Last week was the first week back at university and one of our modules, CS4067 Writing Games Analysis, requires that we keep a blog to help our writing skills. Also being an opportunity for me to keep writing, and keep reading, I’m happy that it’s part of the module. The module is supposed to provide the humanities side of games studies. It looks like the two main topics that we’ll be covering are ludology (the study of games—though not necessarily computer games—and play), and narratology (the study of story-telling). I have acquired a few books on the subjects and will write about anything interesting I find as I go along.
Yesterday I started playing Spore. At the first stage, where your character is some sort of water-based organism, I died lots of times and found some more effective placements of mouths/spikes on my creature. Dying put me right back into the game, where I left off.
On the next level, I left the water and started hunting on land. I found out how to use different attacks and when I died I had to start again from the nest, which wasn’t a problem. Nothing much changed when on the next level I was able to organize other members of my group to hunt in a pack.
When I go to the tribal stage, I was disappointed when my tribe was wiped out and had the start from a basic village again, but discovered that rather than attacking buildings directly, I should have been attacking the villagers and then clearing out the buildings after wiping out the population.
Carrying on to the civilisation stage, I quickly took over my continent and wiped out a few other civilizations. However, I made the mistake of relying on natural resources to give me “sporebucks,” instead of investing in factories. I didn’t realise that the natural resources would eventually dry up and was left without resources and with enemies attacking from both sides of the continent. I found I was able to survive but quickly got tired of straggling along with one or two cities at a time (out of twelve) and quit around 2am.
At the earlier stages, the penalty for messing up wasn’t so high. Just being sent back to the start of the level of a starting position was fine, but at the civilisation stage, I had a totally incompetent economy and no way of getting out. I was waiting for the enemy to attack so I could finally lose, but they were busy on their continent trashing each other’s cities. I’ll go back in today and try to get back to a fresh civilisation level and conquer the world.
The only major complaint about the game I have (except for the DRM.. boo!) is that the minimap doesn’t change with your camera position or orientation in the world. The world is a sphere and the map is 2D. If you’re at a corner of the map and looking south, it’s very difficult to make any sense of the map at all. And when an enemy city has the luck to be placed near a corner, it’s difficult to visualize any attack vector except from the one obvious quadrant.
Well, that’s the end of this entry. Hopefully I’ll have some more interesting ideas that reviewing games I’m playing in future posts.
