Spored out of your mind?

[Samwise]

So do any stores in the US have this yet?  If so, I'll forgo the preload and call around to see if anyone's interested in selling me a box.

[Yoru]

Friend names! 

If you want my shit, add SpaceYoru.

If it gets long enough I'll split this off into a new thread.

[Morfiend]

So do any stores in the US have this yet?  If so, I'll forgo the preload and call around to see if anyone's interested in selling me a box.

Gamestop is showing the 7th as ship date, which is odd to me as thats a Sunday.

[Cory Jacobs]

1. People can deliver on hype, it just takes an exceptionally long amount of time and a shit load of delays and...

You are so wrong!

Lies. You can't look at the polish on the builders and tell me it doesn't deliver. Now gameplay.... eh. But I didn't expect much depth outside of the online community.

[schild]

Cory, I know you. Tell us if you haven't gone back to Disgaea 3 in 2 weeks.

[Cory Jacobs]

Oh, I'm not even going to play it. Gameplays too shallow, I was just blown away by how deep the evolution system was. I'm already up playing Disgaea right now! 

[schild]

That's my Cory.

[ffc]

Spore has practically no DRM whatsoever. Let's just stop this talk of DRM. Yeesh. It's not like it's Splinter Cell fucking Chaos Theory with some bastard child of Starforce and Securom.

And it's not like a pirated copy can authenticate into Spores servers, it's tied to your CD key.

NEXT TOPIC.

I thought Spore is limited to three installations?  That's pretty and warrants discussion.  Sure it's better than phoning home every 10 days for authentication as originally planned, but it is still unsettling. 

Having Spore authenticate in online events like downloading patches or other creatures is fair.  A hard limit of three installations before begging for more is not.

[nurtsi]

Well, got Spore, played my creature to space age. All the mini-games before it are rather meh. The first part is an arcade game where you point and click. Second one is like any MMORPG quest where you need to gather 100 doohickeys or kill 100 leper gnomes. Third is like C&C with four different types of units. Fourth is Civilization-lite with four different units again. The last stage where you fly around with your UFO abducting things, pew-pewing, exploring and trading seemed a bit more interesting.

All mini-games give you something to design, so people who like creating and editing stuff might like it. The most interesting part for me was creating the different creatures, but you don't have the full part list at your disposal in the beginning and you have to painfully collect lot of stuff to be able to make something interesting.

As a game it sucks, but I'm sure the editor will find its crowd.

[lac]

Friend names!
If you want my shit, add SpaceYoru.
If it gets long enough I'll split this off into a new thread.

I'm playing as mientje.
My spore couldn't find SpaceYoru, only Yoru_noob 

[Samwise]

So US stores are holding fast to the 9/7 release date?  Bah.  I guess I'll go ahead and do the preload so I don't have to deal with the mouthbreathers at my local retailers.

[Sky]

My spore couldn't find SpaceYoru, only Yoru_noob 

Spowned

[Jain Zar]

It won't run on the previous Mac OS and its EA.  I shall be passing for now. 

Besides, September 9th is when Battle for Black Reach, Warhammer 40K's newest starter set packed with the 5th edition rulesbook and about 1000 points worth of Marines and Orks comes out.

And I am back to Da Boyz after a nearly year long hiatus of Chaos Marine and Tyranid shenanigans.

I've barely played in years, but I'll be picking this up next week as well.

Do they still have combat patrol stuff in the new edition? I'll have to rejig my painted CPs again, and finish my unpainted CPs, and then rejig their lists.

I don't think they do actually.  It might be in the hardback book maybe.  Or at least the previous one.  (Or one could always look for it online if you don't have the old book..)

But I saw Black Reach at the Comic Shop yesterday, but was a good boy and did not buy it.  I did get to listen to the idiots playing fighting video games belittle the minis gamers since there were very few of us this week.
Given that the store is very close to kicking them out for good (because they don't actually buy much of anything, take up space in the game room, and use up electricity...) they were on rather shallow ground.

Ill buy it eventually though.

[Driakos]

My Spore friend name is: driakos

I'm at the modern age, twice.  I started over to see if I'd missed anything tremendous playing on easy.  On normal now, and I don't see any difference at all.

[Azazel]

Yeah, I skipped the last hardcover book because I was studying when it came out, then never got around to buying it. Found a sealed new copy on eBay a couple of days ago for $5.50, since I realised I had an unbroken line of the 40k-hardcovers, and I may as well keep it up after so many years. I'll buy the HC of the new one as well in a few weeks.

I'll also buy Black Reacharound, I was on the verge of deciding to buy two of them for weeks, before realising yesterday that I don't, you know, actually need any more Space Marines or Orks. And haven't played a proper game since before the last edition (I had some newb-training games using B4M with my wife and some RPGer/CRPGer friends who never got into the money sink that is GW. I'd started building CPs of the various races in order to have some short, fun, casual mini-games with friends using my pre-painted and formed forces. Only got my Dark Angels and 'Nids totally finished, then they changed their Codex.     Orks, Iron Warriors, Catachan Jungle Fighters  were all still in the WIP phases. And I never did get around to a happy list with my already-painted Guardsmen or Marines.

[Samwise]

Ah, now I remember what pissed me off about EA's direct download option.  They charge an extra fee for "download insurance" or someshit that lets you re-download it later if you need to.  You know, the thing Steam lets you do at will as part of its basic service.

No, fuck that.  I'll go brave the mongoloid hordes at the brick-and-mortar retailers and get the game a few days late if need be.   

[Yoru]

Friend names!
If you want my shit, add SpaceYoru.
If it gets long enough I'll split this off into a new thread.

I'm playing as mientje.
My spore couldn't find SpaceYoru, only Yoru_noob 

Weird. Some other folks couldn't find me either, and attempting to find me via the online Sporepedia website gets an internal server error.

I get the same error trying to view your profile. I imagine this is a consequence of the server meltdown or somesuch.

[Shapechanger]

The servers at EA use 14 different brands of hardware.... that's what happens when the Engineers have 0 control over the hardware they use, and the suits decide what parts to buy.

Don't expect much from their servers!  (Though Mythic does it differently and the Engineers control this (they use 2 brands)).

[Yoru]

The friend thing seems to be up at the moment. I was able to add you two to my friends list. Onward to galactic domination! 

[Venkman]

So do any stores in the US have this yet?  If so, I'll forgo the preload and call around to see if anyone's interested in selling me a box.

Gamestop is showing the 7th as ship date, which is odd to me as thats a Sunday.

Last I heard, it was Sunday in fact. I've pre-ordered for delivery but will be checking ye old' game shoppe tomorrow anyway.

[Samwise]

I've preordered for in-store pickup, against my better judgement.  It seems like my best chance of actually getting a box on Sunday so I can have a few hours with it before the work week starts.

[Big Gulp]

I predict much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  This thing is a mile wide and inch deep.

The initial cell phase can take up to 20 minutes and just involves holding down the mouse button and steering your cell towards either animal or vegetable matter.  For 20 minutes.  The land phase is all about either wooing or extincting nests of other critters.  This takes forever and is boring as hell also.  Imagine WoW, only you really just have one hotkey and you'll be spamming it constantly.

That's as far as I've gotten.  Will Wright is a great toy creator, but a shitty game producer.  Glad I decided to give this thing a "sneak peek" before I actually shelled out cash for it, because frankly I got more enjoyment out of just the creature creator.

[Venkman]

You just described four different popular casual online games 

[rk47]

actually it's pretty shallow as he said.
let me just explain in one sentence of each stage I played so far:
1. cell stage: you are playing pacman.
2. land stage: you either grind social skills or kill everything that moves
3. tribal stage: you zerg rush other villages with music or weapons (very, very short tech tree)
4. modern stage: tank rush, jet rush

they're just selling the critter editor which is pretty good. Otherwise ....This game lacks depth. For the Space Age, I've not messed around it too much, just surprised my space taurens made it that far in one night.

[Aez]

Friend name : AezZea

[Yoru]

I think the hit-or-miss nature of the first 4 phases is going to hurt the game a lot. I enjoy the cell and creature phases the most out of the first 4, and civilization the least (on subsequent playthroughs, contrary to what I posted earlier). Space is pretty much what the game's about though, and even that takes a little while to crack open.

Contrary to making it accessible, they obscured the good bits behind some ugly grindiness in the space phase and drudgery in the earlier ones. That said, a lot of the fun is toy-fun, not game-fun. I find the game bits getting in the way more often than not.

As an example, in the Space phase, you'll occasionally get pirates attacking  or an ecological catastrophe befalling a colony/ally. The game immediately assigns you a miniquest and flashes an on-screen warning. In the former case, without max-level defenses, you pretty much have to rush back and help out, or you're going to be left with at least a few destroyed buildings. If it's an allied world, you MUST rush back, because not doing so pisses them off for a good while, which can lead to compound failures that rip apart your lucrative trade routes and alliances, or even start wars. Ecological catastrophe is even more urgent as you get 3-4 minutes to rush back to the planet (regardless of where you are in the galaxy - I've been on another spiral arm entirely and have it happen), or else one of the species in the foodweb on that planet dies off. Leading to the rest of that level of the foodweb collapsing within 10-15 minutes, and then the planet drifting out of its terraform rating, which slowly shuts down and destroys your colony.

This makes exploring the galaxy a pain sometimes. You're already navigating between hostile empires (sometimes) and watching your fuel gauge (always). Now you have to rush home every 10-15 minutes to fend off disaster. And don't even think about what it's like when you have a sprawling star empire of 50+ solar systems spread across a huge area.

They really needed to put in some way for you to get out of these minimissions. Pirates you can eventually defend against if you drop an incredibly-expensive super defense turret on every planet (although the messaging doesn't tell you if it's pirates or an invasion - and you still need to defend against the latter), and you can drop some items that decrease the rate of ecological catastrophe. If you've got defenses in place, they need to stop messaging you and have the game take care of it for you. And if you're way the fuck far away, the minimissions just shouldn't spawn at all. Nothing is more annoying than enjoying some nice peaceful exploration/planetsculpting and then getting a 4-minute timed mission that takes you back halfway across the galaxy through 3 wormholes.

Still, I do really dig the space phase. If they turned off some of the really annoying bits (or added a toggle to let you turn them off), it'd be a masterpiece for sandbox gamers.

[OcellotJenkins]

So you can purchase and direct download the PC version but not the Mac version? WTF?

[Shavnir]

Fucking christ Direct2Drive is slow.  Next time I'll order it to be delivered with thumbdrives on carrier pidgeons or something.

[bhodikhan]

I'm playing as Bhodikhan.

Some aspects are interesting. As a complete game I'm going to hold off judgment for a bit longer. However, it's rather tedious and goofy in places.
 

[Lantyssa]

User: Lantyssa

[Hoax]

Fucking christ Direct2Drive is slow.  Next time I'll order it to be delivered with thumbdrives on carrier pidgeons or something.

lol.  You still can't actually play this with other people right?  I never got the hype in the first place because its a single player game with mmo gameplay depth.

[Yoru]

It seems like the accounts take about 48-72 hours to appear in the buddy search thing. Some folks have just recently been able to friend me, while I've been able to friend anyone who signed up when the creature creator first came out. Anyone here who has had stuff listed for a few days I can locate, while the newer ones I have no luck with.

I'm on my second game in the space phase, and now that I know what I'm doing and how to carefully manage development & expansion, I'm having a lot fewer headaches than when I first got there.

[Azazel]

This thread sums up why I like to avoid pre-release hype and bullshit for games. Glad it's got the fucked-up DRM too, I'd probably have bought it otherwise...

 

[Stephen Zepp]

Does not work on my machine (funny, I have a Dell XPS M130--decently standard gaming laptop).

Turns out the error I've been getting has been known since May, yet EA/Maxis has never once responded to it, and it's not in their support or forums.

DasmX86Dll.dll cannot be found. Crashes every time you start a game.

[naum]

Spore losing the DRM Fight
http://fredbenenson.com/blog/2008/09/07/spore-drm-and-disorganized-activism/

Fsck EA and their DRM.