I’ve been playing around with Spore now for the past week, letting my kids help me with my creatures, control what my creatures do, where they do, which other creatures they have contact with. I say “letting” because not “letting” would result in the horrible whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine that I just don’t want to deal with right now. So, we’ll use “letting” for the time being. And I do have this to say…DRM or not, the game is fabu. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t found some problems….

One irritation is that I can’t seem to figure out how to get other creatures on my good side. I did it with one species…but the others just don’t seem very interested in my prancing about, attempts at singing, and posing. And there’s nothing like having your little critiquer over your shoulder constantly saying, “no, mommy, not like that, do it this way…you’re doing it wrong” over and over again, to crush your little ego. Yeah, kid, you’ve heard about this game for all of, what, two weeks, and watched me play it for a sum total of 4 hours, and now *you’re* the expert?!

Also, I’m getting my butt kicked now by the species that automatically look at me as dinner, and the dinner bell just rang. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if I could JUST GET SOME OTHER SPECIES ON MY SIDE AND INTO MY PACK. See problem number one above. I suppose my starting the game on the hardest mode didn’t help anything, but when I tried it out at PAX, it just seemed too easy. It was probably in easy mode. Yeah, I’ll just keep telling myself that.

But it is a riot to continually add body parts to my critter and figure out what next should go where. If only the various body parts seemed to have some unique value. See, body parts carry two different sets of value indicators…a level indicator (which is not in any way explained in-game) and an action indicator, by which I mean it indicates which actions the body part enhances, but not by how much. So, for example, you might choose a leg that is level 1, and has pose, health, and speed. But pose, health, and speed really don’t tell you *how much* pose, health, and speed you are getting. I suppose the “level 1″ indicator might do that, but still it doesn’t seem to have a value comparison within the game (other than level is lower than level 2). Further, there will be body parts with all of the same indicators. Since body parts can be changed to any shape you want, one wonders why you need to have different shaped body parts with the same values. Ah well.