I decided, Tuesday night, to buy the game, despite complaints about the DRM (Digital Rights Management).  I did this for three main reasons:

1. I read a letter from someone at EA rebuking the claims made by the anti-DRM crowd.  It was somewhat reassuring, and I know some of the guys who do the webcomics I read have purchased and been playing the game with no complaints.
2. Jess is going to be out of town for a few days, and I’ll have some extra free time on my hands.
3. I just wanted to play it!

I purchased he game in downloadable format, since the only physical versions I could find in Poland were in Polish, and that’s an area I’m still pretty weak.  And Amazon.co.uk wouldn’t deliver to Poland…  

After about an hour download, I installed the game and ran it no problems.  It gets choppy from time to time, and there have been a few crashes, but nothing major.  I’m basically running it with bare minimum requirements on this little macbook.

I was a bit disappointed at how quickly you evolved through all of the different stages.  I had hoped a lot of the gameplay would be focused on exploring the worlds (micro and macro) in addition to completing the goals.  However, my civilization had evolved from single celled to space travel by the end of the day.

I actually found myself trying to slow the game down, especially during the single-celled stage, which seemed to last only a few minutes.

The game is really fun, though.  The major focus is on the creation and building of both creatures and buildings.  

It gives you the power to be extremely creative if you wish, but gets very tiring when you can’t progress without creating four buildings and two vehicles all in a row…  

Another thing I noticed that having a creature with 2 pairs of level 2 legs does not give your creature level 4 ability…  still level 2.  I see how this makes sense in a balancing aspect, but I felt a little cheated out of some levels.

The "Massively single player" aspect of the game is pretty neat.  The fact that I can see other people’s (including my own) buildings and creations in my game.

Evolving your creature and trying out the new parts is pretty fun, too.

I took the diplomatic approach, and evolved an herbivore by making friends…  Next time through, I think I might make a beefy carnivore and advance through domination.  But not until after I’ve fully explored the space aspect.

So, Jess and I are INCREDIBLY excited for a game called Spore.  If you haven’t heard of it yet, perhaps you need to crawl out from the primordial soup and evolve a pair of ocular sacs.  

Why the geek-talk?  Spore is a game where you start by controlling a single-celled organism in a pacman-esque game of eat and run, with the added depth of evolution and of course, graphics.  You evolve different weapons and modes of transportation until, eventually, you make landfall and grow legs.

After that, you’re on a predator/prey mission.  The game is balanced so that you’re never really at the top, but never at the bottom either.  Other creatures are created using content from other users.  You’re not actively playing against other players, but the game uses their content, so you still get to see some of what other people are doing, which is pretty cool.

From there the evolution continues, but on a more macro-scale of limbs and organs.  Once your creature reaches the "Technology" stage, the game morphs to more of a sim-city or civilization feel.  From there your evolve your technology until you eventually travel the universe in search of new worlds to populate!

Currently, Maxis has only released the creature creator, which allows you to mess with some of the possible combinations of your higher-level life forms.  The results can range from humorous to mundane, to downright deranged.  Needless to say, it’s provided us with plenty of mindless entertainment.

I’d post a few of my creatures up here, but I can’t find where the files are stored!  But one cool feature I’ve read, but haven’t tried, is that you can import someone else’s creature, but the creatures are just saved as a normal PNG file, and the layers store all the data…  I’m not big on file formats, so I don’t know as much about is as I should, but it’s an awesome way to do it.

Anyways, our little macbook will barely run Spore, but we’re still going to buy it when it comes out in September.  We’ll have to download it from the states, though, since buying it here in Poland might not work the way we’d want it to.

This past Saturday was our second night spent rocking out at Gianca and Amy’s place with Josh, Tracy, Ben, Karen, and Troy playing Rock Band and some Wii games.  We had a blast, but I had to promise not to hog the drums.  I’ve always liked the drums and wanted to play them.  With Rock Band, I actually can.  And apparently, with a few drinks, I got really possessive.  I guess I didn’t want to let the dream go.  And I won’t have to, since I’ll be buying some real drums at some point.

The game is extremely intuitive, and great fun with a full group.  You feel like you’re really playing the songs.  I wish there was more selection, but I’m pretty sure there is downloadable content, and that that content will be extended.

The Wii was really fun, too, but just can’t compete against Rock Band.  Though we did have some really good tennis matches.  I wish the boxing was a bit more responsive, but it was still good.  Bowling was fun, too, but I was worried I’d smack my hand on something.

As the night moved on, we progressed to Karaoke, which was surprisingly fun.  Normally I’m not the sing-in-front-of-a-crowd type, but I’m getting more comfortable with it, and Jess keeps telling me I have a good voice, so I guess I’m starting to believe her.

We almost busted out the Greek dancing again.  I tried to give lessons last week, but wasn’t as coherent as I should have been for teaching.  But we all had fun with it.  I think we were all too tired this week.  As it was we got back really late and were exhausted all day Sunday.  Lucky for me, I’m not a huge football fan, so I didn’t miss out on the Superbowl.