Spore

It’s a gray, rainy day today, perfect time to stay home and game a little. Could be a perfect time to level up a few alts in City of Heroes. Zubon of Kill Ten Rats uses the new Architect system to design the perfect opponents for his new characters and bring them to level 20 in a single mission. Ogrebears has some issues with SOE’s partnership with ZAM.com to give that third party website more access to the game data than any other website, ever. It’s not so much that they have been set above EQ2i, LootDB, EQTraders and such, but because that it seems poorly designed and incomplete. ...

I was exploring further up the galactic arm that is home to my main system, when after a small gap in the arm (easily bridged by Interstellar Drive 5), I came across a small T1 planet circling a yellow star… There was no animal life on Earth, but Mercury and Titan both were harboring nests of pirates. All I can think is that pirates wiped out life on Earth. ...

`` I promise, after this, no more Spore posts. The most fun in the game is creating creatures and space ships. Tonight I made a Pierson’s Puppeteer from Larry Niven’s “Known Space” stories – it’s been done by others, but I like mine best. I made Corporal Legs and the spaceship Serial Peacemaker from Howard Tayler’s “Schlock Mercenary” web comic, and a couple others. I was surprised nobody had done stuff from Schlock already. ...

Baby Diver looks for food, flagella and true love in the primordial goo of Spore’s Cell Phase. If there’s one lesson to be learned from playing Spore, it’s that you are unimportant, life will go on without you, and your only legacy left to an uncaring universe might be that some bit of you will live on afterward in something – or someone – else. MMOs and other single player games try to reassure us that we’re important, at the center of the universe. Spore has no such comforts. You’re a faceless minion and you’re gonna die. At some point you have to give up your false notion that you’ll go on forever, and just enjoy being where you are, living in the moment. ...

I know, you want to see pictures :/ But when I’m home, I’m playing Spore! I’ll put some up tonight. If you have Spore, you can see all my stuff by putting “tipadaknife” on your buddy list. I put Bildo and Darren on, and now I have some of their stuff trundling along in my world. It’s always fun to see a friendly face, though most of the stuff on the worlds I encounter are the things I made in Sunday’s game. ...

I’ll have a better review up in a day or two when I have played through more of the Galactic Conquest game, but basically, here’s what I thought of it. The game is split into a bunch of stages, most of which are very short. You aren’t in the cell stage for more than half an hour – in fact, it’s really hard to slow things down much. I found it difficult as a herbivorous single-celled animal to find new parts, since I couldn’t kill other creatures for theirs. ...