Occasionally we cover something that is produced by the mainstream industry, thought under exceptional terms and conditions - like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which, while funded by THQ was dragged through the long, hard bootstrap by a first-time Ukrainian company that did it because of love. Maxis is, in a very different way, another exceptional source of mainstream games, an oasis of life in a corporate desert (while Trion, across the lawn from EA HQ, is like Dubai or something, with high-tech solar panels and hydroponic gardens).
Anyway, despite the "oh, that's so mainstream" reaction you may have, Spore is ~95% likely to be the most important game released in years, if only for the sheer triumph of procedurality that goes on in it. It doesn't matter that a massive marketing campaign has been behind this game for years, including a Colbert Report appearance on the part of Wright, and a session with Robin Williams, it's still worth a look. Today, EA released a demo of the Spore Creature Creator, and now that my rationalizations are out of the way, here's a review:
Spore Creature Creator is a demo for Spore that does what it says on the label, and it showcases the "Magic Crayon" interface design spearheaded by Chaim Gingold, which is a success. It wouldn't have been successful without a state-of-the-art animation system that allows a practically infinite variation in skeletal structures and body contours to move smoothly. The real wonder is in the vertebrae and the arms and legs, the rest of it is fairly simply configured -- adjust size, rotate -- and while adding depth to a game not yet released, isn't the crux of the creator program itself, so I don't recommend paying for extra doodads. The real crux is in the radical adaptivity of the animation system and its counterpart, the radical variation in forms that you can create.
You really see the wonder in technology when you go into Test Drive mode and try the different "canned" animations. Canned, in that there are a finite set of them -- doing a back-flip, growling, being happy -- but the antithesis of canned when you realized that these are templates that infinite skeletal variations fit into. You also realize watching these why it's so hard to create a highly humanoid entity; the team probably took a visual direction early on that veered away from that for the sake of avoiding an uncanny valley in animation fidelity. And yet, these creatures can have a vibrant, dynamic sort of humanity to them, like happy mutants in the evolutionary Garden of Eden.
Well, my furious defence of
Well, my furious defence of Portal aside, I'm glad that you guys acknowledge positive trends in mainstream gaming.
Spore is a fascinating attempt to perfect the idea of games being "interactive art", with little to no reliance on pre-made content. Canned animations and body-parts aside, the game seems to not only provide an infinite range of possibilities, but also an infinite range of MEANINGFUL possibilities, with creatures having their own personality, looks and skills (tested by virtual evolution in the final game).
Games like, maybe, Civilization have already delivered this free feeling for specific kinds of strategy gameplay, but I've never seen it for real-time, 3D, fully animated environments. No level designers in the traditional sense, no level boarders, no theme sets.
It has potential to feel like the ant that is running on a Möbius strip. The set of rules provided by the programmers and designers might be finite, but you cannot see the borders, you never feel the limitation. You can go on and on, experiment, and the game will always stay ahead.
After the exhausting milking of the Sims franchise, my respect for Will Wright, as one of the few remaining "auteurs" in the mainstream game scene, has been fully re-established.
'Robert'?
I think you meant ROBIN Williams.
I had him half confused with
I had him half confused with Roberta Williams.
SecuROM
I was really enthusiastic about Spore until I heard that it comes with SecuROM, a horrible fusion of DRM and rootkit. I already had to return Bioshock to the store when I was given it for a Christmas present for this very reason.
Apparently even the creature creator is bundled with this badware. It's a shame to have to write this game off, but I'm not willing to put up with it, either as a citizen of a society currently debating intellectual property rights, or just as the system administrator of my home computer.
SecuROM
Just to be clear... SecuROM is a more intrusive form of DRM than I like, but it does not, in fact, install a rootkit.
http://www.securom.com/support_enduser.asp?t=3
Semi-impressed
But mostly disappointed. I had hoped that they would try to create physically realistic gaits for your creature. Rather, it seems there's a limited set of gaits, and it simply picks the closest one it can find (and the "magic" is in scaling and contorting that animation to work with the shape you've picked).
I'm not saying this isn't some challenge - but it would have been a lot more impressive if they'd limited themselves to physically possible movements. For example, it's easy to create a creature that is impossibly unbalanced (eg. straight horizontal body with legs at the back), but the game just lets it stand and walk supported by nothing.
How much cooler would it have been if the creature had forced itself to, say, lean far back to stand, or use its head for balance while standing but while running be able to rear up enough to stay up. Or roll. Or anything but just magically defy gravity.
next up - magic maps
I think the day of pushing pixels and lighting effects is pretty well over. The spore creature engine is the start of putting real smarts into enemy AI and characters.
After spending an inordinate amount of time getting my ass kicked at deathmatch games the last couple years - I'm waiting for someone to roll out a system for generating really interesting random maps to bring the balance back to skill instead of investing hours in map memorization.
on your "oh thats so mainstream" comment
I think you guys should stay an Indy games blog, and let that be your bread and butter, but its certainly relevant to post on things that impact the gaming community as a whole, like spore, portal, or whatever else, so that this is by no means anything bad to blog about - so long as you keep it on the impact of the games and not on the games themselves.
My first reaction to Spore is that it is not really that big of a deal. You can make you're own race of creatures, with a greater deal of granularity than ever before. It’s nice to see, sure, and there is some possibility for awesome levels of user customization - but doesn't this degree of flexibility already exist in Second Life, albeit in the buildings and not the creatures?
I don’t think its going to redefine anything about anything in gaming. It seems rather, that this is just another step forward for the gaming industry. Not a leap. In any case, it’s got something new in it, and here's hoping it’s worthwhile. Maybe it will, indeed, blow us all away when it comes out. I'd be pleasantly surprised if that happened.
ps - I read the fark thread on the Spore creature creator when it came out, and there were plenty of mentions on there about the potential proliferations of penis planets thru out the Spore multiplayer universe. Yikes. Admittedly, its fark, but if that happens, I will *not* be buying this game.