Spore Creature Creator Impressions

Over the past two days I've been casually messing around with that new trial for the Spore Creature Creator. I enjoyed creating a few monsters and things, but got fairly tired of it after a while. One very important observation, though: Kids freaking love it. When I let kids play with the creature creator, they couldn't stop. It was infinite entertainment for all of them. Penny Arcade had a similar revelation yesterday as well. It's incredible just how fun and intuitive this is for kids, which has great promise. They even made me buy the full version of the Creature Creator for them. Very exciting.

There has been a huge marketing campaign for Spore come out of nowhere just recently, which is apparent if you check out YouTube or Wal-Mart or their masterful information releases to Joystiq that are spaced just right to keep everyone waiting every second until September 7th or whenever it will finally come out. I think this is guaranteed to be a huge hit that most actual gamers claim to hate because of the extreme hype.

While messing around with the Creature Creator, I did make an honest attempt at a few Mario characters. I had a go with a more impressionistic view of Birdo, but here's the YouTube video for my Koopa Troopa. At least that gives me a video upload that's not just a walkthrough for Echochrome.

Expressing My Impressions: Civilization and Battlefield Demos

This week, after a very slow Playstation Store update, I got access to the demos for Civilization: Revolution and Battlefield: Bad Company. These were two very big demos in the middle of nowhere, so I felt like talking about them. I've always been a big fan of the Civilization series, and Sid Meier is actually working on this one unlike the past few computer editions, so this is very exciting. I'm even listening to their podcast right now, so I'm rather giddy, you might say. In general, the deal with this game is that it's more compact and built ground-up for the consoles. The demo itself was just a tutorial, basically, but it did allow you to play the opening turns of a game as either Caesar or Cleopatra. The first sort of shocking moment for PC fans is when the advisor pops up on the screen and starts babbling in a sort of Simlish, which is immediately irritating, (especially when he's blocking the text you have to read) but eventually sort of becomes normal. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not. The Civiliopedia looks incredible this time around, with not just text entries but also pictures and videos for all kinds of subjects, showing off the added console power. The only other real difference I found so far was a much more interesting looking combat, with your little warriors sort of jumping around and not fighting so predictably.

Battlefield: Bad Company is, clearly, the next Battlefield game, but this edition appears to be ready to really feature a single player campaign and sort of interesting characters. Even in the online, this version is obviously going for a bit more of a sense of humor, with radio stations playing in vehicles. Similarly to Civilization, some of the quirky elements of this game immediately put me off, but I found them easier to take as time went on. The single player generally doesn't look great, and I found aiming difficult as is so often a problem in console shooters. For some reason, online play seemed just fine and natural enough. I only saw one real bug, when a blown up helicopter fell and balanced on its tip on the ground, but that's not game-breaking at all, and the multiplayer is fun enough to keep playing for a long time on its own. Both of these demos looked very promising for the summer game drought, I just wish the Playstation Network hadn't taken until 4 in the morning to put them up.