If God Dropped Acid

NOTE: This article contains satire and is not to be taken seriously.

Although the Spore Creature Creator has been out since the 17th of June, only now am I finally ready to express my deepest thoughts concerning this let-down of galactic proportions.



Before we go on to the creature creator, let's start with Spore itself. First shown in depth during the 2005 GDC (presentation embedded below), Spore quickly became a matter of excitement amongst gamers who enjoyed the kinds of creation games that Maxis (via Will Wright) is known for (myself included). Wow! Such a gigantic game, with the ability for players to create pretty much everything! It was unprecedented.



Since then, the game evolved, becoming more refined, parts were added, parts were taken out, and those of us who first were excited continued to look on with that same childlike wonder. Then, to our delight, it was announced that the entire creature phase editor would be released as a demo of the game. By far, the creature creator looked like the best editor in the game, and people (again, myself included) were pissing their pants to get their hands on it.

June 17th game and it was officially released. The editor came in two parts: a free editor that had about 25% of the parts available, and the full editor, which was just ten dollars. I had initially pre-ordered it on Amazon, but couldn't wait and so bought it again for direct download.


It was all I'd imagined! I could create pretty much anything I could come up with, and the editor would bring it to life. There were three parts to the editor: the parts tab, the skin tab, and the test drive tab. They allowed one to build their creature, specify its texture, and try it out, respectively. The procedural generation of texture wrapping was, for the most part, all that had been hyped--the computer did a damn fine job.

The problem came when you brought your five-footed beast with a mouth on its ass and eyes for nipples into the test drive area. In spite of how nice the procedural texturing was, the procedural animation was... eh... not quite up to par.



In fact, that is an understatement. It SUCKED. Sure, bipeds worked almost perfectly, and quadrupeds were just fine as long as the back feet didn't step through the front feet (on account of a lack of any kind of collision detection). The real problems arise when you add more legs or an uneven number of legs (such as two in the back and one in the front, or vice versa). Most often, either the leg will be bent in such a way that it doesn't move in a useful way (such as the single hind leg dragging behind the first two--user error, since such a leg would realistically be useless), or the legs bend and twist in horrid, deformed ways as it performs various animations (program error).

Most creature creator artists (many of which are very, very talented) don't care about the animation--it's all about how it looks, but what's important to keep in mind is that the creatures that are made and uploaded to the Sporepedia (that's right--the huge database of creatures that, when the game is released, will be used to randomly populate Spore's galaxies) will have to be animated at some point, or else it's useless to have them there. Many artists have (with much skill, I might add) used the tools of the creature creator to recreate animals, vehicles, foods, etc., forgetting that the whole point of the creator is to make never-before-seen creatures to populate never-before-seen worlds. Not to create things we're familiar with so that some gamer will encounter a planet full of t-rexes, a planet full of crawling creature-airplanes, and a planet full of penises (oh, yeah--I forgot to mention the Sporn).

Which brings me nicely to my next gripe. As of my writing this article, there are over 1.5 million creatures in the Sporepedia, and for every (these are Maxis-approved featured creatures, by the way) Cerebrilith, Cinke Deepdigger, and Orbanid, there are ten Lawn Gnomes, Strawberries, or Maxises, and that's my biggest complaint. Of all the problems that have come before, my biggest is that most creatures that will be randomly chosen to populate my Spore universe are absolute SHIT. Now, I'm not saying that I'm some kind of genius of creative creature design (far to the contrary, though, in my defense, I can't stand bad animations or excessive clipping, thus vastly limiting my creative options), but Jesus Christ Almighty, don't most of these people even TRY to make their creation look presentable?

I know that I've thrown away far more creatures than I've made, and have later even thrown away finished works that I later decided were poor. If anything, I'd rather have creatures of consistent quality in not only looks, but animation and functionality as well, thus making myself a good candidate for "subscribed content" (in the full Spore game, one will be able to filter the creatures that populate their universe by the users that created them). So maybe they're not the prettiest creatures, but they work and, for the most part, make aesthetic and realistic sense.

On the other hand, most other users seem not only to give no thought to the point of their creatures, but also have an immature attitude to match their creative ability (I've many times gotten thumbs-down votes on all my creatures for giving someone creative criticism). When you get down to it, the biggest thing that sucks about Spore (as it is thus far) is that it's an MMO game (regardless of what Will Wright said about it being "massively single-player"), which means that the idiotic and immature scum of society buzz around it like flies around a cow's asshole, and let me tell you, there is nothing that kills my creative urges like a whiny prick.

What's most spectacular is that the creatures in the very first image of this article are actually possible in the editor (though posing them in that manner is not), so why don't more people try to keep their creatures looking good, like that? Also, I think it's kind of funny that they're all bipeds with their eyes above their mouthes--if it's done any other way (for the most part), the animation turns out to be crap, and if it isn't crap in the test drive, I'm guessing that it will be crap in the full game, when the creature oddly bends its head/neck so that it can actually eat with its mouth.

On top of all of that, the game has a number of annoying bugs, such as forgetting the creatures that one has made, or not importing the .png files carrying the creature code properly.

So here I am, out twenty bucks (that could better be spent on WALL-E movie tickets, to fuel my unhealthy obsession). Yet another Maxis/EA product that is fun for about five hours, then quickly loses its thrill. Maybe I'm missing the awesome Web 2.0 thrill that is the creature creator, but I'm not particularly impressed by what I see.

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