Who's played it yet, after years of being 'in the making' it's finally out and by god it's a let-down. For a game that is supposed to have unlimited possibilities, it's inherently limited. The graphics look fairly dodgy, and the control/navigation system is fiddly.

What's even worse is that while fun immediately as you evolve a creature from the microbe level, one you enter 'Civilisation' mode it becomes a totally dull and uninteresting game, and you realise your basically just playing The Sims except with dinosaurs.

That coupled with EA's DRM software means it is likely to flop. You can only install it 3 times unless you get the OK from EA for each and every installation there after.

Been playing it last night. Sort of nice, sort of not. it really is one of those game you need to play rather than be told about.

So far I've played about 2 hours of it and evolved my cell life form into quite a human looking creature. I've been given two or three main tasks to do but they are very simple. Overall there seems to be no difficulty in the game. I could die but it doesn't matter I simply respawn. You never feel like you are going to become extinct.

Maybe later on levels will improve, but just now, despite being nice to look at and a great idea for a game, it's really dull.

I've not heard too much about it (other than the DRM bits) but from what I've heard, it's a similar concept to what Darwinia was... Although rather than growing a population the main goal of the game presumably is to evolve?

It appears to have provoked an unprecedented level of backlash. Amazon.com has over 2,000 reviews posted, almost all of them one star, but the real rammy has been at Amazon.co.uk, where hundreds (and allegedly thousands) of similarly damning reviews were deleted by Amazon, supposedly under pressure from EA. Amazon UK then felt their own backlash, with customers canceling long-standing accounts on the grounds that they can no longer trust the Amazon reviewing system if negative reviews are being snipped at the behest of manufacturers.

The negative reviews have now largely been reinstated, but EA's latest response is to try and spin it as some form of organised protest, and in an act of potentially suicidal crassness, are claiming the forces behind the protest are angry software pirates! This is despite the fact that a cracked version of the game (minus the DRM) beat the official release by over a week, and that while this intrusive anti-piracy software has prevented precisely no piracy, the paying customers have been shafted by EA installing root-kit spyware via a game that they are only allowed to install three times!

Have you been dead for the last 6 months?



Hmm.. I wouldn't compare the two in the slightest to be honest, but then I only played Darwinia for the first couple of levels before I got bored.

Out of interest, did you know that they are releasing Multiwinia?


Basically the game for me (and this is two hours in) has been in 3 parts. The cell life form part and the land creature part, with the 3rd part being the evolution part which is constant throughout the game.

For the cell life form part, all I had to do was avoid carnivores and eat as much food as I could. This is graphically very nice to look at as you grow in size and use evolution to provide you with body parts such as more tail "things" allowing you to swim faster, or more eyes so you can see more things on screen, etc.

Once I had worked up the levels I went onto land. Just now I have a "tribe" of about 6 "things" that are all the same as me. Each creature has a passive and aggressive stances and in those there are certain abilities (such as passive might have singing, while aggressive might have charging - it all depends on your body parts too). You use these abilities to either charm or attack other creatures in the "world" around you. As you would expect, each decision has an affect on future interaction or development.

While I tend to be more passive in the game (purely as it's easier to charm than attack) certain things are not evolved if you don't use all your skills. For example my brain power was increased by attacking and killing my first foe (I got bored so wondered what it would do). Now I can see why a larger brain is needed for attacks and why I was given it, but I wasn't told that I would be rewarded for random acts of violence. So you can see you have a fairly large range for exploration and general dicking about.

What is quite funny is how it you use evolution in the game. For example, my creature is a herbivore and eats fruit. While fruit was easy enough to get to on the ground it soon got used up. In one of my evolution steps I added arms to the creature to get the fruit, however I soon found out that "his" arms weren't long enough, so I stretched his legs (at this moment he had 4 legs and two arms). That worked but my movement was hampered by the way the body took the arms, so in my next evolution I removed the front legs, and shifted the spine so it walked upright, allowing me more speed of movement and (with a little tweak of the arms) the ability to reach all the fruit in the trees.

Don't let this piece of sense spoil the fun, as my creature currently has breasts that spit out poison. Just one more step in the evolutionary scale..

I literally hadn't heard anything about it until someone posted a thread in the Bargain Basement saying they were selling their copy a few days ago

A game so underwhelming that Peter Molyneux himself would have been proud of it.

edit: oh, and EA are being b*****ds? There's a surprise. They'd deploy a guillotine that chopped off your hands on a second install if they could get away with it.

tbh evo on the snes is better

That was me but i think a mod removed it for some reason. It's still up for sale if anyone wants it.

You see I keep thinking that, but I was wondering if maybe it's just a really big game where so you don't realise how big because of it's very simplistic start.

I was speaking to someone else who's played it and they said it took about 4 hours of gaming to evolve far enough to leave the planet you are on. I think I'll keep on playing it until I get to that level and see what options are available to you.

How have they justified this move? Horrible stuff.

It's probably been moved into the "sell your old sh*t" thread.

Don't you mean the 'sell your brand spanking new shit you wish you hadn't bought' thread?

I did notice you're probably asking for a bit much for it by the way - it's £26.99 brand new online. While I see that yours is almost brand new, it's already been installed once so can only be re-installed twice. Might put a few folk off.

A might end up giving it away if it doesn't manage to sell on ebay. Waste of money, truely.

Now there's a bloody game.



Yeah, maybe I'm being too quick to judge, but I can't even really be bothered playing it again (thankfully I didn't buy it, my brother did, so I've only had a brief shot.)

I'll take it!

Ok, I'm now officially bored of this. 4Gb of drive space that can be reclaimed.

If your upset about only being able to install the game three times you should see the threads over on the EA website about SecuROM on most if not all of EA's games.

I have played spore on the DS,but it's not good at all,I might get spore for the pc,and see if that is any better.

Played this for about 2 or 3 days. Decided it's like a seriously watered down version of other games rolled into one, and gave up on it.

This is turning out to be a fun release. Nothing to do with the game per se, and everything to do with the DRM issues and the EA actively censoring people's poor reviews on the game.

Over at Amazon, somehow a "glitch" stopped lots of people sending in negative reviews, yet allowed through positive one. This glitch not only affected .co.uk, but .com, .de, .fr, etc.. yet surprisingly other game reviews were magically unaffected.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080...er-reviews.html

The DRM function which was initially limited to 3 installs before the serial code becomes invalid, has been crippled even more just before release so that if you want to have more than one account to play spore then you need another copy (of course how you install two copies of Spore onto the same computer is not explained). You cannot simply load up Spore then select "load profile" or whatnot, you are stuck with the one profile in the game.

There are also numerous rumours going round that top review sites and magazines were offered bribes to ensure the game wasn't slated.

All this for a very averagely dull game.

oh rise of the robots, remember that?

Rise of the Robots was an odd one. I am sure it was originally written in a BASIC like development language (Blitz Basic) which explained why the Amiga one was so poor. It was nothing more than some nicely rendered robots shuffling around a poorly designed game "engine". That was the Amiga version, I cannot explain why the ports to other platforms were so bad.

However you are right to bring it up as an example, it was ridiculously marketed. There was a rumour that Mirage ploughed all it's money into making the game a success and when it wasn't all that was left to do was blanket promotion. IIRC they claimed Brian May did the soundtrack, when in fact he had nothing to do with it.

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/comments/...OTR_letter.html

"And while we're here, how come this slimy turd from a dead dog's arse managed to score more than one 90% review? Didn't any of the reviewers notice either? Or has the single word "Exclusive" really come to represent the entire text of the reviewers' Holy Bible? How, in 1994, can a game score 3%, 5%, 19%, 20%, 33% and 35% in six reviews in very different magazines covering five different formats, and 90% and 92% in two other ones? "Personal opinion" really doesn't cover it in this instance, does it?"

Wow, I'd forgotten about Rise. I remember being so excited about it and totally blown away by the graphics.

And it was one of the worst games ever

I played this for a few hours yesterday.

The first stage is a decent wee game, then the Land Creature stage is brilliant fun, I was having a great time running about the place, making pals and fighting all the cool wee beasties, then running away from giant angry ones - then it told me that I'd done enough of that and my brain was massive, so I could advance to the Tribe stage.

Tribe stage is fucking horrendous. I probably will go back to it and try to get through to the next stage, but it seems like a chore, rather than the fun of the last stage. Instead of just choosing to go and do whatever you like, the game starts effectively just demanding you do stuff. So you start working out how to make pals with the one neighbouring tribe, when four others all spring up and start nicking all your food while you're off playing music for someone else.