Spore Creatures (DS)

Is that a creature in your pocket?
9/24/2008 7:32 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Spore Creatures is a mutation of Spore. Where Spore is a fully developed PC game, walking on its hind legs and doing all kinds of nifty stuff with its opposable thumbs, Spore Creatures is something different. Something smaller. It's all about the environments into which the two games were born: The Nintendo DS, by its very nature, is limiting. So Spore Creatures grew stunted, like one of those albino cave frogs. (No disrespect to Nintendo's handheld or subterranean life-forms intended.)

Limitations are what makes life and art interesting. The limitations of nature, such as the scalding water and intense pressure around deep sea vents, force life to change in unexpected and fascinating ways. The limited capabilities of the Nintendo DS force developers to find creative ways to make their games work. It's survive or die, and sometimes survival means developing luminescent skin or the ability to breathe air poisoned with the fumes of hydrochloric acid. Spore Creatures isn't quite this kind of marvel -- nothing worth making an IMAX movie about, anyway. But it is worth digging into the game's genome to pick out the bits of useful code it has borrowed from its ancestors.

Spore Creatures' closest relative isn't really Spore at all; it's a little-known GameCube game called Cubivore. Just like this portable spin-off, Cubivore's predecessor was fixated on the food chain: Players mutated a creature across multiple generations, eventually buffing up enough to sink their teeth into the top dog. Spore Creatures is interested in telling a bit more story. Players start as a small fry who sees one of its buddies abducted by an alien meddler who never heard of the Prime Directive, and so begins an accelerated climb up the evolutionary ladder. Hot on the heels of the kidnapper's UFO, the player runs roughshod over the local wildlife, brawling and befriending as the mood fits. This simple "rescue the princess" plot contains more story than the original Spore ever aimed to tell, but it suits the setting. Spore Creatures could never recreate the sprawling freedom that Spore eventually allows. Although it has its own version of the Creature Creator, it's but a pale shadow of the incredibly robust tool that PC gamers have been playing with. You don't so much concoct your own creatures here; like Victor Frankenstein working from Charles Darwin's notes, you try to cram as many useful, stat-boosting body parts onto the poor thing's torso as you can, and hope the guy doesn't come apart at the seams.

As players interact with the many critters bumping around on their homeworld, more and more echoes of past games pop up. If a player wants to make nice with another species, they first hoot at them with a social call. Once the potential pal responds, the player makes like a good Nintendog owner and rubs the friend-to-be with the tip of their stylus. As the wooing process continues, both parties loosen up, kick off their shoes, and cut a rug. The dancing mini-game feels a lot like Elite Beat Agents, with timed taps on the screen translating into twinkling toes.