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.

An Australian video game designer has caused a major uproar Down Under with his creation of a game based on the Virginia Tech massacre.

Called V-Tech Rampage, the game has several levels of "stealth and murder," reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

But what really is causing the kerfuffle--as if the game itself wasn't in bad enough taste--is that its designer, Ryan Lambourn, says he will take the game down from his Web site only if the public comes up with a $2,000 payoff.

For another grand, he'll apologize...

-- Game designer causes uproar with Virginia Tech game (Tech News Blog)

I really need to add a "WTF" category to this blog.  I had heard about this peripherally and figured it was just an urban legend, but it's not.  In the last few days Sony released its new adult-oriented video game God of War II for the PlayStation console.  Recently they had a big "European launch party" in Greece for members of the press who write about video game news.  They tried to theme the party to match the nature of the game, so the party featured an actor dressed up as the hero from the game (okay, you might expect this), games involving throwing knives and pulling live snakes from pits (?), topless women who hand fed grapes to the guests (WTF?), and as a centerpiece, the decapitated carcass of a freshly slaughtered goat (WTF!!?).

Now it's not the first time Sony has done something amazingly stupid to promote their wares, but, as you can imagine not everyone was cool with a slaughtered animal being used as a "prop" at a party.  Guests were invited to reach into the goat's lacerated body, pull out entrails, and eat them.  The entrails had in fact been replaced with some sort of Greek dish that resembled intestines.  Yum.

If a goat had been killed and served as a dish which guests could eat, that probably would have been fine... I mean anyone who eats meat is eating a killed animal.  But to morbidly lay out a dead animal at your dinner party with its head hanging off as a lurid decoration?  That's just disgusting, cruel, morbid, and a waste of an animal.  According to Sony the goat carcass was purchased from a loal butcher and then returned to the butcher after the party.

Apparently it has finally occurred to Sony that this whole party really wasn't such a great idea.  Mostly because of the backlash from animal rights groups, Sony has issued an apology.

From Sony Apologizes For Decapitated Goat In 'God Of War' Launch (InformationWeek via Yahoo! News):
..."On this occasion we recognize that we fell short of our normal high standards of conduct and apologize for any offense caused," Sony said in a statement. "We are conducting an internal inquiry into the circumstances of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put in place measures to ensure that this does not happen again."...

The article goes on and quotes animal rights activists decrying the use of the goat's carcass, and a professor of marketing who calls the party centerpiece "stupid".

Which is all expected of course, but what I find intriguing is that nobody quoted seems to have any complaints about topless women feeding grapes to the partygoers.  Okay, of course they are performers, and they were paid to perform this service, but it hardly seems appropriate for a video game launch party.  The use of "pretty girls" at product launches or other types of retail expositions is not a new thing, and includes some sort of compensation, typically money, but not always.  But this goes beyond anything I've heard of before.  I would expect something like this at say a strip joint* or something like that, but a video game launch party for the press?  WTF were they thinking?

Here's an article from 1Up.com recapping the event and including a picture which is probably NSFW.

That's effed up, yo.

*: Which is not to say I've ever been to a strip joint.  For the curious, no I haven't.  I have no interest in watching ecdysiasts perform live.  That would be way too embarrassing for me.

...So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did...

-- Allen Lee, Carly-Grove High School Student

 Allen Lee wrote some seriously disturbed crap during a "Free Writing" assignment in his high school English class this week.  Apparently the instructions on the assignment made clear that the students were not to censor themselves and should instead write whatever came to mind.  The point was to keep writing and not to stop until the time ran out.  Allen's essay begins "Blood sex and Booze. Drugs Drugs Drugs are fun. Stab, Stab, Stab, S…t…a…b…, poke."  The end of the essay concludes with a message to his teacher: "No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting." The "cg" refers to "Carly-Grove", the name of Allen's school.

It is evident from his essay that he has an extremely low opinion of his teacher, and English in general.  So I suppose it's possible he selected subject matter most calculated to upset the teacher.  If so, the calculations were spot-on.  Allen's teacher apparently called the police, and now he is charged with disorderly conduct according to the Chicago Tribune.  You can read Allen's entire essay here.

I read the last sentence of Allen's essay as a threat, and therefore I am not at all surprised that some sort of discipline is in order, and I fail to see why Allen would be surprised.  But apparently a lot of people are surprised because they seem to be leaping to his defense and claiming that the teacher/school are overreacting.

In the meantime Allen is planning to join the Marines.

The questions here are, are these the ravings of a deranged mind, or a normal high school student attempting to undertake a free writing assignment and making a poor choice of subject matter?  Was arresting him an appropriate reaction or an overreaction?

What do you think?

This sucks.  Man will I ever get better?  I'm doing a little work from bed these days, but only a few hours a day.  Nights are still the worst... coughing fits and so forth.  At least twice now the coughing fits have been so severe they've led to puking fits... or whatever you call it...  you cough hard a few times and then you ralph up a little lunch.  And then you do it again. Cough-cough-cough-wretch.  Cough-cough-cough-wretch.  Loads of fun.  Doc has recommended Mucinex DM for that, and it seems to be helping.

I stopped taking the Vicodin and the flavors of things seem to be coming back.  Now I take Tylenol when I start feeling discomfort.

Here's a snapshot of my little world.

Daytime television is awful.  There's very little worth watching and on some channels they have perhaps 10 commercials (or less) which they will rotate through multiple times every hour.  The Science Channel is one of the worst offenders.  The first time I saw their ad for their upcoming show about an expedition to Borneo, I thought it looked interesting.  Upon seeing this same damn commercial repeated 2000 times, I realized I have no interest in watching the Expedition to Borneo.  Know why?  Because all the way through it I will have to watch some other endlessly repeated commercial that will make me nuts. Eff that.

Oh and GEICO?  All your commercials make me want to do is stomp that stupid lizard to death.

So I've mostly been rotating through the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Science Channel, and occasionally G4TV.  Heavy use of the MUTE button on my TV remote to shut out the annoying commercials.  I saw an interesting show about the Cassini orbiter, and another about gamma ray bursts.  Most of it hasn't stayed with me.

G4TV... what the heck happened?  Didn't this use to be the video game channel?  What's all this other crap?  The Jamie Kennedy Experiment? WTF has that got to do with hot games?

In its defence the best show I've seen this week was on G4TV and it wasn't about videogames.  It was an English subtitled Japanese show called "Ninja Warrior" (in Japan the show is called "Sasuke").  Hundreds of contestants from around the world compete to be a "ninja warrior".  How?  By attempting to cross an extremely challenging obstacle course in four stages.  The obstacles are nightmarish and I really felt for the contestants.  The courses were so difficult, it was typical to have no winner at all.

G4TV ran about 8 episodes of Ninja Warrior back to back on Sunday.  Apparently some time passed (like several months) between each new round of attempts on the course.  During those intervals the courses would also change somewhat, obstacles would be added and removed, as if it wasn't challenging enough for some of these guys who were building their own copies of the courses and training at home.  Oh did I mention that most of the stages had time limits?

On the last episode, the guy I had been rooting for (it really pulled me in) finally won, being only the second person to ever complete the course.  It was pretty intense.

In some ways it reminded me of American Idol, because some of the people who showed up to compete were actors, or comedians, or beauty queens, or whatever--clearly untrained and only looking to get their few minutes on camera.  One guy who showed up every time was a sculptor who built miniature models of the ninja warrior course.  The models were exquisite and delicate.  And their creator was also obviously delicate... he was clearly a very frail little man who had no chance of completing the course, and yet he would attempt to run it anyway, failing spectacularly at the very first obstacle every time and falling in the drink.

I enjoyed the show a lot.  If you get a chance to catch it sometime, check it out.

Well I'm getting tired.   Hope everyone out there is happy and healthier than I.

Although it is very nice to have the XBOX 360, the current crop of games out for the system has me wondering if it is even worth it to purchase one.  It's great to have hi-def output of course, and there's no doubt in my mind that it is a better system.  But the dearth of good games for the platform is appalling.  If I wanted a great piece of hardware with shockingly few good games, I'd have bought a Macintosh.  The only conclusion I can come up with is that game designers are rushing to produce games for the 360 and therefore cutting corners.  The sad outcome of all this is that I have a sleek new xbox 360, and I am just not using it that often at all.

I recently picked up 2 new games because a gamer friend at work who is typically on top of the game scene said they were "awesome".  They are not "awesome", and I have previously noted how the word "awesome" has become meaningless in the world of video games.  In that same article I also noted that typical video game ratings are gratuitously inflated on GameSpot.  Remember, the GameSpot versus reality scale?

The two new games I tried were Dead Rising and Lost Planet.  Lost Planet was better than Dead Rising, but not by much, and both games fall into the "too boring to finish" category.    It is both sad and confusing to me that when I go online I find people on discussion fora raving about these games--people must actually be enjoying these boring experiences--and I wonder if game designers are trying to redefine the game experience to the point where folks have lowered expectations.

So those are the new games which I'm not playing anymore.  Boss Planet and Ass Rising.  And I am ever so done with CAPCOM.