Spore Never Changes

If you've never encountered Spore before, that game was the swan song for Will Wright, the creator of amazing games such as SimCity and The Sims. Spore is a game that enables you to mould the evolution of a species from a single-celled organism until it's flying around the galaxy as a starship captain in a space-faring civilization that's capable of terraforming other planets. You start with a cell-growing mini-game, progress to a creature stage full of dancing or fighting, then compete with other creatures in a tribal stage with musical instruments or fighting, then compete in the civilization stage to unify every city on your species' homeworld with religion, trade, or warfare, and then finally head out into the stars to colonise the galaxy. The most distinctive mechanic in the game is the creature creator that enables you to craft cartoonish creatures, buildings, and vehicles.

The reason I'm talking about Spore is because I've been having fun in recent weeks revisiting that game. I was around when it was first released over 15 years ago, and I remember the furious backlash against it when it failed to match the ridiculous levels of hype for the idea of a "Sim Everything" with some sort of in-built evolution simulator for education purposes. EA's draconian DRM scheme also didn't help, yet Spore still sold millions of copies around the world. Maxis also released a new creepy crawly parts pack and a role-playing expansion. I remember enjoying Spore at the time, so coming back to it has been a fun nostalgia trip for me.

Today, you can buy a DRM-free version of Spore with all its expansions on GOG. It still connects to the original Maxis servers and tracks achievements if you use your EA Origin account. You can also still subscribe to Sporecasts to introduce other peoples' creations into your game, but annoyingly it's hard to find good ones from the millions available without googling for them first, and frustratingly there's no obvious way to manually download Sporecasts, so you must wait for the game to download them automatically in the background after you've logged enough hours playing Spore. If you want to try the game for yourself, I also strongly recommend that you save early and save often, because even with GOG's patches, the game will periodically crash or respawn you at an autosave that's either not very recent or was created right before you died, which means that you either lose a huge amount of progress or become trapped in an unwinnable scenario.

Once you get past the quirks of Spore being an old game that was originally designed to run on Windows XP, it's a very fun and unique experience. I've spent by far the most time in the Space stage, because in my view, that's the area that affords the most flexibility and creativity. I appreciate the Creature stage for its creativity, but I almost invariably end up producing winged raptor hell-beasts because the Simple Simon dancing game that you have to do to make friends with other species is boring and ridiculous.

In the Tribal stage, every AI empire is your enemy and targets you specifically unless you play the right musical instruments and send them fruit baskets, at which point they just sit there and don't interact with anybody at all. I think that's a shame, because if my tribe hadn't been relentlessly under attack, I might have tried that less aggressive approach, and perhaps even tried domesticating the local wildlife instead of hunting them to extinction. The Civilization stage is also a mixed bag, as it's essentially a mad dash to spam vehicles and attack your neighbours before they do the same to you. Diplomacy in the civilization stage does allow for non-aggression pacts, but there are specific civilizations that will just always war with everyone no matter what you do, so it feels like the game is still forcing you to play aggressively. As a result, I only play through those stages to earn the achievements, and I'm grateful that the Galactic Adventures expansion pack unlocks the Space stage on new installs so that I'm not forced to play through all the other stages first like the base game requires.

Currently I'm playing as a warrior race that live on the planet Denmux, and I'm enjoying it tremendously. As I write this blog post, the valiant species that inhabits Denmux have formed a space civilization with seven new colonies on terraformed planets and several more colonies captured from rival factions that were foolish enough to declare war on them. My captain's starship isn't yet powerful enough to capture alien home worlds, but their allied fleet is powerful enough to take down Grox raiders and defend colonies from pirates and Spode's followers. I'm enjoying the process of slowly increasing the T scores of several terraformed worlds so that I can upgrade their colonies and expand their spice production. Hopefully I'm guiding the mighty Denmux Empire in the right direction on the galactic stage, and they will no doubt feature in any future save games I create with less aggressive space-faring species.

Pokémon Fans Take to The High Seas

Earlier this week, the Pokémon company took the Pokémon TV app down from app stores on all platforms, and that will stop functioning entirely in March. Suffice to say, as someone who's old enough to remember the original games and TV shows, and still carries a Pokémon themed wallet even as an adult, I'm disappointed by that decision.

Now if anyone wants to see episodes of that long-running Japanese cartoon, they'll find them on a hilariously long list of streaming services to which nobody can realistically afford to subscribe. While signing geofenced exclusivity deals can be a lucrative business for content owners, they often overlook that the whole reason why so many people used the Pokémon TV app was that it was more convenient than online piracy. Signing a deal with one streaming service might have worked, but sporadically putting different series on different streaming platforms, and in some cases even different seasons of the same series on different platforms, is not what convenience looks like!

Netflix was able to charge £6 a month because cord cutters that didn't want to pay for cable could get fast access to high quality videos in one place without advertisements, viruses, or the low-key threat of prosecution. Today, it costs £9 a month for Netflix, and it probably doesn't have most peoples' favourite shows on it anymore because the content owners signed an exclusivity deal with a different platform, or the content owners tried to build their own dead-on-arrival Netflix competitor. Also, Netflix has an annoying tendency of taking down third-party video content for very American reasons instead of just providing a visible content warning before the start of a show like linear TV channels have been doing for decades. Worse still, Netflix no longer permits parents to share their account with any young adult children that have just moved out and can't afford their own subscription. To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, Netflix has become enshittified, and unfortunately rival platforms have decided to compete on how heavily they can monetise content rather than providing a better experience for their customers. Amazon is the worst offender in that regard, as they either charge for TV Shows they didn't create themselves or shunt them onto the ad-supported FreeVee service, and now they're inserting adverts in Prime subscription content for which viewers have already paid.

As someone that does pay for the British equivalent of cable TV, I've been increasingly watching TV Shows on used DVDs that I've bought for cheap from eBay and CEX. I think it has probably reached the tipping point for me now where it no longer makes sense to pay for streaming services, particularly given that I can supplement the DVD boxsets with linear TV recordings and my cable provider's video on-demand content. The streaming services that I still have for now are bundled at a discount with my cable TV, broadband, or mobile phone contracts but their days are numbered because, unless someone physically breaks into my house and steals the DVD boxsets for my favourite TV Shows, I only need to pay for those once. They also aren't going to just randomly disappear from the bookshelf in my living room because a random stranger threw a wobbler on Twitter to win fake Internet points, or because a high-powered executive in the United States wants to buy another yacht.