Spore is a lot of fun

EA FINALLY RELEASED the long-awaited Spore today in some parts of the world, with the US version going on sale officially Sunday. That brings up three questions, is it a good game, a great game like topple Sim City, and can I run it on my system?

The short answers are yes, maybe and almost assuredly, in that order, but as always, there are a lot of caveats. Spore has an amazing amount of hype to live up to, and in this case it actually will do that, no Daikatana here.

Spore is billed as a sim to take a single-celled organism up to a space-faring race with everything in between, and it does that, just in steps, not linearly. There are five separate stages, Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization and Space, each radically different from the last.

Cells like plant matter

The stages are delineated by a progress bar on the bottom of the screen. When you accomplish goals, you get points, and the bar moves up, and when you hit one of the breakpoints, you get an ability, or simply move on to something else. In the cell stage, every breakpoint you hit, you get bigger and the things that used to menace you become background art, but the big things that couldn't be bothered suddenly are very interested in turning you into a light snack.

You must be at least 16 cells old to view this image

Once you have gotten to a break point, you can put out a mating call, and draw in a like-minded organism. From there, the screen fills with hearts, the music changes to something out of a Love Boat rerun, and your behavior changes. The cells flip over, eye each other, and then it is time for some hot cell-on-cell action. Unprotected cell-on-cell action leads to eukaryotic cell division, potential vice-presidental candidacies... and a new screen.

The new screen is an organism builder. While running around eating in a point-and-click manner, you get food, and occasionally parts. Those parts are used in this screen, you buy parts and put them on your cell. There may only be a dozen or two options, but you can place, tweak, resize and bend them until you age far more than you planned playing a video game. From there, you can paint the parts and test out your new blob.

If you are thinking that the customisations are endless, you are right. Most are cosmetic, but some change the game radically. If you end up the first stage with different mouthparts, you evolved, I mean you intelligently designed, from an herbivore to a carnivore. Some of these choices affect the later game, others do not. Some. like the mouthparts, are obvious while others are not.

Once your progress bar maxes out, you can evolve. This gives you a history of what your creature did, how long it took, and offers some new options to buy in the creator. Once you pick a set of legs, off you go to dry land and the Creature stage.

I live to kill

The Creature stage is radically different from the Cell stage. Instead of running around and eating the right type of food while avoiding bigger thingies, you have to socialise or antisocialise. In this stage, you get points by either befriending other creatures or wiping them out. Whenever you encounter a new race, you can be friendly or combative, usually your choice.

As your little spud progresses, he/she/it grows a brain and finds new parts scattered around the world. The brain allows you to pick up a posse of warped little creatures to help you charm the legs off the competition, or simply kill them.

As usual, you can put out a mating call, and then have some hot creature-on-creature action. The result is another entirely different creature creator screen where you spend the points gathered in the game to evolve your beastie. The option count here goes from a dozen or so to likely over 10 and, once again, some are cosmetic, others functional. Legs don't seem to do anything different other than guide how you walk, but your mouth definitely does.

The choices you make give your creature levels in one of four abilities in friendly or aggressive actions, or adds health and armor. If you plan on mauling all you behold, you can probably skip the fluffy cotton tail and simply get a mouth with more teeth. It isn't rocket science, but the choices are nearly infinite.

Once you and your posse survive and take over the world, or at least parts of it, you are then booted into the Tribe stage. This is, once again, radically different from the last part, and instead of controlling a creature, you run a tribe, with spuddy from the creature stage as the template.

Home sweet village

Tribe is similar to Creature in that you have to either impress or conquer neighboring tribes. The mechanics are quite different though, as are the customisation options. Your tribal currency is food, and you set your workers to semi-autonomously gather food, while your chief goes off and plays diplomat. The screen is not centered on any single point, so it takes a bit of time to become acclimatised to this phase.

Instead of customisig the critter himself, you pick costumes and accessories for the entire tribe. If you want to make the Red Fez of Great Power and Awesomeness, you can, provided your paint skills are up to snuff. Mine are not.

The next two stages, Civilisation and Space are a mystery to me, I didn't have enough time to finish Tribe, much less move on. That said, the first three stages grow fairly geometrically in complexity, and the next two sound like they will just do more of the same.

If that isn't enough, there are modes and sub-projects that you can play with until you die of old age. You can spend a long time simply creating creatures and painting them. When you do, things are automatically uploaded to EA for use as other races in the game. When you start a new game, it pulls down things other people made to populate your world as well. Quite a nice idea.

There are online tools, Sporepedia is the overarching name for them. You can share your creations with people, pull down theirs, and in general, socialise indirectly. Spore has the now mandatory achievements, including '42' (finding the center of the galaxy), Identity Crisis and Careless Parent. To say there is a lot here is understating things.

That brings us to the multi-hundred million, if not billion dollar question, is it a good game? The short answer is yes, but it won't topple Sim City as the greatest game that Will Wright ever did. So far, it is a lot of fun, but I don't feel the burning urge to drop my life and spend time only playing Spore. The thing about sims is that they grow on you, and soon enough, they do make you drop your life. Spore has the potential to do that, write me in a few weeks (email on top of the article) to find out if this one did.

More importantly than that, Spore has something for everyone. Not only can you go aggressive or friendly, you can not go anything at all. If you are one of the artistic set, you can spend your time making, modding and painting creatures. EA seems to be aiming for the casual gamer as well as the somewhat hardcore set, and has quite likely hit the mark. Halo griefers need not apply, but most others will find something to like in Spore.

You might think that a game this complex needs a huge machine to run, and luckily that is not the case, the system requirements are shockingly modest. If you have anything newer than an ATI 9500 or an Nvidia FX5900, you can run this game. EA even claims it will run on an Intel 945GM, the arthritic snail of modern integrated GPUs. On the CPU side, you need at least a P4/2.0 and 512M of ram, 768 if you are on the Broken OS.

Once really nice feature is that the Mac client is included in the game. All you need is OSX 10.5.3 and an Intel dual core CPU with 1G of Ram. Interestingly, on the Mac, you need at least an Intel GMA X3100, ATI X1600, or GeForce 7300 to run, Intel 950s and lower are right out. Sadly, there is no Linux client included.

Given those specs, how playable is it on the low end? The graphics settings have three main levels, low, medium and high. The test system I used for Spore was based on a Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H mobo with an Athlon X2 4850e (2.5GHz) and a Phenom X4 9950 (2.6GHz) for the low and high end CPUs respectively. GPUs were the inbuilt GPU on the Gigabyte board, basically a 780G @ 700MHz and the wonderful Sapphire Radeon 4870X2 on the high end.

The graphics on Spore will not floor anyone who has played Crysis, but they still look quite good and get the job more than done. In fact, how well it ran on lower end machines impressed me. The game seems to have a hard cap of 30FPS, at least Fraps never showed anything above 30, and was pegged at that on with everything on high on the highest end testbed.

With the X4 and the Sapphire card in the machine, you could not make the FPS counter drop below 30 at all on a 30" monitor @ 2560*1600. When you pulled out the GPU and relied on the integrated graphics, the max rez was limited to 1920*1200, higher than that did not display correctly with the GPU/monitor combo I used.

I was expecting a huge drop in frame rates, so I started modestly, 1280*960 with everything set on low. Fraps showed a rock solid 30 FPS in the Tribal stage. Moving everything to medium, the frame counter was showing 24ish +/- 2, and that was quite playable. When the rez was upped to 1920*1200, low settings once again produced 30FPS, medium was averaging 12. Low settings were playable, medium was not.

If you stop and think about it, integrated graphics, albeit the best integrated part on the market, can now drive the hot new mainstream game at playable frame rates all the way up to 1920*1200. That is as much a testament to ATI as it is to EA/Maxis.

Putting in the dual core 4850e, it showed similar frame rates to the X4. In the creature stage, the 790G+X2 combo still pegged the 30FPS cap on low/1920*1200, and dropped to 16ish FPS on medium. Basically, this game is pretty solidly GPU bound, but the bindings are wrapped pretty loosely.

I was expecting level load times and world creation times to jump up with the slower CPU, but that never happened. If you remember back to Sim City, the world creation took ages on the Atari 520ST, and showed a distinct speedup with every MHz you could throw at it. Will Wright seems to have learned that lesson well in the intervening 25 years, now just about any dual core CPU, Intel or AMD, would be more than enough to power Spore well.

On the GPU front, it is certainly perfectly playable on integrated graphics, but having the settings on high does add a lot of life to the world. Low is flat and rather lifeless, medium is a huge step up. Given that, I would recommend at least a mid-range GPU for the game, $100 will buy you an ATI 3870, much more in a few weeks. Given that for a bit more than the game, you can get a GPU that makes things much prettier and a little smoother, it is hard to recommend anything else.

Overall, Spore is a worthy game. For the few days I have played it, there seems to be a lot of depth to it, and other people playing took some very different routes to diverging play styles. And this is only scratching the surface. Spore if definitely worth buying, and may be one of the great games out there, but that question will take time to fully flesh out. With horns. And a duck bill. Add a cotton tail if you have the points. In any case, Spore is worth buying.µ