[Game Review] Jurassic World Evolution

If the video game canon was a library, deep within the section dedicated to cult games that never quite made the leap to classic, beside dusty games mostly forgotten and full of scrawled notes in the margins left by the aspiring few who had more passion than a sense of tempered craft, would sit Jurassic Park Operation Genesis.  JPOG was a theme park simulator released in 2003, and I, as well as a handful of others, picked it up almost immediately.  The idea of running your own Jurassic Park was something of a dream of mine ever since I saw the original film when I was, honestly, far too young to be watching it.  Zoo Tycoon, another cult game but one that may have breached some sort of "cult classic" status at this point (and one in outdated limbo as the game is notoriously difficult to run on modern machines) had an expansion that allowed for dinosaurs in your park.  To date, I would still say that that expansion is probably the best overall game that is closest to the Jurassic Park ethos, even if it isn't the most fun to play.  But it still wasn't Jurassic Park, it didn't have similar iconic designs, such as the T-Rex's overbite, nor did it have that style so unique to the franchise.  JPOG, then, felt like a promise finally kept, one of interacting with this excellent idea proposed by the films but always adjacent to the games world without ever being fully realized.

It is controversial to say, but I do not think that Jurassic Park Operation Genesis comes particularly close to "cult classic" status.  As much as I love it, the game was heavily flawed, and despite an absurdly committed mod scene for the age and lack of popularity of the game, it remains flawed even with a slew of tweaks.  The issue with JPOG is that, at its core, it was a poor park simulator.  Visitors could be buggy with their satisfaction levels, you were given extreme limitations on what can be placed in your park and how many (the latter of which, admittedly, could be modded out), and the game's midpoint always resulted in you waiting for things to happen rather than engaging with any of its systems.  A simulator of this type, where you are overlooking a theme park, a city, or some other corporate entity with guests or consumers, has to balance out the business with the creative.  The business has to be the conflict, of balancing profits and expenditures with safety measures, with cleanliness, and with visitor satisfaction so you can then use the tools to create something fun and unique.  The way in which you balance these two is usually where the fun comes from.  Games such as City Skylines, Roller Coaster Tycoon, or Sim City wouldn't be nearly as great as they are without deftly riding this razors edge between creativity and work.  Holding together these complex systems and utilizing their successes for your own gain is the fun.  For JPOG, the systems are all easily gamed or ignored, and getting to a 5-star rating for your park is a matter of simple, unavoidable growth rather than careful planning.  Planning, outside of where you put your dinosaur pens and where you lay your paths, is virtually nonexistent.  There are so few things to place that you cannot truly get creative with it.  What JPOG did well, however, was create a game that truly felt like it was within the Jurassic Park franchise.  It was what it said it was, to a degree, and the designs were mostly correct to at least one of the films' dinosaur depictions (except: what the fuck is with these raptors?).

The absurd legendary status of Jurassic Park Operation Genesis hangs over everything in Jurassic World Evolution.  In the most literal sense, JWE is JPOG's successor.  The primary loop to just about everything is the same.  Both games require you to hire expeditions to dig up dinosaur bones for you to research their genome.  Over 50% genome means they are viable to clone, but the lower the genome the greater the chance that the incubation process will fail.  Getting as a high a genome as possible both increases the chance of a successful incubation and increases the lifespan of your dinosaurs.  Both games likewise have viewing platforms, fence vents for viewing, and an in-paddock ride that lets you get close to the dinosaurs.  You also get to take pictures of the dinosaurs for some extra cash, and can fly a helicopter to knock dinos out with a tranquilizer dart.  You can say this all sounds pretty basic, but virtually none of this is shown in the films, and so is unique to the "park sim" side of the Jurassic Park canon.  The real difference between the games comes from the mission system and the park layout.

One of the most lauded aspects of Operation Genesis by fans was its generated island.  Each game of JPOG was essentially a sandbox game, where your only goal was to get a 5-star rating on your park.  It felt like a skirmish, so when it came to choosing where you were making your park, it made sense to give you control over your island as well.  JWE has come under considerable criticism for not allowing generated park maps, rather requiring you to choose one of their six or so (depending on DLC) parks and working within those confines.  As nice as it would be to somewhat generate my own park, JPOG's choice to do so really added very little.  You could choose how big your island was, which was never all that big in the first place (and certainly not as big as the biggest park in JWE), and you could choose the amount of mountain terrain or rivers were present, which would either hinder your development or provide easy water for your dinos.  The generation in JPOG was simple at best, and hardly even counts as a feature when you measure what little difference it made to your parks.  All that said, I don't necessarily like how this was executed in JWE.

Evolution has several park layouts, and nearly every one of them has choke points where a path can be placed, but little else.  Often times, the maps feel like thin corridors with pockets of open land branching off like buds on the stalk of a plant.  The game is broadcasting to you where you should put your dino pens, but this is really only a suggestion.  One creative alternative I've found is eliminating the paths in these choke points and instead making them pens themselves.  You can use a monorail to traverse over them, and essentially have pockets of visitor areas as well as dinosaur pens.  This is pretty much telegraphed to you on the Isla Sorna map, which consists of three large pockets connected by three extremely narrow choke points in a circle.  There are multiple ways you could go about laying out this park if you so wanted, but by far the easiest is to create a little visitor area in each of the pockets, and tie them together with a monorail.  The restrictions given to you, despite looking like park layout has been decided for you, do actually have quite a bit of flexibility to them so long as you remain creative with your execution, and so long as you largely ignore most of what the game is telegraphing to you with its pre-laid paths at an island's start.  All of this said, several of the parks are still far too small for use.  The infamous Isla Pena is a considerable challenge, and by far the hardest in the game.  It is absolutely tiny, giving you extreme limitations in how you can approach it.  The island works best in the campaign, as a way of forcing you to consider some aspects of the game you may have otherwise ignored until now, such as dinosaur rating (which has to do with not only the species, but also the number of dinosaurs it has killed and its genetic modifications, which we will get to shortly).  It makes you pay attention to the systems you've learned about thus far in a way in which you must contend with them now, or otherwise fail.  This would be all great if it weren't for the fact this island also has the worst storms of any island, making it extremely dangerous as storms usually set aggressive animals, such as the Velociraptor, into a tizzy where it breaks your fences and hunts down guests.  The game has a limited choice of park layouts as it is, and this one only really has one use as there is virtually no reason to come back to it after the campaign except for a challenge that, honestly, you already accomplished anyway.  The other smaller parks likewise limit creativity after a spell, and having a generatible map would go a long way in remedying this limitation.

 JWE does one thing particularly right and far better than in JPOG, and that is the dinosaurs themselves.  All of the dinosaurs look just like they do in the movies, and their presentation is damn near perfect.  Their movements and sounds all parse correctly, and watching a T-Rex's leg muscles jiggle as it stomps around looking for food is not only impressive in its detail, but intimidating.  When creating these dinosaurs, you are given the option to modify their genome for varying effects.  This can be as simple as modifying their color pallet (which was a fun way to tell the difference between my Rexes on Isla Sorna), or as complex as modifying their lifespan, health, and attack stats.  Making highly aggressive dinosaurs will, obviously, make them more likely to break out or kill other dinosaurs in their pen.  Dinosaurs with a storied history, however, will also attract more guests and increase your dinosaur rating, so there is some incentive to have a chaotic monster so long as you can justify the labor needed to keep it in check.  Modifying the genome, however, comes at the cost of lowering its incubation success rate.  This is a great risk and reward, as you could be blowing $2mil on a T-Rex that might just die before it matures, but on the other hand could be a powerful attraction.  I didn't play around with this feature much until I got to Isla Sorna, where my dinosaurs were essentially free to roam around wherever they pleased, and having a big bad dinosaur became a lot more fun.

Dinosaurs aren't just attractions, however.  There are basic maintenance chores such as refilling their feeders or curing them of diseases, but by far the most "management" this game gets is in taking care of the dinosaurs' happiness.  Each dinosaur has a different threshold of how many trees, how much grass, and how many other dinosaurs it wants in its enclosures.  I can't be totally sure, but based on my experiments on Isla Sorna, it seemed that the dinosaur threshold had more to do with their proximity to these things than what was exclusively locked in with them.  Dinosaurs would feel there were too many trees in a wooded area of the map, but once they walked over to the plains they were fine.  Likewise with the social breeds, such as Velociraptor, who would be happy in proximity with their pack, but once they strayed too far would become agitated.  Managing their happiness, and learning which dinosaurs would mix (big carnivores could mix with long-necked herbivores, for instance, as could anything big with any small carnivore, except maybe the T-Rex and the Indominous Rex) was a great deal of fun going through the campaign and sandbox modes.

The same cannot be said, however, for the mission system.  In JPOG, you got emails telling you of dissatisfaction so you could better tailor your park to increase its rating, or otherwise tell you when something horrible was breaking out.  JWE retains the warnings, but instead of emails you will often receive missions.  There are three departments to your park: the entertainment division, the scientific division, and the security division.  Each will vie for your attention, and ask you to accomplish tasks for them for a hefty reward.  If you let one of their reputations drop below a certain threshold, they will attempt to sabotage your park, usually by turning off one or more of your power systems, which can be easily fixed (although one sabotage, where all the gates to all of your pens open at once, is by far and away the most destructive).  From a gameplay standpoint, the point is to encourage good practices when you aren't meeting basic needs for your park (such as having good shelter coverage or applying upgrades to your ranger station or ACU), and then rewarding you with cash to give you an extra leg up once you've done so.  The issue here comes in three parts.

Firstly, the missions are almost always trite.  They are condescending to you if you know what you are doing, and relieving consequences to those who do not.  The former I can mostly deal with, as I understand you need to get new players up to speed, and it did get me to realize a few mechanics I wasn't venturing to explore on my own.  The latter, however, becomes intrusive if you know what you are doing.  The issue comes mostly from the hefty money reward you get for accomplishing simple tasks.  It is nearly impossible to lose money at this game, making the business side of this management sim essentially moot.  When first starting a park, it is potentially possible for you to have lost enough money you can't come back from it, such as incubating a T-Rex as your first dinosaur but then having the incubation fail before putting in anything that could net you money.  But most fuck ups result in you having to wait a long time until you can place something like a restaurant or a new dinosaur attraction in order to increase profits.  Missions, for all they do fail at, at the very least always require you to spend money, so having a certain nest egg or a consistently viable stream of income is required to take advantage of them.  Not being in this position, however, is a rarity.  It was incredibly easy to be in the tens-of-millions of dollars before hitting 3-stars, essentially making the 5-star rating either a waiting game or a game of Tetris, as I tried to fit all of my visitor amenities together in such a small space.

Secondly, the missions are given by the heads of their individual departments, and they are all atrocious.  They bemoan the importance of these contracts, the greatness of the money you will receive ("You'd be insane to turn this down!"), and how challenging accomplishing them was for you, when in reality all you had to do was place something down you'd forgotten because it was making no impact on the millions upon millions you were accruing.  The mission heads will act equal parts smug as they are amazed, and the whole presentation is incredibly hokey.  If you were looking for a realistic sim, you are sincerely out of luck as any amount of immersion you could get from this game is immediately dashed once anyone starts talking.  They aren't the only ones who do, either.  Jeff Goldblum returns as Dr. Ian Malcolm, but the writing is an extreme caricature.  Nevermind the fact that his return to Jurassic Park, let alone his employment is itself ridiculous, the fact all he does is talk down about the different division heads makes his inclusion virtually useless outside of being able to claim on advertisements that he is indeed in the game.  If you buy the Return to Jurassic Park DLC, this issue is compounded as all the regulars from the original Jurassic Park such as Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler (with horrible impressions as their voices) try desperately to justify why they would ever think of working for the traumatizing park in the first place.  Underneath all of these people is the lawyer character whose name I forget.  He oversees Jurassic World, and is apparently your boss, and acts as goofily ignorant as much as he talks about money, which is to say all the time.  The game has a gross pro-capitalist bend to it, something that all sims of this nature technically do, but usually through an admiration of the systems in place and how to utilize them, not usually in the deification of money.  I consider all of this to be a sincere criticism, but one with the caveat that it's all hokey.  It isn't meant to be serious, but it feels detrimental to my immersion nonetheless.  

Thirdly but certainly not least so, is that the missions themselves often ask you to do things that are so apparently out of character, that it increases the hokey-ness mentioned above.  The security division, in particular, is the worst at this.  At least once he asks you to release a dinosaur into the park to see how well you handle a disaster.  From a gameplay standpoint, okay this makes sense.  I'm learning how to re-contain a dinosaur that has escaped its enclosure, but from an immersive standpoint it is beyond ridiculous.  The things missions ask you to do has little if any positive contribution to a consistent ludonarritive, rather chipping away from it at every popup that rudely interrupts whatever task you are on at the time.  This becomes particularly annoying as the game does not feature an explicit pause button.  Time is consistent throughout, no speeding up or slowing down or stopping entirely to better make decisions.  You react now, or you wait until you can.  This isn't all that crazy for a sim game, but it is always something that annoys me.  The game will occasionally pause the action if, for example, one of your big five missions pops up (one for each department on each of the five main islands), but that is all you get.  These five missions are generally multi-step and more difficult to accomplish, and usually gate some particularly useful unlock.

The differences between Jurassic Park Operation Genesis and Jurassic World Evolution are almost along the avenues of taste rather than quality.  If I had to pick one, Jurassic World would probably win for its superior look and more involved interaction with dinosaurs.  Jurassic World Evolution is more or less a broken sim, one sure to be fun to anyone who likes the movie(s) as much as I do, but for those not interested in the subject matter it may be a shallow bore full of annoyances and little creative output.  The recent release of Planet Zoo by the same developer looks to be far more the management sim than this is, and it may be until that game acquires a big enough modding community before the true blue sim of my dreams becomes a reality.  Until then, I'm happy enough with my little box of fleas, imagining the sim that could have been.



6.5

[Game Review] Turok: Dinosaur Hunter

The First Person Shooter genre on consoles was relegated to PC ports by early 1997 for the most part.  Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were ported to the SNES, and the former was finding ports of uneven quality on just about every piece of 3D or 3D-adjacent hardware out there, such as the Sega 32x, the Atari Jaguar, and, of course, the original Playstation.  With the exception of Alien vs Predator (not the PC version, which is altogether different) on the Atari Jaguar and Alien Trilogy on the Playstation, original FPS games were scant on consoles.  In general terms, the FPS historically finds its footing on consoles with the release of Rare's Goldeneye in late 1997, but just a few months ahead of that game's landmark release was an oddly overlooked, by historical standards, shooter called Turok: Dinosaur Hunter by Iguana Entertainment and published by Acclaim.

Turok got its start as a comic book series originally released on Dell Comics in the 50s, but was later revived by Valiant comics in 1993.  Acclaim was going through changes at the time where it was trying to expand its game production by licensing game characters through comics, shows, and anything else it could to expand profits.  With this intention they bought Valiant comics for the IPs and Iguana Entertainment in order to keep game production in house.  They showed Iguana Entertainment the IPs they acquired from Valiant that could potentially be turned into a new game, and Iguana found Turok to be the most appealing.

Iguana envisioned Turok as something like Tomb Raider, which was eating up sales and press at the time, but on the Nintendo 64, whose cartridge based technology would allow for faster load times for wide areas.  They didn't want to ape Tomb Raider outright, but rather use its sense of exploration and locale as inspiration for what Turok could become.  They played around with the idea of a third person view before settling on first person because they thought it would show off the 3D possibilities of the Nintendo 64 the best.  This particular trajectory is important, because in a lot of ways, while Turok is most definitely a shooter, the game's ethos doesn't feel all that shooter-y.

Turok tasks the player with first running and gunning their way through a level that ends in a hub of other levels.  Gaining access to these levels requires you to collect keys in each of the levels.  The way these keys are laid out is bizarre for a shooter.  FPS games at the time almost always used a key-and-door system for progression within a level, but that was generally in order to unlock the direct progressive path.  For Turok, nearly all of the keys are hidden off the beaten path, usually shown to the player up on a cliff-side out of reach, but sometimes hidden deep within caves or areas completely impossible to see from any other vantage point.  Turok wanted you to explore,to collect ammo and newer guns and to find secrets.  The required path now required exploration and thorough play, which made it far more akin to Super Mario 64 than you would expect on the outset.  While your interaction with this world is primarily like that of a shooter, your objective follows that of a platformer, for better or for worse.

Jumping puzzles start popping up around level 3 in Turok, and while they can be easily adjusted to over time, they never feel quite that good.  First person view doesn't give you a good sense of trajectory, limiting your view far too much for tight jumps to feel confident.  To make matters worse, momentum is entirely dictated by you holding the direction down.  That is, if you let go of forward mid-jump, you will stop dead and fall like a rock straight down.  It is contrary to just about every platformer you will ever play, especially Super Mario 64 which is notably floaty.

Platforming aside, the shooting feels rather good for the time.  Shotguns have kick to them (and can snipe enemies across the map somehow), explosive weapons shoot enemies into the air (and even topple some trees, which is impressive for '97), and there is a general one-man-army feel to it akin to that of arena shooters.  Turok most certainly fits most snugly in the Arena Shooter genre, but it isn't a perfect fit because of its copious and pace-slowing platforming sections.  Fleeting impressions of Serious Sam came to mind while playing Turok, although I wouldn't outright say they feel exactly the same (and I am too far out from the last time I played Serious Sam to make any kind of accurate comparison, but the impression was there nonetheless, and often).  Being overwhelmed by enemies is normal, and due to high respawn times for a lot of areas, you won't be rid of them until you've spent a mild fortune on ammunition.  This can be a boon or detriment to your fun with the game.  Keeping mobile is paramount to not only surviving, but also doing well throughout the game.  Nothing in Turok ever really stumped like how, say, Quake could.  Turok's difficulty is medium at best, as his weaponry and mobility is far too powerful to really edge you particularly close to a game over.  If the game didn't limit your lives to 9, there is no telling what number I would have racked up by the end.

The closed combat arenas that make up a bulk of Quake's campaign aren't usually present in much of Turok, instead allowing for large, sprawling, often labyrinthine levels that are easy to get lost in, and not in a good way.  The recent HD port of the game added a feature to see a wire map overlay at the hit of the button much like Doom, and without it a couple of the levels in Turok would be a much more frustrating affair.  Blurry textures, which were good at the time and roughly the peak the Nintendo 64 could output, and repeating models for ruins and bridges don't help matters, but it also comes with the territory of late 90s games.  Level design on a whole is "okay" at best and "kitchen sink" at worst.  The levels sprawling nature wouldn't be so bad if their design seemed to have more structure to it.  And to be fair, their earlier levels did.  The first level gets you accustomed to shooting, the second level gets you accustomed to the "hidden" keys motif, and the third level gives you practice and perspective on platforming tasks that will pop up later.  The early parts of Turok are well done in teaching you the principal challenges you will be overcoming in increasing difficulty over the course of the campaign, but after a few introductory levels, the game seems to focus far more on width than depth.  Quake is still praised for its incredible level design, where it could create labyrinthine levels but subtly code the environment to make sure the player was always on top of where they were (this wasn't always the case in Quake as some would have you believe, but it was far more than it wasn't).  Turok's later levels have long snaking paths leading to dead ends, or even wrapping back around to where you started.  I imagine the reasoning for the complex design was to lengthen gameplay, since going back and looking for missing keys in order to unlock further levels was more than likely to be the case if you were a kid playing this game.  Although, if that were true, I'm not sure this game should be designed with a kid in mind.

Turok from the outside looks rather cartoonish, with bright colors and green fauna giving way to grey temples and colorful lasers from alien enemies (yeah, there are aliens in this game - more of them than there are dinosaurs, as a matter of fact).  But Turok also boasts a near unprecedented amount of violence for Nintendo's new console.  Killing enemies could have them fall backwards, or clutch their throat as blood spouts from the (implied) wound, and an explosive can burst enemies into bits all over the ground.  By today's standards it is certainly mild, but for '97 it was incredibly violent.  The Playstation was already well into making a reputation for itself as the more adult platform for games, and while Turok certainly doesn't scream adult, it was as violent as anything on Sony's machine.  Iguana Entertainment even said they were worried about what Nintendo were going to think, expecting push back and censoring before they went gold, but Nintendo didn't give them much of anything in the way of restraint.  So bloody, violent Turok remained.

Turok was a success upon release, and rightly so.  The game boasted some of the best shooter mechanics on a console, and the fact it was an original title was already giving credence to the idea of the console shooter being not only feasible, but profitable.  Goldeneye would come out in only a few months time and cement that claim, as would a critically acclaimed (and cult favorite) sequel to Turok a year later.  The Turok series would unfortunately be short lived, dwindling sales across the four games on Nintendo 64, and failing outright on the PS2 before being remade in 2008 for the 7th generation of consoles and not fairing much better.  Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was proof the genre could work on consoles, and is unique in its approach to the FPS by integrating collect-a-thon mechanics into its gameplay.  There's a roughness to the game overall that can wear down the player playing today, but its only a slight drag against the current of gun-popping, side-jumping, dino-bloodying fun that Turok has to offer.          



7.5

[Game Review] Spore

Will Wright had several classics under his belt and tremendous clout in the games industry when he unveiled Spore in 2005.  While the Sim series of games had certainly had some rough, or, at best, eclectic titles under its moniker by this point, what permeated the gaming consciousness was the classics.  Sim City and Sim City 2000 were mega hits, and their follow up, The Sims, was the best selling game of all time.  Only a year after the release of The Sims 2, it looked like Will Wright and co. at Maxis were about to release another game changer: a game where you get to evolve an organism from single-cell to galactic colonizer.  Admirably dubbed "Sim Everything" by fans, the hype for Spore was intense.  Early showings of the game showed a rather robust and easy-to-use creature creator that promised to be inspired by real biology.  The game boasted about its educational uses, its creative freedom, and its new(ish) sense of multiplayer interaction, where your creations and those of everyone registered with EA would be automatically loaded into every new world, allowing community creation to fill out your game.  Stats could be read online to see how well your species fared in other players' games, and you could download other creators' creatures to toy with, play as, or place within your world.  Likewise, the game promised to use copious amounts of procedural generation, an exciting concept in games at the time.  The promise for Spore, in retrospect, was obviously too good to be true.  Despite nearly a decade of being spurned by the silver-tongued promises from the likes of Peter Molyneux, the gaming public was ready to trust Will Wright at his word, even if some doubts hung lightly in the air, dissipating almost as soon as their utterances ceased.  Spore was going to be a Big Deal, and everyone thirsted for every drip of news.

But the news wasn't always good.  The different "phases" of the game took multiple shapes over the years.  Phases would be deleted outright before release, such as the water stage between cellular life and the creature stage on land.  Initially, the single-cell phase looked far more realistic, but by the latter half of its pre-release ramp up, it looked rather cutesy, showcasing large human eyes on your microbial life and softer curves to its shape.  Incrementally over time the game was looking less and less like the realistic "Sim Everything" that had sold everyone at early showings, and more like a cartoony amalgamation of those ideas, something more akin to the The Sims.  This wasn't the worst news, but it was certainly a dampener in hype to some degree.  Still, Spore found itself among many players' most anticipated titles, and when Maxis revealed they would be releasing a pay demo - the entire Creature Creator, so players could get a head start making stuff and uploading them to EA's servers for play upon release - people were a lot more thrilled than you would expect with our modern disposition on the gaming industry.  The game was no longer the potentially educational life simulator, but surely it still had that goofy, fantasy fulfillment simulation character that The Sims had.

Well, sort of.  Spore doesn't so much skirt over the realistic angle as it does entirely throw it out the window and down the fire escape.  Creatures created in Spore's engine have a Jim Henson like quality to them, where their spines can't seem to adjust their weight, preferring instead to flail their extenuating bits around wildly as the game's odd physics engine does, honestly, whatever the hell it wants.  Eyes bulge off of cheap looking clay bodies.  Limited options in limbs, feet/hooves, hands/claws, and odd articles of individualism such as feathers, horns, or weird, alien feelers give a somewhat samey feel to a lot of what you are going to make at first.  Goofy it is, but there is a permeating feeling that maybe this is all a bit too goofy, that it may be getting in the way of your creativity by limiting the character you're wishing to give your odd abomination (making something that looks remotely natural in this game is a form of alchemy -- certainly possible, as I've seen evidence of it, but at the cost of seriously abusing the creator to obey aesthetic over stats, an issue we will get to later).  Later content packs like the Creepy and Cute pack offer a little more in the menacing monster category, but also double down on the cartoonish abandonment of realism.

Realism however, as most artistic types will tell you, really isn't all that important.  The truth of the matter is that, although the creature creator is certainly limiting in character, it is a hell of a lot of fun to use.  Shaping the bodies like clay, elongating the spine for a tail or neck or adding fat in odd places is like shaping your canvas.  Mouths don't have to go in  a natural place, nor does there have to be one.  Put a herbivore mouth on the tail (how about something with a snout?) and a carnivorous mouth on the stomach (what about the mouth of a tapeworm?).  Horns can be placed on the knees, but you can bend them back in a halo around the animal's mid-drift.  Objects require symmetry in Spore, meaning if you place a mouth away from the longitudinal center, it will mirror itself on the other side of this vertical equator.  You could build a neck and place a mouth on either side of it, rather than the end.  This likewise works for eyes, so placing one in the center is viable.  You can increase the size of anything added to the body by scrolling the mouse wheel, but I found most useful shrinking things down.  Noticeable features on an animal are often rather small in relation to its size, and so making a less goofy looking creature sometimes comes down to shrinking the eyes to a more realistic look.  But just as much fun can come out of the opposite, giving your dinosaur looking dude a massive head with even bigger eyes, and a tiny little body.

The creature creator is surprisingly easy to use, even if some of its functionality (such as positioning the arms and legs) seem to disagree with the 3D nature of the creature model.  At best, positioning your creatures arms is annoying, and at worst you'll give up and exclaim "fine, hold out your arms like a crazy person, see if I care".  Positioning the arms and legs doesn't allow you to move the camera around the model, which means your two axis of movement -- up and down, left and right -- are incredibly misleading, as you unknowingly move them on the third axis you have no control over.  Thus, fine tuning your adjustments has you making moves from one angle, turning the model, making adjustments from another angle, then turning the model back to see you've gotten closer to what you intended, but in some ways also over corrected on the absent axis from the last position.  It is certainly small potatoes as far as the creator's overall quality is, but something that is difficult to overlook after playing around with it for anything more than an hour.

The creature creator is by far and away Spore's greatest accomplishment, and it is unfortunate that the game seems to get in the way of you using it in any sort of fulfilling way.  Spore's structure has you passing through five stages or phases to beat the game.  The cellular stage is a 2D collect-a-thon, where you seek out food (plantlife if you chose herbivore, other creatures if you chose carnivore) until you've collected enough to evolve to the next stage.  Eating in the cellular stage gains you DNA points that you can spend on new features to add to your creature.  Creature parts can be collected by picking up random pieces of asteroid in the water.  Evolving to the next stage gets you to the creature stage, where you are tasked with either friending other creatures or hunting a bunch of them down in order to gain DNA points.  Either way you go about it, you're going to have something of a bad time.  Friending people amounts to you copying one of four friendly actions after your would-be-friends do it, virtually "Simon Says" with World of Warcraft type keyboard inputs and controls.  If you want to hunt others down, not only does it take far longer to do, but gameplay amounts to an extremely simplified MMO control scheme, tapping abilities and waiting for them to cool down.  Your ability to perform friendly actions or attacks are determined by your creature parts equipped, which is were the game really restricts you.  It turns out your creativity isn't really worth that much if it means you cant do a good enough dance move to befriend your neighbors and progress.  Granted, one could look at this as living with the consequences of your creativity, and attempting to force you to problem solve within your own limitations, but that would require a much more robust game.

Spore, if it is anything at all, is simple.  Your ability to choose at any point of the game almost always rides along the binary option, with a third choice if you squint by choosing an even amount of both options allowed of you.  Do you hunt or befriend?  Do you attack or convert?  Do you eat meat or plants?  Granted, in some stages, that third option is far wider than others, but the game scarcely gets any more complicated than that.  In the creature stage, you either build your creature optimally, attempting to be creative with a mechanically limited pool of options (which, credit to the creature creator, is still at least some fun), or you say "fuck it" and build what you want and hope its enough to do either of your options for progression.

This simplicity permeates the next two stages as well.  The tribal stage morphs the game into a RTS, only one of very few options.  You have six or so slots for buildings in your tribe, each able to house one of three types of musical buildings (all required for the "conversion" victory), one of three weapon buildings (same for "war" victory), and one or two for economic stuff such as gathering.  You must gather food as your resource, and you must convert or dominate several other cultures nearby in order to proceed to the next stage.  You can get an economic victory as well by giving gifts until everyone likes you enough, which will gain you the economic society in the next stage, but is even simpler than the other two options.  Conquest is as it is in any RTS at its most basic level: click the enemy and watch them fight.  To convert other tribes to your religion and attain the "conversion" victory, you will need to do the Simon Says bit from earlier once again, only this time making sure you play the correct instruments.  The one complication added to this stage is that you need to equip gathering equipment, weapons, or musical instruments in order to use them, adding a mild level of annoying maintenance (there is one hot key for selecting units, and it is to select them all; ctrl+click will also work, however, making things a little easier, but not any more appealing).

Once you've dealt with enough societies, you go to the civilization phase, which has you adding buildings to your newly found city to increase productivity and happiness in your citizens (of which there is a whopping three kinds), and your goal has become either conquest every city on the planet, convert them to your religion, or buy them outright.  Your options on how you can approach this section of the game are entirely dependent on how you finished the last stage.  If you were economic, you are now an economic society.  If you were war hungry, you are a war-like society, etc.  When you gain a new city, you are given the option to retain that city's original "type" or convert to yours, so your options are still sort of open, but rely heavily on RNG as to how the other societies generated in.

Once done with that, you enter the galactic phase, which is by far and away the largest.  The galactic phase seems to be endless, or nearly so.  You have a sort of goal in finding the center of the universe, if you can be bothered, but along the way you will colonize planets, do quests for other nations, and generally run amok between the stars.  This part is kind of cool, being able to fly over other planets -- including your own, looking down at those shallow waters you once waded in forever ago from your interstellar ship that now grants you access to the entire cosmos -- and do simple, chore-like tasks on different planets, but hardly makes for a full-bodied gaming experience. 


Spore's biggest failures are that of design, and can be oft referenced as warning or argument for temperance whenever anyone begins spouting too loudly about threading genres together.  Spore wanted to be everything in one, and ended up as basic mechanics bridging disparate parts that wanted so heartily to be something whole.  It was ambitious, it was an exciting idea, and the glints here and there of true inspiration leave a sense of longing for what could of been, even though I'm not really sure it could have been anything.  From a design perspective, the concept just doesn't really work.  As a Europa Universalis type strategy game, I could imagine, but as a constantly morphing odyssey of genres as scope dictates it will always be clumsy in execution.  The ghost of what Spore was supposed to be was simply an idea that could never exist precisely on their level, and that is okay.  Sometimes I look at how Crusader Kings II can be imported into Europa Universalis IV and I think, "yeah, if someone made a full-fledged game for each stage, and let you import up, this could work", but the practicality of that is nigh impossible.  The scope of skills required to develop not just multiple games, but games that span complex genres that often take some specialization in means that a unifying vision would be difficult at best to maintain.  Add to that 3D models of custom creatures that can be imported up games when these games would necessitate over a decade's worth of development and, thusly, over a decade's worth of technological advancements, and what you have is something attractive, sure, but ultimately worthy only of a forlorn sigh.   

Spore is most certainly a failure on multiple promises, but that can be lived with.  Games like Fable showed that, even through disappointment, good games could shine through and find a substantial player base.  The issue is that Spore isn't really a good game.  My dirty secret is that, even though I wholeheartedly see Spore as a sub-par game, I can't help but love the thing.  Spore has a certain charm to it, shallow as it may be in that charm and in its mechanics.  It's a goofy romp that asks creativity of you, even if it doesn't outright encourage it.  Seeing your odd creations come to puppet-like life before your eyes is usually a laugh, and I can't help but find myself coming back to the thing once every couple of years.  Spore is eager for life, wishing to make the impossible possible, and wishing for play to make its systems whole.  You can't make it whole, but you'll at least admire it trying.



 6.5