Spore (PC)
My god, it's full of stars.
9/9/2008 6:50 PM | 17 Comments | Page 3 of 3
What's Hot: The Earth's molten core; Alien death rays; Mammalian blood
What's Not: Comets; The cruelty of nature; The soundless vacuum of space
Gus Mastrapa
Status: Chickens that shoot lasers out of their eyes.
One of many places to boldly go.
My favorite bits were the parts where you terraform, tweaking a lifeless planet with volcanoes and atmosphere generators until the temperature and protective shell of gas hits that perfect Class-M sweet spot. Then it's just a matter of locking down those magic numbers by planting the vegetation and introducing the life forms that'll create the ecosystem that holds everything together. Making a creature from the stems up is cool, but turning the third stone from the sun into a livable place feels nearly as good as pumping and dumping a three-bedroom fixer-upper.
No two star systems in
Spore are alike. Some have binary stars in the center. Others are rife with comets. Some have black holes at their centers. Mine, the heart of the Feldspar Empire, has two planets in synchronous orbit. When cruising across my homeworld's rocky alien landscape, you can see the neighboring globe looming there in the sky. It just struck me that I'd like to carve a big, beaming smiley face into that world, so that when my people look up into the heavens they'll know that, yes, there is a God, and that, yes, that God loves them. That ought to blow their tiny little minds. I did, after all, make them in my own image.
This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher. Note: copy protection on this game only allows installation on three separate machines per disk.
