Month: September 2008

Thoughts on Spore

Considering the hype and how much Electronic Arts has banking on it, Spore is getting hammered in some reviews to the point where MTV did a story on Will Wright’s reaction to the negative reviews.

Having played it for about 10 hours on Sunday, I can understand some of the negative reviews and Wright’s reaction to them. More than anything Spore reminds me of another game I play all the time — the 2005 update of Sid Meier’s Pirates. Like Pirates, Spore is essentially a bunch of mini-games thrown together in an attempt to make them one coherent whole. Pirates pulls that off, IMO. With Spore, however, sometimes it works, but mostly its boring and unchallenging.

You start out with the Cell level which is basically Pac-Man on steroids. This is actually fairly fun but in a casual games kind of way. My six year old son, for example, had no problem beating the Cell level several times and he still doesn’t quite get the mouse click targeting scheme the game uses.

Once you’ve built up your cellular creature enough, its on to the Creature stage. This is an simplified 3rd person action RPG. That means running around the world and either befriending or killing other creatures. Again, it was fairly entertaining but not much of a challenge.

After disposing of or befriending enough fellow creatures, its on to the Tribal stage which was a pain in the ass. Again, this was easy but it is essentially the worst RTS you’ll ever play. Halfway through this stage, I had to just stop and let my kids play because it was so maddeningly annoying.

Once I beat that, though, it was on to the Civilization stage. Again, this a very basic Civ-style game with just a handful of military units and a 6 or 7 basic structures you can put in your cities. Somewhat enjoyable, but trivially easy to beat.

Which pretty much sums up the entire game before the Space Stage. Anyone looking for any sort of challenging gameplay will be sorely disappointed. In fact, other than to earn the various achievements for various accomplishments at those levels, I’m not sure why anyone would ever go back and play them again. Getting to the Space Stage is a lot like grinding your way to level 70 in World of Warcraft — its a necessary evil, not something you look forward to going back and doing over and over again for the sheer joy of it.

The Space Stage is a mashup of games like Star Control and Elite. Run around the galaxy, take on missions, fight off pirates, establish trade routes with other species, terraform and expand your empire.

Along the way there are all of these wonderful creation tools built in the game that you could spend days tinkering with, from the creature creator to similar tools that let you design buildings, vehicles, and military units all with the same sort of control the creature creator gives you. Hell, there’s even a built-in musical creation tool so you can create a national anthem at the civilization stage if you’re so inspired. Ultimately, though, this is all very pretty window dressing that has zero impact on the gameplay itself.

Personally, I like these kinds of games, but I think the New York Times was on the money with its summation of Spore,

Beginning with all manner of outlandish creatures — want to make a seven-legged purple cephalopod that looks like it just crawled out of somewhere between the River Styx and your brother-in-law’s basement? — and proceeding through various buildings and vehicles, Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced.

But it’s not a great game, and that is something quite different.

Nancy Pelosi Visits Hiroshima Memorial

On September 2, Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking U.S. politician to ever visit the Hiroshima memorial. According to the Associated Press,

The Democrat, who came to this western port city for a two-day annual gathering of Group of Eight legislative heads, joined other speakers in paying their respects at a memorial to the Hiroshima bombing. One by one, each bowed, then laid flowers at a white, arch-shaped monument containing the names of more than 200,000 victims of the nuclear blast.

No serving U.S. president or vice president has ever visited Hiroshima. As speaker of the House of Representatives, Pelosi is second in line to the presidency after U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Post notes that the nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 220,000 people within a few months and, of course, led to the quick surrender of Japan.

What goes missing from these figures, of course, is the sheer and unimaginable murder of civilians by the Japanese empire from its invasion of China in 1937 to its unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945.The death toll is staggering. The United States’ indiscriminate bombing of Japan killed an estimated 670,000 civilians; but the Japanese empire murdered several times more civilians than that just from their forced labor programs throughout Asia.

Ruddy Rummel, in his chapter on Japan’s democide from his excellent Power Kills notes that,

From the invasion of China in 1937 to the end of World War II, the Japanese military regime murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture (such as the view that those enemy soldiers who surrender while still able to resist were criminals).

At the time of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World War II was still raging in many parts of Asia and some estimates put civilian casualties in Japanese-controlled territories as high as 8,000 per day in the time period shortly before the end of the war. Despite facing certain defeat, Japan was still engaged in wholesale murder in the parts of Asia it still controlled.

Pelosi’s visit to the Hiroshima memorial might be a bit easier to understand if Japan still was not engaged in wholesale denial of its role in World War II. In the United States, there is an ongoing debate over the morality of dropping nuclear weapons on Japanse cities. In Japan, however, history textbooks that whitewash imperial history are bestsellers.

A Buffy MMO? Why?

Massively interviews Multiverse’s Corey Bridges about the announced Buffy: The Vampire Slayer MMO, but doesn’t really do much to answer the question of why anyone would bother at this point with a B:TVS MMO,

All that said, the Buffy announcement is very positive. We have to ask, how is it that you folks are able to get ahold of these great intellectual properties? What kind of relationship do you have with Fox and Joss Whedon to get in touch with these worlds?

CB: Well, we’re big fans of “where there’s a will there’s a way”. We are not announcing any relationship with Joss, but I would love to work on these games with him. We’re definitely seeing what we can do on that front. I and the rest of the team, unsurprisingly, are huge Joss Whedon fans. He does a fantastic job creating worlds. Firefly was an easy setting to understand how that could be a fully realized world, but even Buffy – which takes place primarily in our world – has a lot of mythology to it. Sometimes literal mythology.

So basically, this is an attempt to cash in on a brilliant but not very active property (thanks, in large part, to Fox’s own ridiculous treatment of Buffy and Whedon). And the result — if anything is ever actually released — will be some lame-ass Flash game that sounds about as exciting as the crappy handheld Buffy games that keep coming out.

Better to just not do a Buffy MMO at all rather than do some half-assed game that doesn’t even have Joss Whedon involved. What’s the frakking point?