Spore

Damn nature, you scary.

Games have allowed players to create all kinds of things - simulations of their lives, the cities they want to live in, the vehicles they want to drive, hospitals, theme parks, and zoos. If you had a creative itch, there was probably a game that could scratch it.

But what about creating the entire evolutionary tree of an interstellar lifeform? What game caters for that? What game starts us off in some chemical soup before allowing us to guide the hand of evolution towards a space-faring civilization?

Spore does. Let's see how intelligent this designer is...

Fun Times

I wasn't terribly interested in Spore when it first came out. Not the type of player to sink time into The Sims, why would I be the type of player to play The Sims with weird creatures? The idea might have appealed for just a little bit, but not long enough to justify a purchase.

A decade later and a 1001 list to venture through, and I'm playing the PC version of Spore, right from the very origins of life, all the way through to my extinction or eventual success as a galactic civilization - that's the promise Spore offers, at least.

We skip a few stages of cellular life to start off as a wibbly little thing with googly eyes and a beak. I've decided to become a carnivore, so we're swimming around this pond in search of scraps of meat to grow big and strong on.

Why are there scraps of meat at this early stage of life on this planet? Don't worry about it. Just know that more food equals more evolutionary progress. Eat, find a mate, recreate, repeat.

Each time you hit an evolutionary milestone, you'll be prompted to dive into the creature creator to make some changes to your little beast. Dotted around the pond, if you can find them, are evolutionary leaps like spikes and eyeballs, but I only managed to find one of them and was still able to dominate the life aquatic as this little Sabretooth Tiger wannabe, complete with forward-pointing spikes and central eyes to focus on the prey ahead.

There's always a bigger fish, though, so you'll find yourself evolving extra bits to swim and turn faster, for example, hoping this lifeform is smart enough to figure out how best to use them. You can apply these extra bits anywhere you please, and Spore will do its best to find a suitable animation to use to portray your creation in all its glory.

There's not much to do at this stage other than swim around and eat. You can pick a fight with the other lifeforms if you think you're hard enough. Death isn't the end of your game, but you don't want to look like a chump this early on, do you?

Thankfully, Spore isn't played in realtime, and before long we've got a family tree to look back on, and a shoreline to look forward to. We need some legs.

When I say you can apply things wherever you please, I don't mess around. If you want legs coming out of your ears, you can do that. I'm not sure how that'll help, but Spore will find a way to work with the nonsense you throw at it.

Editable joints allow you to have your knees point backwards like all of the cool kids, and you can adjust the length and curvature of your spine to accommodate all of your frilly bits, though you can't quite stand upright just yet.

A scroll of the mouse wheel scales the selected part up or down, making for some seriously silly-looking entries into your family tree, and after juggling the books to pay for what I thought this creature needed, we were ready to roam the land for the first time.

We've been beaten to the shores by a fair few species, some that favour the quiet life, some that only hunt vegetables, but we're developing the idea of peaceful co-existence. You have a friendly stance or a combat stance, and approaching an alpha animal in one or the other will be your first steps towards working together or waring forever.

I'm a carnivore, remember...

Wiping out your neighbours rewards you with DNA points and hunting around for the bones of creatures already long gone will give you more evolutionary bits and bobs to mould your creature in the direction of your choosing.

Quickly seeing no need to look like a fish anymore, a generation or two passes and we turn into a kind of tusked ape-bear. Stupid looking, but already capable of grabbing sticks and hurling them at a target.

Not capable of running away from angry spider-dogs, though. Speed is not our forte at all. We pack a punch, but it's no use when we're outnumbered, and seeing red, I'm about to evolve a grudge...

After stomping on some defenceless blobs, Spore told me that I was developing a teeny tiny brain, one that was big enough to work with other tusked ape-bears to hunt in packs.

If Spore was getting a little repetitive and aimless before, it gave me purpose now. It was time to bully the locals.

You need to impress a would-be accomplice with a dance or a pose, but once you do the smiles disappear and the claws come out. I've evolved some attacks, apparently modified by what bits and bobs I'd stuck on the end of my arms, and I could now get some almighty swings in, as well as charge at my target over short distances.

And now there's two of us.

Now, I'm perfectly happy to admit that being a bastard isn't a nice way to live, but when Spore presents a system that is as simple as "click where to go, click a target, click an interact button, click to eat from the corpse", it's quite easy to fall into a brutal routine of kill or be killed. And I was a carnivore, remember. What else was I going to do?

You could do some sustainable farming, I guess, hunting the weakest of the pack, but the HUD makes it clear that if you kill X amount of whatever you've just said hello to, you'll get a DNA reward, and that's the whole point of Spore. 

Could you get rewards peacefully? Yes. But who would do a thing like that?

More generations go by and we now have antlers, which should work wonderfully with our charge ability, and we're migrating our nest elsewhere on the island. I guess the sea air wasn't working for us - not that we've got to worry about lungs or anything. That's a level of detail too far for this kind of game, but it is just as ambitious in other areas.

We can also hunt in bigger packs, so I'm just terrorizing this place now. If I see something moving, it generally doesn't move for much longer, but I'm not stupid - some creatures are just too big to attack, even as a group.

On the horizon is the ghostly form of one such creature, which loads into life as an Epic something or other, with 1,000HP. We can barely reach 100 between the three of us, so I hope to just run around and gather the evolutionary upgrades from all these skeletons, which hopefully haven't been victims of this giant here.

A single kick says they may well have been. My companions start swinging in response, and the beast doesn't seem to care. Will I be avenged? Sadly, Spore crashes at this point, an hour or so into my evolutionary adventure. I will never know.

Final Word

Since that crash, I've not even gone to check on whether I have any save data for the Sabretoothed Ape I was apparently working towards, and part of the reason is that I feel kinda satisfied with the time I've already spent in Spore, and don't feel the need to try again.

I say this knowing that after the tribal stage we'll evolve into a civilization, complete with towns and desires to reach the stars. We'll go all the way from pond scum to skywalkers in a single game, and we'll do it our way, with the ups and downs that come with it.

It'll be an adventure worth taking just to see what happens, but how often will we take it? Once we've done it successfully, is there a need to go back?

The arguments would come in the form of "Yeah, try and go through it peacefully, try and go through it with no eyes, try and create something so out there that the animation rigs don't know what to do", and I can see those arguments no problem. I just don't really want to explore them, not right now at least.

Spore is a wonderful tool to have some fun and perhaps learn a thing or two about life, but as a game, it's a little too sandboxy for me. I'm not expecting a story mode, but I'm not expecting so much repetition either.

It's definitely something worth having a look at, and online modes - if they're still available - will see your efforts infiltrate other player's games to flesh out their neighbourhood. It's fun for what it is, but whether it has any legs for the long haul is up to you.

Fun Facts

The underlying physics systems allowed you to send creatures into orbit. Not very useful for evolutionary purposes, but entertaining enough for some.

Spore, developed by Maxis, first released in 2008.

Version played: PC, 2008.