Spore (PC)
My god, it's full of stars.
9/9/2008 6:50 PM | 17 Comments | Page 1 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
I'm scrolling back on my mouse wheel when it hits me. Every speck of light I see on my computer screen is a star -- a solar system that I can
actually visit so long as I keep my spacecraft gassed up. There seem to be, in the parlance of Carl Sagan, billions and billions of them. The tiny points of light spiral off into the distance, radiating from the center of the Milky Way like legs of a starfish. I'm having a David Bowman moment: Like Keir Dullea in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," I'm catching a glimpse of something bigger than myself -- something I'm not sure I can completely comprehend. My eyes go wide and something pops deep inside the recesses of my monkey brain. Mind blown.
"I'd like to buy a vowel, please."
That's the point of
Spore, really. Will Wright and his army of simulation makers at Maxis have crafted the videogame equivalent of a shopping mall map. Instead of Abercrombie and Fitch you get the moment the first fish sprang legs and walked on dry land. Where that Verizon Wireless kiosk sits, there's the entire industrial revolution. And that place that sells tiny frozen dots of ice cream? That's our tasty and refreshing future as intergalactic explorers.
Spore slaps a sticker atop all of creation, an arrow pointing to one time and place with the plain words "you are here."
Funny how a so-called God game, one that gives you the power to create life, sculpt planets, and determine the course of entire civilizations, has a way of making you feel small.
Spore may be ambitious, sprawling and borderline revolutionary (we'll get to this in a moment) but it's pretty much the same game Will Wright has been making for the past 10 years. It's a game about sweating the details.
SimCity,
SimAnt,
SimCopter (and countless other games with the word "Sim" preceding some mundane but somehow interesting thing) let players pop the hood and get their hands dirty.
Pac-Man evolved.
But those games were always so focused -- they zeroed in on one subject, then riffed with near autistic (but rarely tiresome) detail.
The Sims was the first where we started to get the sense of scale that
Spore would eventually to aspire to. The idea of a virtual dollhouse seems, on paper, like such a simple thing. All you really need to "play house" is a mommy, a daddy and something rectangular-shaped in which the ensuing domestic disturbances can occur. Yet
The Sims wound up being so much more. It, like the childhood game, became a mirror -- one that reflected the light of American life back on us. Our George Carlin-esque fixation with "stuff," the mutation of the nuclear family, and the vice-like grip that pop culture holds on our imagination, all sprang to life in the petri dish of
The Sims, and millions (including, statistically, your mom) had a blast playing out their fantasies.
Spore isn't just
SimGalaxy. It's an evolution of the all-encompassing lifestyle simulator that
The Sims brand became. That's kind of what the game's five stages are all about. These seemingly disparate ways to play aren't just pit stops on a playable timeline of life, the universe and everything; play through the lot of them and you're also experiencing a brief history of videogames. The Cell Stage channels the
Pac-Man era. It's eat or be eaten in Flatland, with controls just as intuitive, as primal as any arcade quarter-chomper. Then with landfall and the Creature Stage, when creatures clamber from the ocean, the game makes the radical shift to three dimensions. It's
Super Mario 64 all over again -- learning to walk, learning to stomp. Then with the Tribal Stage and Civilization Stage, things start to get deep. It's no longer about "me." The gamer takes control of a "we," orchestrating the movements and actions of many, with rising levels of difficulty and depth. This is when we learn that individual lives, like a Terran marine or a single red Pikmin, are disposable.
