How to Make Friends and Influence Creatures

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.

The Creature Creator isn't quite robust enough to make Sporn.

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.

"C'mon shake your body, baby, do that conga."

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.

Fruit collecting. At least they're not coins.

As the bits and pieces of Spore Creatures come together, it becomes increasingly clear that the team's approach towards game design was not too dissimilar from the gameplay of the game itself. In Spore Creatures, not all creatures are capable of traversing the deep waters between islands. It's not until the player kills an animal with that talent or discovers the body part by some other means that they're able to integrate that particular kind of leg into their anatomy. Just as in nature, life encounters a problem and adapts. And so it probably was with the team behind Spore Creatures -- during the course of creating the game, they stumbled across one design problem after another. To overcome these obstacles, they cannibalized games that came before them, using the innovations, advancements and approaches of others to rise above. (Again, no judgment intended. Wise men regularly stand on the shoulders of others, and it is foolish to ignore the lessons of the past.) Yet at times, it's like Spore Creatures doesn't have an original bone in its body. Even the polka-dotted pattern on the grass feels like a direct swipe from the kawaii art style of Animal Crossing.

The game's one opportunity to forge new ground, via the plot, is mostly squandered. Despite a more personal approach, Spore Creatures never bothers to create memorable characters out of the many quest-giving characters the player comes across. And whatever tenuous ties to logic or science the game had are chucked out the window when the player is tasked with collecting spaceship parts and eventually piloting the flying saucer to another planet. What little critter beds down in a nest of bugs and twigs, but is totally cool with interplanetary travel?

This is how DRM makes us feel.

Nitpicks like these miss the point, though. Spore Creatures achieves, in a smaller fashion, the same vainglorious goals of Spore. It's meant to encourage the player to wrap their head around the problems of natural selection -- to give them a taste of the way science explains the world, and let them have some fun futzing around with a broad approximation of the insanely complex systems that allowed a single-cell organism to eventually beget a civilization of hairless apes. That's a pretty tall order, and maybe it's forgivable that Spore Creatures is merely a passable portable diversion. Sometimes highfalutin goals and ideals have to take a back seat to survival.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.