Dear asshole that made "Quarantine"--thank you for making yet another shitty movie with the shaky hand-held camera recovered footage approach that made "Cloverfield" suck too.  I'd like that 90 minutes of my life back please.

Oh.  And you suck.  In case I didn't say that earlier.

So, the creators of Spore, Electronic Arts, created an online discussion forum where people could talk about Spore.  Unfortunately they made the mistake of offering a feedback forum where people could post feedback about the game, and the reviews are positively ghastly.  So many people are irate about how shallow the game is and the various bugs in it that last week EA released a patch for the game, only a week after the game went to market.  Anybody in software development knows what happens when you rush a patch out the door.  And it happened big time... the patch made the game experience WORSE for a lot of users, fixing some bugs but creating a whole host of new ones.  Interest in the game is visibly on the wane, online Spore traffic has been pretty much falling since day one and people are already clamoring for "expansion packs".  It's generally not a good sign if you are looking for game expansions after owning the game for one week. By comparison I've owned Oblivion IV for over a year now and I only purchased one of the available expansions.  I haven't needed to buy any more because there is plenty of content there to keep I (and my family) entertained.  But I digress..

The interesting thing is (as you might expect) a number of EA's customers are not at all pleased that they are limited to 3 installs of their game before it won't install anymore, and some are unhappy with SecuRom being installed on their machines without their consent.  So along with feedback about various other flaws in the game, EA gets plenty of feedback about DRM and the headaches it is causing their customers.

Which they delete.

Yeah, you heard that right.  If you post feedback about the DRM in Spore, they simply delete your feedback.  They don't want customers discussing DRM or complaining about DRM.  And the reason is quite simply this:

DRM does not stop pirates. It never did.  The day Spore was released, there was already a DRM-free hacked version available for download from the various piracy sites.  ANYBODY who did not have an ethical problem with stealing the game, could simply download a fully functional pirate version.  Personally, I think game makers should be paid for their efforts, so this is not an option for me.

Electronic Arts isn't staffed by morons--they have tech savvy engineers working there who know full well that DRM will not stop pirates.  So why do they keep claiming they put it in there to prevent pirates from stealing their game?  Why is it really there?

My theory (and a lot of other people think so too) is they want to control (or basically kill) the resale market.  If you want to play Spore and figure you'll buy a used copy in a year or so, think again.  By putting the install limit on the game, EA prevents you from selling your property to a third party when you tire of it.  Why would anyone buy Spore if it had only 1 install left, or less?  So if someone wants Spore six months from now, they're going to have to buy it from EA--or they will get stiffed on reinstalls if one is ever needed.

That's fairly evil and a number of people (including myself) have posted threads to that effect on EA's feedback forum only to have them quietly disappear.

Which is also evil.

Okay, so gamers everywhere are upset about the Digital Rights Management that comes packaged with Spore.  If you don't have an internet connection (because say, you are using a laptop while camping, or your internet modem is on the fritz) you can't play... even though there is nothing on the internet you actually NEED to play Spore.  That's annoying, but if you are a home user who never upgrades their machine and has a solid internet connection, you may not care so much.  So let's actually talk abut the GAME--how does it play?  Is it fun?

The idea behind Spore is exciting and compelling... start with a microbe and evolve it into an intelligent spacefaring species.  The game is basically broken into five minigames--and that right there is a sign of trouble--the Jack of all trades is a master of none.  All five minigames have weaknesses and are pretty shallow simply because to invest too much development effort in one of the minigames means not investing it in others.  Plus there are annoying inconsistencies in the camera controls for each minigame.  What used to pan or zoom the camera in one minigame will do something else in the next, so at each transition you need to relearn how to do the same old things--that's right out of the Vista playbook... very irritating.

In conclusion, for $50 you get 5 games that are probably each worth about the $10 you are paying for them.  You would probably be better served by spending your $50 on ONE really good game.  I sure wish I hadn't bought this... because having played it one time through, I've gone from incredibly excited and interested by the game concept, to disappointed and bored.  I have zero interest in ever playing this game again.  Oblivion, Warcraft, and Civilization are all far better than Spore.  Don't waste your money.

What follows are detailed reviews of the five games in Spore.

Minigame #1 - The Microbe Stage
Ignoring for a moment that evolution is *not* a directed process, and therefore the concept behind the game is annoying if you are a scientist, the idea is promising.  But swimming around in fluid and nibbling bits of food gets tired very quick.  The graphics are very pretty, but users will likely get bored with the microbial stage very quickly.  As your germ wanders around it will collect "DNA points" that can be spent when it mates to pay for additional (or better) body parts.

Minigame #2 - The Creature Stage
All microbes must evolve into land creatures.  Why?  It's a testament to the shallowness of this game.  Germs become land animals.  You can give your creatures wings, but they can't live in trees or cliff walls... all they can do is wander around on the ground.  You can't choose to stay in the ocean and become an intelligent underwater race.  You can't burrow into the ground and become an intelligent underground race.  You cannot evolve or design plant life, or become an intelligent plant species.  The implication in the game is that though evolution you can evolve whatever you want.  You can't.  All you can control is the basic shape of your creature, its behavior toward other creatures, and what body parts it has.  And it is in the creature-creating portion of the game where most of the development time seems to have been spent.

But even this too is annoyingly limited.  The game wants all creatures to be vertebrates with bilateral symmetry--want to make a giant starfish?  Too bad for you.  Want a creature with two arms on one side and none on the other?  Too bad for you.

One of the depressing things about this is that body parts don't actually DO anything.  All they do is change your creature's stats.  Adding a pointed spike gives the creature a "strike" ability, but adding two spikes doesn't make any difference, nor does changing the position of the spike or even its size.  There's no reason not to throw your creature together haphazardly, because the actual arrangement of body parts has no effect on the game.  Once the user realizes this, the illusion is shattered and the process of developing creatures becomes boring.

Many of the body parts are completely cosmetic and do nothing at all.  Give your creature eyes on the back of its head and it gets no advantage whatsoever.  There are dozens of different "arms" and "legs" available, and they are all hard to distinguish from each other, and universally all do the same thing.  Add a particular leg to your creature and now it has a leg.  Choose a different leg and the creature's stats are unchanged.  So why bother having different legs then?  And why do all the arms and legs essentially look the same?  There are no hairy legs, legs with more joints, pseudopods, wrinkly legs, insectoid legs, etc.

Creatures have 4 basic social behaviors--singing, posing, dancing, and charming, and 4 antisocial behaviors--biting, striking, charging, and spitting.  You can pretty much think of your creature as a tally sheet with a score for each of these behaviors.  A creature with "sing 4" is really good at singing.  The animations for the behaviors are very pretty, but to initiate them is a little clunky and extremely repetitive.  Making friends or killing enemies gets tired fast.  And unsurprisingly, the game rapidly progresses through the creature stage and tries to push you into the tribal stage.

Minigame #3 - The Tribal Stage
Gather food, try to make friends (or destroy) neighboring tribes.  That about sums this stage up.  It will remind you of the original warcraft games where your drones gather resources to make buildings, but it isn't as involved.  It will remind you of civilization where you can sort-of acquire new technologies and interact with outher cultures, but it isn't as involved.  Fact is there are already good games that do both of these things better, and since this game tries to cram in both of them, it does neither well.  This stage is shallow but blissfully short.  One thing that might annoy you is that all the time you spent developing your creature's physical traits pretty much become irrelevant at this stage of the game (and in every stage after).

Minigame #4 - The Civilization Stage
Now instead of fighting (or befriending) tribes of different creatures, you are fighting or befriending nations of creatures like yourself.  The animations are stunning, but again the tactics are pretty shallow.  There is no deep strategy to be found here, no clever interplay of various social forces.  And this stage of the game too will end fairly quickly.

Minigame #5 - The Space Stage
So you finally made it.  The grand conclusion of the game... and it isn't fun at all.  At this point you should be controlling worlds and commanding fleets of ships, and instead you are basically an errand boy.  You get one ship to fly around in and fly around you will.  All that creature development is just a distant memory now... your beautiful creation is just a face on a communicator screen.  You will receive missions that basically boil down into two types: (1) go to this planet and scan/pick up/bring back a certian item or items within a time limit, (2) go to a planet and kill all the creatures/beings that are glowing yellow in a certain time limit.

Just getting around is annoying.  A mission says "go to planet Dingly Ball and bring back a Pferdburper plant", so the first thing you do is go to your star map (in steps, each step requiring a lengthy animation that you CANNOT skip) and you might expect to see a clear indication of the star you are supposed to go to.  Sometimes you will but usually you won't and you spend your time hovering your mouse over each star to try and find the one with the right name.  Yeesh... the star should have a blinking colored flag sticking out of it to tell you it is your objective... or the names of stars should appear next to them. There's no end of things that ought to be in here to make it less annoying.

As you try to negotiate trade routes or carry out missions you will CONSTANTLY be running back home to defend your homeworld (or your colonies) from pirates or enemies.  Every such encounter is exactly the same and rapidly becomes infuriatingly stupid.  I have a spacefaring race but I can only make one ship at a time?  Why can't I build a defense force and leave guards on each planet so I am not constantly running back and forth to fight the same boring fights over and over again?

And the ship-to-ship combat is the absolute worst.  Clunky as heck, and for all the pretty ships and lovely explosions, very little actual information is communicated to you... there is no useful tactical display--like say, coloring enemies differenly from friendlies, or automatically coloring ships in range differently from those out of range.

The space stage is, frankly, dismal... and should have been left out of the game altogether.

I picked this CD up last night with much anticipation and listened to it today on a long drive. 

It started strong, quickly soared to awesome, and then made a meteoric descent to absolutely awful and only recovered marginally after that point.  *sigh* Too bad.  I admit, that by track 3 I was beginning to wonder if we had another Ray of Light on our hands.  Things stumbled a little in the fourth track but came back strong for tracks five and six.

Then came track 7--the inexplicably named song Incredible.  The only incredible thing about this song is that it came from Madonna.  I'm sorry to say it is the worst song she's ever created.  Dischordant, screwy pacing, strange change-ups, and just an all around mess.  This one song utterly destroyed the mood and made it hard for the album to come back, which wasn't helped by the fact that the next 3 songs were mediocre at best.  I have no interest in hearing any of them again.  Madge, you can do better.

The mixing on tracks 9 and 10 was also pretty poor.  Madonna's voice was often drowned out or subdued against the music.  I understand it's supposed to be dance music but her voice is way too strong to be so downplayed.

Track 10 was the best of the mediocre songs, but Spanish Lesson is no La Isla Bonita... far more cheesy and contrived.  I may listen to Spanish Lesson again... I have a feeling it might grow on me.

Thankfully, the tail end of the album was saved by track 11 The Devil Wouldn't Recognize You, definitely an awesome number that I'll be putting on my new MP3 player whenever I can afford to buy one.

Track 12 Voices had a good sound but pretty silly lyrics.  I got the impression Madonna was trying to do a sort of "haunting" piece, like perhaps Frozen--but the lyrics were too weak for me to enjoy it.

Obviously I hold Madonna to a pretty high standard, let's face it--7 good songs on a 12-song album makes it a good album.  And this really is a good album--in fact if it had been an 11-song album minus Incredible, I probably would have enjoyed the later tracks more.

So here's what I recommend to people who buy this album and who loved Ray of Light and Confessions on a Dance Floor.  Listen to the tracks in this order:

2. 4 Minutes
3. Give It 2 Me
6. She's Not Me
5. Miles Away
1. Candy Shop
4. Heartbeat
11. Devil Wouldn't Recognize You

After that, stop and leave the other tracks until your next listen.  And I recommend just skipping Incredible forever.

Hard Candy is an awesome album.  It is almost another Ray of Light, and once again Madonna rocked my world.  Get the album and dance your ass off.

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EDIT: After several more listens I have to say this album seems increasingly more kickass.  There's no hope for track 7, and track 10 doesn't stand up to a second listen, but track 8 Beat Goes On was much better than I originally thought.  On a second listen I enjoyed it much more and I think the first time through I was just so disappointed by Incredible that when the next song came on I was already soured on the experience.  So add track 8 to my list of good tracks above.  I'm going to be listening to this album constantly for awhile... and "4 Minutes" is frigging huge.

Here's a funny animation I caught on Pharyngula, the excellent science blog by P.Z. Myers.  The audio is German, but there are subtitles.  I got a kick out of it, perhaps you will too?

Das Rad

Kicks ass.

Weird video though.

So it's been awhile since I've posted a summary of the indie music I am listening to. As you know I follow 3Hive, GigaTracks, and also Obscure Sound to find out about new small independent bands and get some of their music. I check these sources every few months and backtrack through the posts to see if there is anything good. Usually, I like very little of what I hear, and that which I do like is merely "passable".

Well this time I waited over six months, and let me tell you my favorite source (3Hive) has been positively dry... dry dry dry. But even when it's dry you can usually find a few things, and some of these are quite fun. There's been a dearth of kickass dance music lately though, and I would say only one song in this list (Duality by The Martial Arts) qualifies as a song you could dance to.

Anyway, I've got most of this stuff on a mix disc and I'm listening to it in the car these days to get a feel for which bands I might want to purchase a CD from. There's definitely a couple I would like to hear more from. Anyway, throw on your headphones and have a listen... I don't think anything here will knock your socks off (there's no Afroganics or Aviatics in this bunch) but you may find something you like here.

1. Christine Fellows
    
   3Hive describes Fellows as "Experimental Pop"--but I'd simply describe this as thoughtful acoustic music. The only song available via 3Hive is "Advice" which is a beautiful piece advising young people not to be in a great hurry to find love, or at least to "give themselves away". I find it quite pleasant.
    
   • Advice
    
2. Club 8
    
   I have a soft spot for Swedish bands, but I would love this duo even if they weren't Swedes. Lovely soft-pop with lots of acoustics and simple vocals that you can sing along with. It isn't dance music… in fact, it's Christian music. Strange that an atheist would enjoy Christian music? It's just words folks, and I can sing them and enjoy them without believing them. Maybe you can too.
    
   • Jesus, Walk With Me
   • Heaven -- I particularly like this one… very happy.
   • Spring Came, Rain Fell
   • What Shall We Do Next? -- Less acoustic, more poppy.
    
3. Colour Revolt
    
   This band from the deep American south makes a good attempt at wailing guitar rock with "Naked and Red". It's also a bit of a refresher after the happy spirituality of Club 8. The song opens with a line about God swinging from the "licker tree" and it only gets weirder from there but ties up its interesting message with the idea that "Eden is a hell of a place." I'm glad somebody noticed!
    
   • Naked and Red
    
4. Elk City
    
   I seem to be on a spiritual kick lately, because Elk City also serves up a religious offering with "Los Cruzados" (The Crusaders) -- I'm a sucker for a good hallelujah chorus, and Los Cruzados delivers. 3Hive has another song by them available which I didn't enjoy but you may. Check them out.
    
   • Los Cruzados -- Hallelujah… hallelujah… my wife heard me singing some of these Christian/spritual songs and asked "Are you having second thoughts?" Hee hee hee.
    
5. Empty Rooms
    
   Sombre and haunting, I'm not sure how to characterize this rock band. In some ways they remind me of Duran Duran, and in some ways they remind me of The Fixx, but their sound is definitely their own. I'm linking two songs here, there's a third on 3Hive that I didn't particularly enjoy.
    
   • Off with His Head
   • Try Again
    
6. Hasch'm'Méneum
    
   Is it electronica or jazz? It makes me tap my toes and rock my head whatever it is. Unfortunately some of the available tracks seem to cut a little short… probably because the band wants you to buy their CD… well I'm considering doing just that. If you like chirpy electronica with a comical side to it, this may be the blurps and bleeps for you. There are no vocals, or at least no lyrics... it's all instrumental.
    
   • Christerium -- This song is a little funny. Something about it makes me smile. Sadly it is cut short.
   • Heliotrope -- This piece is more meandering and contemplative… it would make great background music to read to or engage in some other mental activity.
   • Red Sniper -- Stronger rhythm track and a hint of some sort of illicit activity going on in the mood of the music. This would make a good movie soundtrack for a montage where a character is putting his evil plan into action.
   • Slide -- Probably my favorite song by Hasch'm'Méneum, this one is goofy and fun. It's another one that makes me tap my toes. Alas it is also cut short. :-(
    
7. The Heavy Circles
    
   I have to see if I can find some more music by the Heavy Circles. This pop piece definitely sticks in my head and includes some great whirling sound.
    
   • Henri
    
8. The Hermit
    
   Some songs are background music, some songs are dance music, some songs you sing along with, and some you just want to close your eyes and slowly rock from side to side. "Wonderment" is onesuch with its sweeping poppy electronic sound and gently echoing vocals.
    
   • Wonderment (Affekt remix)
   • Flutterbye (Sputnichek remix) -- Faster paced than wonderment.
    
9. The High Water Marks
    
   Squelchy retro guitar beach music... at least that's what it feels like to me. 3Hive has three of their songs up. The only one I've included here is "The Leaves" although I felt that "Queen of Verlaine" was passable.
    
   • The Leaves
    
10. The Martial Arts
     
    Okay, this is another group I need to find more music by. This is great summer music--even beach music perhaps. Music you can sing along with and even dance to, which makes it a little unusual because this latest 3Hive dump doesn't include much in the way of dance music.
     
    • Duality -- Probably my favorite song of all the songs listed here today.
     
11. Oslo
     
    This is darker stuff. Sometimes when you are disgusted with the state of the world, it's cathartic to listen to something dark--or at least therapeutic. Rise and Fall of Love and Hate is about divisiveness and how we are taught to be divisive. Sure touches a nerve with me, because I am fed up with all the demonizing I see going on these days.
     
    • The Rise and Fall of Love and Hate
     
12. Sittser
     
    If 3Hive has been dry, GigaTracks has been postively barren, but this one piece makes up for all that. It sounds like of a great 80's guitar ballad.
     
    • Losing My Fear of Heights
     
13. Sneaky
     
    So if you took Indian music and set it to a funk track and built in a solid driving whorling drone and a lot of repetition you would probably get a hypnotic piece just like this one. Excellent driving music this. I dig it. Purely instrumental.
     
    • Beduija
     
14. Spitzer
     
    Okay, I was iffy on including this piece by the French group "Spitzer". This is definitely electronic, like Trash80-style electronic. No vocals and very very synthy, but it has a good beat and it gets the head bobbing and the fingers tapping. Give it a listen... come on... you know you can't pass up a song called DISCO BISCUITS.
     
    • Disco Biscuits
     
15. Wojtek Godzisz
     
    I'm not sure what to make of this artist. 3Hive refers to this as "theatrical pop" which as good a way as any to describe it. They listed three songs but this was the only one I enjoyed.
     
    • Light Over Dark Earth

Hope you enjoyed at least some of these... I'll keep trolling the intertubes for good indie music... check back in 3 months!! :-P

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