A world of MeFi creativity September 8, 2008 6:59 AM   Subscribe

Spore is out and I'd love to add MeFi creatures to my universe. Please post your Spore username here.
posted by jragon to MetaFilter-Related at 6:59 AM (76 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite

jonbell
posted by jragon at 6:59 AM on September 8, 2008


JesterInACast
posted by EarBucket at 7:08 AM on September 8, 2008


RunsLinuxSoCan'tPlay:(
posted by DU at 7:29 AM on September 8, 2008 [1 favorite]


MsElaineous
posted by MsElaineous at 7:33 AM on September 8, 2008


You know, the creationists are gonna love this game.
posted by caddis at 7:41 AM on September 8, 2008


I just bought it for store pickup today, so when I get home I'll install and re-post here. Is it any good? I love that the amazon review is averaging 1.5 stars due to DRM flaming!
posted by Grither at 7:54 AM on September 8, 2008


This is a cool idea. Once I get my copy, I'll share all my Spornography with all of you.
posted by slimepuppy at 8:13 AM on September 8, 2008


I am backseatpilot, funny enough.

What are people's impressions so far? Ars and Wired both seem to have panned it a bit, but I think it's a lot of fun - I only made it to the beginning of the tribal stage before I had to go to bed, but it's pretty addicting right now.
posted by backseatpilot at 8:23 AM on September 8, 2008


Anyone know if it can be coaxed into running on OS X 10.4, like the Creature Creator could?
posted by uncleozzy at 8:24 AM on September 8, 2008


I'm KaptainKolbey, but I didn't choose to install the EA downloader. Does that affect the game's ability to add user-created content? It's all a bit nebulous.
posted by adamdschneider at 8:38 AM on September 8, 2008


crunchland
posted by Dave Faris at 8:38 AM on September 8, 2008


It's cool and very interesting, but I'm not sure if it's "fun". I had more fun with the creature creator itself, tbh.

There are quite a few creatures tagged with MeFi already, btw. Oh, and I'm Gemmy there too.
posted by gemmy at 9:11 AM on September 8, 2008


I played a bunch yesterday and I was keenly aware of two things:

* I love it, and I know a lot of people that will love it
* It's not for everyone

In that way I think it'll be like the Wii and The Sims -- it'll tickle the mainstream but the more advanced gamers are likely to be disappointed. (for example, the tribal stage is probably more fun when you're not saying to yourself "Warcraft 1 did resource management better".)
posted by jragon at 9:23 AM on September 8, 2008


I've been playing this game for ages; it started when I neglected to throw out an old slice of pizza sitting on top of my TV, eventually I noticed that mold was growing on it, but I figured it was probably handy to have around, like penicillin, so I kept it. Then one day, I looked closer and realized that the mold had evolved into little tiny flies that were living on the surface of the now dessicated pizza. I figure it must have been the constant stream of TV radiation combined with the grease, anyway, some had moved onto the Island of Pepperoni, while a different sect seemed to favor the thin slice of land that was The Crust.

Sadly, relations must have broken down because eventually the Crustians seemed to just disappear. I like to think that they struck out for better lands, but the reality is that the Pepperonians probably ethnically cleansed them. Since I've started watching, I've come to believe that the Pepper Reds (as I've begun calling them) are a bit militaristic and kind of scary. I've already caught them making advances on my soda and the almost empty box of chicken from last week.

I'm already convinced that they have supplanted humans as the top of the food chain, and I'm praying they develop space flight and take off before they decide that I'm a potential food source as well.

Otherwise, I'm afraid I've doomed us all.
posted by quin at 9:26 AM on September 8, 2008 [6 favorites]


I don't know what Spore is, but I'd love to add MeFi creatures to my universe, too.
posted by amro at 9:30 AM on September 8, 2008 [1 favorite]


Also, spoiler alert if anyone cares:






I was running around in creature mode and I saw a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man-sized version of my friend's creature. Then it started crashing through the forest to chase me and I almost didn't escape because I was screaming and laughing. *That's* user-generated content, bitches.
posted by jragon at 9:35 AM on September 8, 2008


sequential
posted by sequential at 9:50 AM on September 8, 2008


Speaking of Amazon reviews for Spore: Everyone loves it, and gives it 1 star because of the DRM.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:00 AM on September 8, 2008


wnalyd

I pretty much lost yesterday to Spore.

If you're wondering why they're called Belgians, it's nothing against the fine people of Europe's Most Boring Country. It's a riff on my TF2 name -- the planet is named Waffle.
posted by dw at 10:02 AM on September 8, 2008


My spore name is polpo. I got a free copy of the game so I don't care about the DRM aspect, but so far my impression has been "meh." I've just started the tribal stage. The fact that your creature's design has very little to do with its success in the world takes away a lot of the game's impact for me.
posted by zsazsa at 10:06 AM on September 8, 2008


My Spore name is Diskeater.

I lost this past weekend to Spore and I'm kinda torn. The first four stages are fun but have almost no impact on the Space stage and that's where the majority of the game takes place.

There's a lot that needs to be tweaked. Collecting and selling spice requires you to zoom in which gets tedious after a while. Pirate raids and ecosystem disaster happen frequently and take no time at all to fix....but can happen to a planet that's a long way from where you are and traveling there takes time.

There are other issues but after all that, I'm still thinking about what creature I'm going to create next.
posted by Diskeater at 10:26 AM on September 8, 2008


So after a year or so of tons of people playing this game, will it be impossible for us to meet REAL aliens that don't look like one that has already been created in Spore?
posted by Grither at 10:29 AM on September 8, 2008 [1 favorite]


Why hasn't anyone pointed out the Gamer IDs page on the wiki yet?
posted by Plutor at 10:30 AM on September 8, 2008 [1 favorite]


DeeArrEmma
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:13 AM on September 8, 2008


robocopisbleedin

The best parts so far have been the "OMG WTF IS THAT THING ITS HUGE AND COMING RIGHT FOR ME...ARGH!" moments in Cell, Creature, and Tribe.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 11:14 AM on September 8, 2008


My Spore name is... kbanas.

I watched my girlfriend play for three or four hours last night, and found it to be quite interesting - it was just kind of fun to watch someone else sit down with it from step one and all the decisions they made and what interested them and what confused them and so on and so forth.

However, we kind of mutually got stuck at some point last night... It was kind of irritating. We got to the point where we could have *two* animals in our party and we would go to all these different colonies and every time we tried to be "friendly" we would try to mimic the fellow - a dance, a charm, a song, etc.. and our little colored bar just would not go up, and then we would be kicked to the curb, discarded, abandoned.

And since the only way to make progress as an herbivore seems to be to make friends, we were kind of stuck.

What the hell.
posted by kbanas at 11:34 AM on September 8, 2008


kbanas:
Spore creator Will Wright is a rabid anti-vegetarian, and he firmly believes that vegans are the spawn of Satan, so he designed the game so that anyone who chose that path would be stuck in an interminable loop of friendship rejections.
posted by Grither at 11:49 AM on September 8, 2008


and our little colored bar just would not go up

As with every other videogame made since the dawn of time, the computer controlled players always advance at the optimum time. You couldn't dance/pose/charm/sing as well as the others because you didn't advance the talent as fast or as efficiently as the computer game did. So they're dancing and posing and charming and singing at a couple levels higher than you, so they weren't impressed.

Just be glad the game doesn't have you turn into the domesticated animal of a computer controlled species.
posted by Dave Faris at 12:16 PM on September 8, 2008



As with every other videogame made since the dawn of time, the computer controlled players always advance at the optimum time. You couldn't dance/pose/charm/sing as well as the others because you didn't advance the talent as fast or as efficiently as the computer game did. So they're dancing and posing and charming and singing at a couple levels higher than you, so they weren't impressed.

Just be glad the game doesn't have you turn into the domesticated animal of a computer controlled species.


I mean, that's what we figured - so, we'd go back to the "creator" mechanism and equip a new pair of feet or some new decorative oddity that would level up our talents - for example, we added some feet that took us up to "Dance 5" from "Dance 2" and yet.. even while attempting to win over friends in our general area and of similar level, we still weren't advancing as we thought would be appropriate... And then we just kind of ran out of people to befriend...

I dunno.
posted by kbanas at 12:25 PM on September 8, 2008


This is where being a carnivore is awesome -- if the "friend" thing doesn't work out, there's always the "lunch" thing.
posted by dw at 12:33 PM on September 8, 2008 [3 favorites]


sthig is my screen

I'm a herby made it all the way to space exploration (although it took all day). Now the space stage is MEGA confusing
posted by Hands of Manos at 12:35 PM on September 8, 2008


oh and here is my guy:
Huskwalker
posted by Hands of Manos at 12:37 PM on September 8, 2008


My copy of Spore & Creature Creator should be here by tomorrow and I have been debating for days what to name myself...I dont know yet, but when I do...oh boy.
posted by Jenny is Crafty at 1:00 PM on September 8, 2008


jleyser

And Spore is, at turns, tons of fun, and tons of MMO-style grinding.
posted by FfejL at 1:10 PM on September 8, 2008


wonderdad is mine. Just FYI you're going to see quite a few things designed by (and for) a 4-year-old. I have to say that as fun as the creature creator is, the vehicle designer is even better. I can hardly wait to goof around with the spaceships.

Yesterday my son and I were playing the creature stage and we kept getting harassed by a (computer controlled) spaceship that kept using a tractor beam to steal all the other creatures. We were both like "Hey! I was gonna eat that!"

Spore's a great game, but yeah, not for everyone.
posted by ssmith at 1:19 PM on September 8, 2008


I'm still dealing with depression caused by the Sims. When I was jobless and broke a few years ago, I made the mistake of creating a Sim who looked just like me and built him an apartment that looked just like mine.

Within a month he was mayor and had remodeled his apartment into a luxurious mansion. In the meanwhile, I was still broke and jobless.

I couldn't handle having a single-celled organism beat me to greatness.
posted by Astro Zombie at 1:28 PM on September 8, 2008 [10 favorites]


awww, that's a terrible story, Astro Zombie!
posted by Hands of Manos at 1:46 PM on September 8, 2008


You know, the creationists are gonna love this game.

Only the ones who believe mankind's creaturekind's destiny is looking funny while dancing.
posted by ersatz at 2:07 PM on September 8, 2008


I'm NelsonMinar in Spore. This add one-at-a-time is for the birds, particularly when the server is so unreliable.
posted by Nelson at 2:32 PM on September 8, 2008


My name is Maalic
posted by thekorruptor at 2:53 PM on September 8, 2008


I added a bunch of you guys, but some names it wouldn't take. Nelson, your name would not come up
posted by Hands of Manos at 3:07 PM on September 8, 2008


Jordan117

It just has my Creature Creator stuff right now since I'm still waiting on my copy to arrive, but I could not resist downloading the (offline-only) game when it leaked, so I already have some stuff cooked up to upload when I get the real thing.

My thoughts on the game so far:

It's really all about the Space phase. The early stages are so short, so simple, that they're more like tutorials to inure you to the complexities and nuances of the galactic level.

If you play aggressively, the Space phase can be a grind. Expand early, defend your colonies doggedly, and don't allow your relations with larger empires to sour too much. I blew off my neighbors' demands for tribute a little too much early on, and now I'm surrounded by hostile forces. I have to spend considerable time appeasing them with missions and such to stave off their raids.

Save often. There is no autosave, not even after completing a phase, which is unacceptable in a game like this. I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to play from Cell to Civ and then losing it all because the game crashed.

Oddly, one of my biggest disappointments is the inability to name new planets. I have a penchant for coming up with interesting names for things, so it was a letdown (albeit a cool one) seeing that the game autogenerates them for you. It does let you name your homeworld, though. Mine's Petrichor -- "the smell of rain on dry ground".

FunTip: Go to My Documents > My Spore Creations > AnimatedAvatars (or the equivalent path in your operating system). There will be an animated .gif of all of your creations showing their development from empty canvas to full-formed creature/vehicle/building. It's pretty great.

Lastly, I think Ars hit the nail on the head in their review on the game's most foreboding aspect: "one also gets the uncomfortable feeling that each phase is now just a shell to be filled in with upcoming expansions and for-pay content packs. Imagine an expansion pack release for each phase, adding in the depth that's sorely missing. It's not a fun thought."
posted by Rhaomi at 3:34 PM on September 8, 2008


Had to go with Chiark, since they don't like 3-letter names :P
posted by Auz at 3:37 PM on September 8, 2008


I am gloriousmeept. I'm a little disappointed that body structure in the creature phase of Spore doesn't really seem to matter that much, nor does the relative placement of, say, defense mechanisms. Practically speaking the design doesn't matter much as the accumulation of parts.

But then, I guess my Civ II technique of winning almost every land war by building railroads and attacking each enemy city in turn with a multi-stacked unit of low level troops also did not correspond to any kind of realistic military strategy, either.
posted by Wavelet at 4:05 PM on September 8, 2008


Wavelet, yeah I noticed that in the game. Shame, that'd really rock
posted by Hands of Manos at 4:17 PM on September 8, 2008


Within a month he was mayor and had remodeled his apartment into a luxurious mansion. In the meanwhile, I was still broke and jobless.

It's a bitch when your artificial self is frolicking in the hot tub with a couple of babes, while your real life self watches on, jar of vaseline at the ready in the hope of getting some voyeuristic thrills by imagining your computer monitor is connected to a real CCTV camera as you watch the poorly drawn cartoon version of yourself giggling under the blankets.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:51 PM on September 8, 2008


'moonMan registered the game, and I've made a bunch of creatures, though I can't figure out how to make my own account. Our collective efforts are under the name "nunoman."

I had no trouble making friends as an herbivore. It's all about choosing the evolutionary "equipment" for charming and dancing. My problem was not getting eaten by things bigger and tougher than me. Which was like, everything.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 5:00 PM on September 8, 2008


briank

But I won't have my copy until next week, so don't look for anything from me for a few days.
posted by briank at 5:21 PM on September 8, 2008


WolfDaddy here, WolfDaddy there, WolfDaddy everywhere, like Savoir Faire!
posted by WolfDaddy at 5:47 PM on September 8, 2008


Some people know me as "Cooter."
posted by Ida Hitit at 5:51 PM on September 8, 2008


Some people know me as "Cooter."

Talk about yer intriguing first-ever comments!

"Grobstein", but my copy doesn't get here till Wednesday.
posted by grobstein at 6:56 PM on September 8, 2008


arcticwoman
posted by arcticwoman at 7:10 PM on September 8, 2008


mathowie
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:22 PM on September 8, 2008 [1 favorite]


i kid; i don't play computer games at all
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:23 PM on September 8, 2008


My laptop's crappy graphics card can't even run the creature creator, let alone the game. *grumbles* I am not thrilled about the idea of SecuROM either.

What Plutor said - post your names on the Wiki.
posted by IndigoRain at 8:22 PM on September 8, 2008


Nightchrome

I haven't made a whole lot of stuff yet, because the space stage has completely sucked me in and will not let me go until I own every star in my arm of the galaxy. I'm gonna be at this awhile.
posted by nightchrome at 10:19 PM on September 8, 2008


Ok got it. I am Grither. And....my computer has this problem where it randomly powers down. Not shuts down, just....woomph, and the power is off. So....until I get a better PC, I might not be getting too far in the game. Sigh.
posted by Grither at 5:08 AM on September 9, 2008


What Plutor said - post your names on the Wiki.
posted by IndigoRain

I don't see a Spore section? I just created an account there to add my username, but nothing is there? Do I have to create a Spore section? I'm kind of bad at this. Though I did manage to add my name to the MONSTROUSLY HUGE PSN list.
posted by Grither at 5:15 AM on September 9, 2008


I was going to avoid picking up Spore due to severe work related time constraints. In consideration of yesterday's sudden, unexpected (and now serendipitous) layoff, I'll be picking it up as soon as I get my unemployed ass over to GameStop. I'll be in as "zerokey".
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 5:47 AM on September 9, 2008 [1 favorite]


Anyone have any hints as how best to tweak my Mac and game settings for optimal play? I've had to turn down a bunch of game settings, but suspect there's something on the Mac end I can do.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:58 AM on September 9, 2008


username: HappyScrappy
posted by Koko at 6:44 AM on September 9, 2008


Thanks jragon!
posted by Grither at 6:51 AM on September 9, 2008


DWRoelands
posted by DWRoelands at 8:22 AM on September 9, 2008


SpiderFarmer

My 5 year old really loves Spore...I'm finding it a lot less awesome than I expected, but I think that's primarily a result of all the prelauch propaganda. It's cool and all, but I dunno...I'm kinda disappointed.

The DRM is really the suck too.
posted by dejah420 at 3:20 PM on September 9, 2008


cabingirl
posted by cabingirl at 8:21 AM on September 10, 2008


thegreatbigmulp

For some reason, there's only one creature up on my Spore page. I have definitely made more than that.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 11:17 AM on September 10, 2008


mrbigmuscles
posted by R_Nebblesworth at 12:49 PM on September 10, 2008


BitterOldPunk.

Just got the game tonight and am in the tribal stage. The control scheme is a fucking nightmare. Cell stage and critter stage were pretty fun, but the tribal stage is annoying me. May skip straight to space.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 1:59 AM on September 11, 2008


I also got very frustrated with the controls on the tribal stage, BitterOldPunk. It took me like 15 minutes to realize they'd switched the actions from the left to the right mouse button.

Even later on, I could hardly ever find these damned gifts people kept bringing me, probably because they'd always show up while I'm in the middle of befriending some other tribe.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 12:12 PM on September 11, 2008


Let me amplify the request for any Mac performance tips. Also, tips for playing with single-button mouse. (Spore doesn't seem to be reading my CTRL+clicks as right-clicks.)
posted by grobstein at 1:15 PM on September 11, 2008


grobstein: If it's a Mighty Mouse, Apple Menu-->System Preferences-->Keyboard & Mouse-->Mouse will get you to a diagram where you can assign the right side as a secondary button.

The more I play the tribal stage, the more I LOATHE the control scheme. How can they spend all this time and money making an innovative game and then fail so miserably to solve a problem that second-rate game designers conquered years ago?
posted by BitterOldPunk at 1:36 PM on September 11, 2008


I just got through tribal today. Yes. The controls sucked, especially considering that I'm playing on my MBP. I wound up grabbing my corded 2 button mouse. It made things MUCH easier.

grobstein: I'm on a 1st gen MBP(CoreDuo) w/ 2gb. I dropped all visual effects to Low and pushed resolution all the way up (1680x1050) and it's smooth as silk, and still looks pretty pretty.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 1:44 PM on September 11, 2008


mensrea
posted by toomuchpete at 7:30 PM on September 11, 2008


Oh yeah, me too with the Tribal. Yikes. I got to that level, couldn't figure it out. Quit and restarted. Twice. Ugh. The controls are weird, and do I really have to tell each dude when to eat? Every time? They can't just eat when they're hungry?
posted by arcticwoman at 8:37 PM on September 11, 2008


DarkLordSeitan
posted by mkultra at 6:53 AM on September 12, 2008


karellen08
posted by baphomet at 11:30 AM on September 14, 2008


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