar to the main character of the game. Not true. It's just a character around which the storyline is based. If the suggestion is that people want to get guns because of GTA 4 I would argue that people who are determined to get guns already have one.

Some people suggest that people buy GTA 4 because it teaches them how to steal cars but really this just shows their own lack of knowledge and acceptance of media scaremongering as fact. GTA 4 doesn't teach you how to commit real world car theft: it merely provides a means to get a new car. You press the yellow button on your Xbox 360 controller. It's hardly the same, is it? Gone in 60 Seconds probably teaches you more about it in the real world, but nobody ever mentions that.

Realistic video games are all about doing fun or crazy things you couldn't or wouldn't do in real life. It's about being part of the action rather than a spectator. For example in FIFA 2008 you can be a Premiership footballer. In Project Gotham you can drive fast and recklessly in cars of your dreams. In NBA Live 2008 you can be Kobe Bryant.

In GTA 4 you can be a common criminal involved in a battle of mafia-style families. You can steal a helicopter and fly freely around Liberty City, land it wherever you want, even jump out of it in mid air. You can drive a high performance car up a large number of ramps to complete crazy stunts such as barrel rolls. You can be a law enforcement officer and settle the most wanted list. You can even cruise round in a fire engine blasting the water hose at people if you want to.

The best thing is that unlike many games which are heavily scripted, GTA 4 isn't. The city is amazingly realistic and you have freedom to do whatever you want within the city. Whilst the storyline is finite, the game never ends until you get bored. Which is generally when you complete the storyline.

Rockstar have combined three popular genres with GTA. Driving and roleplay with a bit of first person shooter (FPS) in there as well. The driving aspect is modelled so that each vehicle drives individually and as you might expect it to drive in the real world. So a sports car is both fast and handles sharply whereas a large American style lowrider drives like a boat.

Some might suggest that those that have played GTA 4 would want to get in their car and run over a pavement of pedestrians. I obviously haven't done it (although some crazy Japanese guy did recently), but it is impossible to re-enact a GTA 4 pedestrian steamroller scenario in real life anyway. In GTA 4 you can mow down the entire centre of Liberty City (modelled on Times Square), suffer no damage to your car, attract no police attention and even if you do it's really easy to get away from them. In real life all you have to do is shine a laser pen at a police vehicle for 4 months behind bars.

Police chases are something that people love: look at the popularity of the Police, Camera, Action fly on the wall cop shows or indeed most action movies. But unless you're a criminal in real life, you probably wont ever be involved in one. Unlike movies though, where you only spectate whilst John Travolta is hammering it in his TVR Tuscan in Swordfish, you can be the one being chased in GTA 4 and it's up to your own driving skill and ingenuity to get away. Personally I think whilst I'm able to enact this in a video game I'm less likely to want to do it in real life.

Many people that have no interest in gaming often claim that video games are for kids but this is yet another completely unfounded statement based on nothing at all. I don't even agree that controversial console games such as GTA 4 are marketed to kids even though the media likes to tell us that they are. Ian Collins on talkSPORT commented that GTA 4 had cartoon-like packaging and therefore was marketed at children. Rubbish. It's just a style of art. He then admitted that he bought a Playstation "to play Space Invaders". Right.

A recent survey was done by Experion group to find out the facts about Xbox 360 and PS3 owners. It concluded that the average age of Xbox 360 owners is between 35-44 and of PS3 owners is over 44 years old.

I'm pretty sure software developers are aware of this demographic. Since GTA 4 is only out on these two consoles why would they market the games at kids? The answer is they wouldn't unless it was a game actually designed for kids.

People often overlook the fact that Rockstar really didnt need to advertise this game. Call it viral advertising or whatever but everyone knew it was coming out and it was much anticipated. This was proven by the fact that it outsold all movies ever with something like $500million of sales within the first week of release.

Maybe if those people in the media that have so much to say about games such as GTA 4 actually went and played it they would realise that it's nothing more than a realistic city with no limits. It's up to the player how they want to play it.

It's the taking part that counts

That idiot Dr Tanya Byron has been self publicising again: today she came out with yet more revelations about video game censorship.

She reckons that games should be labelled as films currently are, i.e. Universal, PG, 15, 18 and so on.

Wow. If she had a clue about the subject matter she would realise that most games are rated already, and no matter what age you place on a video game it won't stop kids from playing it just like it doesn't stop kids buying cigarettes under age, buying booze under age or renting/buying 18 rated films under age.

Does she really think kids are copying what they see in video games? Really? Does she really think first person shooter games are the cause of black gun culture, or that games such as Grand Theft Auto are the cause of youths taking vehicles without their owners consent?

Does she really think kids are not exposed to sex or violence before they are 15, or even 18? Most TV programmes after 9pm are packed with both but I don't see Byron bleating about this, probably because hey, she is getting paid by taxpayers to compile a report about the danger of the Internet and of video games to kids. So hey, lets not consider everything else outside the box eh Tanya?

I can't be arsed with bleeding heart do-gooder spongers like Byron that make a name for themselves by inciting hysteria within the ignorant masses. Gary Glitter is a bigger danger to kids than some coloured pixels on a computer monitor. Has she really nothing better to do than regurgitate this crap every other month on TV as though it's some ground-breaking discovery she has made?