« Spore Daily #79: Plantius Carnivorii
New Sporepedia now available »
04 09 2008

Spore Daily Competition Is Now Closed!

Posted by: Mythor in Site News

Are you new here? You may want to subscribe to the Spore Daily RSS feed to receive regular updates.

Sorry I’m a little late on the notification for everyone but to be clear - any “entries” submitted for the competition from here on in will definitely not be counted. You can still create something to match the theme, if you like, but you won’t be in the running to win a copy of the game.

For those of you who did enter, I have not yet decided who will win… And it may be a few hours until I can, since the Sporepedia is down right now for mysterious upgrades.

The winners will be announced later today, hopefully, both here on the site and via email to the winners, so stay tuned!

Social Bookmarking: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • bodytext
  • StumbleUpon
  • Propeller
  • Reddit
  • Facebook
  • del.icio.us
  • Google
  • Pownce
Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Site News.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


Note: Comments may not appear immediately due to server caching. Please allow a few minutes before resubmitting!

Viewing 9 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Have some fun playing your copy of spore too, I saw your creature for a little while that it appears you have been running through the creature stage. I am anxious to have mine soon too, but being in the US for whatever reason we have the last date of release, oh well.
    • ^
    • v
    Yep, I played it a little bit in the wee morning hours. Managed to get to the end of the Creature Stage but decided to stop before advancing to Tribal and get some sleep. :)
    Maybe some US stores will break the release date as well?
    • ^
    • v
    I'm not too sure that any stores will. My friend who works at blockbuster couldn't get Mercenaries II early even though they had it at the store he works at because there is apparently a $5,000 fine for breaking the embargo and letting it out early. My hope is that EA, who I ordered from, will send the game out soon because it won't arrive before until the 7th which has happened with other games before.
    • ^
    • v
    I had a chance to play though the game twice today and something about the feeling of spore just does not sit right with me. Though my play though, I found one common theme though all of the game. Fast and simple game play. I felt like the game did not go though enough testing and should have been improved more. It had the feeling of a beta test more than a polished game. I am really shocked to say this but I think this games release should have been held back to fix some / most of these issues and expand the game play. Without expanding the game play, spore feels cheap and rushed.

    The game starts off as cell which gets you to get used to the controls and it plays very nicely, but after a while I noticed that I was growing at a very fast rate, before I knew it I was out of the cell stage in 30 minuets. Personally I loved the cell stage and played it four more times though out the day but it felt like it was rushed and uncompleted.

    The next stage the same feeling crossed over. I was rushed though the stage hardly having time to collect parts and DNA when my nest moved twice and I did not have the chance to add members to my party.
    The way you attack is on a timer based cool-down system (Like rouges in WoW) and you only have four main attacks and four social abilities so if you are aggressive you find yourself bashing the button trying to keep the damage rolling while hardly able to keep up with the creatures dying. With the social path, its hard to figure out what they are asking you to do, but then you catch on that the song stays the same even if the animation changes.

    The stage ends and tell you to click on the time-line button to continue. You can still mate and pick up parts which is good because when I finished (even when I spend another two hours trying to find parts) I never had anywhere near enough parts to finish my creature. Now if you are a omnivore this can cause a problem, you want to stay in the middle of the time-line but you can no longer see if your swaying one way more than the other because you cannot click the time-line anymore to check.

    After completing your creature and moving to the tribe stage you start to notice the narrow feeling of the game. Yes you can fish, hunt, domesticate creatures and collect fruit. Domesticating creatures seem like an after thought. Eggs are just like any other reusable resource minus hunting.

    You either attack and kill a tribe or play the social game and make friends. After playing for a bit you start to really stock up on food and find yourself having nothing to spend your resources on and force yourself to finish the tribe stage quickly.

    The tribe turns into a city. Nothing expect your clothing carries over but the clothing can be changed in this place too and get upgraded to silly looking gear. Here we finally get our first glimpse of the music editor. It comes with no explanation on how to use it or even shows you that its there.

    This stage differs from the other stages. Where instead of having a awkward balance between aggressive and passive, there is a defined branch of choices. Economic (middle) Religion (Top) Military (bottom). Having only played Military and Economic I can say that Economic is easy if it works and Military is a lot of work but you can keep working at it and eventually win.

    First play though I ended tribe with Economic and was a bit slow to build up and so I did not produce a lot of spice. This made trying to made trade routes impossible and I was against a military nation which just attacked me and killed me. Economic units do not attack and only trade, so I was not able to do anything. Lucky for that play though I took over a military city early on and finished the level with ICBMs. The second time I played though everyone was friendly toward me and I took one city after the next and had enough money to buy out all the cities and give gifts to those who did not want to open trade routes.

    For space stage it felt like a mash of a bunch of stages and really felt like one of the worst stages. This was most likely due to the fact you felt like you were making very little headway with a lot of effort and constantly being interrupted to do something else without free time to wonder around or do something you needed to do.

    The game play in civ was good but still not without some faults. It was one of the more refined (along with cell) stages.
    CELL

    Pros - Cell
    Very fun to play and customize
    Here you get the feel of aggressive vs passive and it clearly makes a division

    Cons -Cell
    Too quick – Shame they did not extend the game, this could have been a whole game on its own
    Very fast – You often find yourself dying a lot from one to two hit kills
    Limited parts – It would be nice if they expended the parts like they did in creature stage with level of damage

    CREATURE

    Pro – Creature
    Lots of customizations
    Interesting game play aspects

    Con – Creature
    Button Mashing – In combat you find yourself constantly just smashing the 1 and 3 buttons
    Nests - When the nest moves it is really annoying and takes forever to get to it, usually it happens when you are able to add the next pack member too.
    Other Pack Creatures - I find that adding another creature that is not in your pack an afterthought considering you cannot change or update them.
    Focus / Time - More focus on getting fossils than social / hunting when you need parts
    Hills - Some hills are not even sloped much and are hard to walk on
    Epics – Epics are way too strong, I mean like one hit kills
    Short – This level was too short

    TRIBE

    Pro – Tribe
    Umm....
    Setup – This sets you up for Civ stage (Eco, Relgion, Military) and brakes away from the food type you eat

    Con - Tribe
    AI – Your units stand there if you do not tell them to do something, it would be nice if they did -something- or at least notify me if they are just standing around
    Simple – This stage is just too simple, there needs to have more to do
    Domesticate – They should do more than give you food
    Items – Items come to late and are only one level, like I only received baskets when I had one tribe left and I had 400+ food
    Food – There is no sinkhole for food (minus people eating it and babies) you have nothing to spend it on at the end of the stage and you really do not care that wild creatures are eating it. You are able to kill a Epic and its worth it for the food stock but really thats all you need to do to max out on food.
    Short – it was again too short



    CIV

    Pro – Civ
    Focus – Changes the focus away from passive and aggressive
    Fun – this stage was well made and was well rounded

    Con - Civ
    Turrets – Not enough range and are not strong enough
    Eco – Either economic is way too strong if they get a good start and can finish quickly by making everyone happy and buying them out or are screwed because they have no spice and die because they cannot start trade routes.
    Cities – I found myself constantly using the same city design which got repetitive.
    Short

    SPACE

    Pro – Space
    Fun to look around planets
    Terraforming is interesting
    Tools are fun to use

    Con – Space
    Difficult to find planets – There needs to be a search bar to find certain planets
    No terraform info in universe window
    Terraforming is annoying when you need to fill the ecosystem
    Combat – Combat is wayyyy to fast and the enemies are toooo small (fly in and go boom)
    Items - you do not get enough basic items fast enough (weapons, cargo hold)
    Collecting Spice – you have to go to EVERY planet that you colonize to pick up spice which is a huge hassle when they have such a limited number of slots for the spice, this should have been redone.
    Loading creatures – On my laptop when you are collecting small creatures it hard to see them or sometimes they do not even show up when you at the lowest altitude.
    TREES – OMG the trees are so annoying to fly though when your trying to find something, I often have to toss them away to find what I want.
    Quests – they all feel very similar
    Trade – there is no way to figure out prices for things and you often forget where to sell things
    Explanation – there is no explanation of what the different types of spice are
    Cities – Cities seem like a hold over from the last stage and should have been changed
    Too much going on – I find myself with no time, there are too many other races trying to do something with me, too many quests at once, running out of fuel too often, tryign to set up another colony, fix the ecosystem, terraform the planet, while fighting off pirates and other races....there is just too much happening

    Misc
    The music at times collides with its self playing two tracks at once.
    Tribe seems to crash a lot on me
    Lack of depth for a lot of the game
    Lack of music editor for most of the game
    no autosave


    Just open up all the Stages at the start and if someone doesn't like one stage let it be shippable than making it too easy and short.

    After thought
    Well its getting late and I have to say ill prob think of another 20 or so things that could have been fixed or changed to make a better game. I do hope that people tell maxis that there is a problem so they can patch the game to play better because I do hope that this is not going to be the condition that the game will stay in.

    The game is great but lack of focus is not
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks for the review first of all.

    I haven't had a chance to play yet, but I was getting disappointed when I have recently heard them talking about how short some stages are because they want people to be able to take a species to space quickly. I think they should have allowed cheats or something to leave a stage early if that was what you wanted to do instead of making it short and allowing you to loiter there after you are able to move on.

    It might be interesting to see how long the stages are in the various difficulties, I am sure it will alter the experience but I don't see it extending them much. If you are able to alter the difficulties at the start of each stage it could be nice so that you can get the most out of each stage for entertainment.
    • ^
    • v
    I've not read Mur's review, just wanted to chime in to say you can loiter on any stage if you want, though there's more or less point to it, depending on the stage. You can keep swimming around in Cell if you've not collected all the parts yet or you can keep wandering around in Creature if you want more Creature parts. Tribal you seem to get all the tribal buildings simply by progressing further. Civ you only finish once you control every city - little point continuing after that since there's no other cities to poke, just your own.

    But yeah, you can loiter if you want, there's just not always any point to it. :)
    • ^
    • v
    I had a chance to play though the game twice today and something about the feeling of spore just does not sit right with me. Though my play though, I found one common theme though all of the game. Fast and simple game play. I felt like the game did not go though enough testing and should have been improved more. It had the feeling of a beta test more than a polished game. I am really shocked to say this but I think this games release should have been held back to fix some / most of these issues and expand the game play. Without expanding the game play, spore feels cheap and rushed.

    The game starts off as cell which gets you to get used to the controls and it plays very nicely, but after a while I noticed that I was growing at a very fast rate, before I knew it I was out of the cell stage in 30 minuets. Personally I loved the cell stage and played it four more times though out the day but it felt like it was rushed and uncompleted.

    The next stage the same feeling crossed over. I was rushed though the stage hardly having time to collect parts and DNA when my nest moved twice and I did not have the chance to add members to my party.
    The way you attack is on a timer based cool-down system (Like rouges in WoW) and you only have four main attacks and four social abilities so if you are aggressive you find yourself bashing the button trying to keep the damage rolling while hardly able to keep up with the creatures dying. With the social path, its hard to figure out what they are asking you to do, but then you catch on that the song stays the same even if the animation changes.

    The stage ends and tell you to click on the time-line button to continue. You can still mate and pick up parts which is good because when I finished (even when I spend another two hours trying to find parts) I never had anywhere near enough parts to finish my creature. Now if you are a omnivore this can cause a problem, you want to stay in the middle of the time-line but you can no longer see if your swaying one way more than the other because you cannot click the time-line anymore to check.

    After completing your creature and moving to the tribe stage you start to notice the narrow feeling of the game. Yes you can fish, hunt, domesticate creatures and collect fruit. Domesticating creatures seem like an after thought. Eggs are just like any other reusable resource minus hunting.

    You either attack and kill a tribe or play the social game and make friends. After playing for a bit you start to really stock up on food and find yourself having nothing to spend your resources on and force yourself to finish the tribe stage quickly.

    The tribe turns into a city. Nothing expect your clothing carries over but the clothing can be changed in this place too and get upgraded to silly looking gear. Here we finally get our first glimpse of the music editor. It comes with no explanation on how to use it or even shows you that its there.

    This stage differs from the other stages. Where instead of having a awkward balance between aggressive and passive, there is a defined branch of choices. Economic (middle) Religion (Top) Military (bottom). Having only played Military and Economic I can say that Economic is easy if it works and Military is a lot of work but you can keep working at it and eventually win.

    First play though I ended tribe with Economic and was a bit slow to build up and so I did not produce a lot of spice. This made trying to made trade routes impossible and I was against a military nation which just attacked me and killed me. Economic units do not attack and only trade, so I was not able to do anything. Lucky for that play though I took over a military city early on and finished the level with ICBMs. The second time I played though everyone was friendly toward me and I took one city after the next and had enough money to buy out all the cities and give gifts to those who did not want to open trade routes.

    For space stage it felt like a mash of a bunch of stages and really felt like one of the worst stages. This was most likely due to the fact you felt like you were making very little headway with a lot of effort and constantly being interrupted to do something else without free time to wonder around or do something you needed to do.

    The game play in civ was good but still not without some faults. It was one of the more refined (along with cell) stages.
    CELL

    Pros - Cell
    Very fun to play and customize
    Here you get the feel of aggressive vs passive and it clearly makes a division

    Cons -Cell
    Too quick – Shame they did not extend the game, this could have been a whole game on its own
    Very fast – You often find yourself dying a lot from one to two hit kills
    Limited parts – It would be nice if they expended the parts like they did in creature stage with level of damage

    CREATURE

    Pro – Creature
    Lots of customizations
    Interesting game play aspects

    Con – Creature
    Button Mashing – In combat you find yourself constantly just smashing the 1 and 3 buttons
    Nests - When the nest moves it is really annoying and takes forever to get to it, usually it happens when you are able to add the next pack member too.
    Other Pack Creatures - I find that adding another creature that is not in your pack an afterthought considering you cannot change or update them.
    Focus / Time - More focus on getting fossils than social / hunting when you need parts
    Hills - Some hills are not even sloped much and are hard to walk on
    Epics – Epics are way too strong, I mean like one hit kills
    Short – This level was too short

    TRIBE

    Pro – Tribe
    Umm....
    Setup – This sets you up for Civ stage (Eco, Relgion, Military) and brakes away from the food type you eat

    Con - Tribe
    AI – Your units stand there if you do not tell them to do something, it would be nice if they did -something- or at least notify me if they are just standing around
    Simple – This stage is just too simple, there needs to have more to do
    Domesticate – They should do more than give you food
    Items – Items come to late and are only one level, like I only received baskets when I had one tribe left and I had 400+ food
    Food – There is no sinkhole for food (minus people eating it and babies) you have nothing to spend it on at the end of the stage and you really do not care that wild creatures are eating it. You are able to kill a Epic and its worth it for the food stock but really thats all you need to do to max out on food.
    Short – it was again too short



    CIV

    Pro – Civ
    Focus – Changes the focus away from passive and aggressive
    Fun – this stage was well made and was well rounded

    Con - Civ
    Turrets – Not enough range and are not strong enough
    Eco – Either economic is way too strong if they get a good start and can finish quickly by making everyone happy and buying them out or are screwed because they have no spice and die because they cannot start trade routes.
    Cities – I found myself constantly using the same city design which got repetitive.
    Short

    SPACE

    Pro – Space
    Fun to look around planets
    Terraforming is interesting
    Tools are fun to use

    Con – Space
    Difficult to find planets – There needs to be a search bar to find certain planets
    No terraform info in universe window
    Terraforming is annoying when you need to fill the ecosystem
    Combat – Combat is wayyyy to fast and the enemies are toooo small (fly in and go boom)
    Items - you do not get enough basic items fast enough (weapons, cargo hold)
    Collecting Spice – you have to go to EVERY planet that you colonize to pick up spice which is a huge hassle when they have such a limited number of slots for the spice, this should have been redone.
    Loading creatures – On my laptop when you are collecting small creatures it hard to see them or sometimes they do not even show up when you at the lowest altitude.
    TREES – OMG the trees are so annoying to fly though when your trying to find something, I often have to toss them away to find what I want.
    Quests – they all feel very similar
    Trade – there is no way to figure out prices for things and you often forget where to sell things
    Explanation – there is no explanation of what the different types of spice are
    Cities – Cities seem like a hold over from the last stage and should have been changed
    Too much going on – I find myself with no time, there are too many other races trying to do something with me, too many quests at once, running out of fuel too often, tryign to set up another colony, fix the ecosystem, terraform the planet, while fighting off pirates and other races....there is just too much happening

    Misc
    The music at times collides with its self playing two tracks at once.
    Tribe seems to crash a lot on me
    Lack of depth for a lot of the game
    Lack of music editor for most of the game
    no autosave


    Just open up all the Stages at the start and if someone doesn't like one stage let it be shippable than making it too easy and short.

    After thought
    Well its getting late and I have to say ill prob think of another 20 or so things that could have been fixed or changed to make a better game. I do hope that people tell maxis that there is a problem so they can patch the game to play better because I do hope that this is not going to be the condition that the game will stay in.

    The game is great but lack of focus is not
    • ^
    • v
    Ok, I'm not criticizing your review, I just have a couple questions since I haven't played the game.

    First, with cell and creature phase, you complain about them being too short, that you wanted to evolve further. It's been said many times, even as recently as the fansite day, that you didn't have to advance when the option first comes available. Why, then, did you not just stay in the stages until you were satisfied? I can see with Tribal and Civ, after you're ready to advance there probably isn't much to do, but with Cell and Creature, Maxis people have even described spending a lot of extra time in the stages trying to collect every part.

    Secondly, for space. Also during the fansite day, it was mentioned that after you completed the initial tutorial in space stage, you didn't have to follow the missions. Is there that many mandatory missions that you feel so rushed? Couldn't you have just skipped some?
    • ^
    • v
    sorry for the double post, the system stalled

    well for the stage lengths
    Cell :20 - :40
    Creature 40 - 2
    Tribe :40-1:30
    Civ 1-2
    Space ~~

    Most times you leave a certain stage because of clicking on the time-line. If you are trying to be a omnivore it is hard to do this without the time-line but you could keep playing cell for an extended period of time.

    No even if you did finish the tutorial there is too much going on in space, you need to constantly baby all your colonies and go back and forth to do things.

    The game is good but its really really needs work
close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus