Happily, they couldn't have planned a more illustrative near-disaster - it turns out that Microsoft's operating system was by far the least intuitive piece of software we'd have to get to grips with all day. As it happens, EA looked a little daunted themselves during our hands on session, with early password problems suggesting that we might have been granted two hours' exclusive access to the Windows XP log on screen. You personally might be fine with it, but there are people out there who might feel that a game concerned with, y'know, creation of biological life in its entirety is a little daunting. Long in development and mutant heir to the Sims franchise, Spore remains EA's big hope, and the forthcoming release of the Creator on PC and Mac is crucial to selling what could otherwise be a dangerously complex proposition. As well as keeping track of your own creations, the Sporepedia allows you to browse other players' content. Making a sound like a seal barking, he was proof that twenty minutes had made us masters of the toolset. A fat sausage with an aardvark's snout, le Monsieur was certainly easy on the eyes, even if the ram's horns on his hind knees were an error, in retrospect. It was only with the arrival of our third creature, the cosmopolitan Monsieur EuroG that we started to approach something likable. Even the basic starting blob can be brought to life in Test Drive, although unless you've a yen to see a pulsating tumour rolling around, we wouldn't advise it. Young Donlan was clearly a mutational cul de sac on a par with chocolate-covered pretzels and Celebrity Wrestling. Our next creation, Young Donlan, fared no better: a conceptual mess of mouths, eyes and strange coiled lumps of bone, he was simply too busy, with too much going on in all the wrong parts of his body.Īlso, we mistakenly thought it would be funny to build him without a face, and the hooves we gave him in place of hands brought his long arms crashing to the ground, meaning that he had to punch with his elbows (brilliantly, when we then gave him another arm with two fists jutting out of his forehead, he automatically switched to attack with this). We didn't miss him much when he was gone. His spine was a loop, which may have explained why he looked so unhappy, and he had too many mandibles. How different? Our first creature, imaginatively entitled Eurogamer (it had been a long train ride to EA) was a disquieting combination of grasshopper and trout, a silver-fleshed limbfest, continually emitting a series of wet, slippery yelps and clicks. Most of these animals were quite horrible, some of them were frankly embarrassing, but all of them had one thing in common: each was entirely different. In our preview session with Spore's forthcoming Creature Creator, two hours was ample time to build and discard entire ecologies, bringing ranks of species to life before mercilessly extinguishing them with a single click of the mouse. Sometimes, two hours can be a lifetime - and for all the right reasons. Time enough for a tutorial, maybe, or a handful of cut-scenes - at most a quick blast through a first act of easy victories.īut that isn't always the case. Two hours is not a long time in gaming terms.
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