Coding with Fountain Pens

Spore is an epically conceived attempt to provide a game that lets you oversee your little creature from tidepool to galactic domination.  While this sounds like an educational game about evolution, this is not a science based game about evolution by natural selection.

It’s a game about intelligent design.  You have godlike powers over your creature’s abilities and appearance, and you can modify this to achieve your desired ends.  There is no random variation, all of your creatures are identical.  There is no selection, as death of your creature never affects the rest of the species.  If you notice there is fruit hanging high in a tree, you can stretch your creature’s neck in a Lamarckian fashion.

Also, contrary to what I first thought, modifying attributes like your creature’s gait doesn’t appear to change their ground speed.  That seems to be entirely dependent on whether they have +1 or +2 leg parts.  Also, adding a second set of horns doesn’t increase their charging ability.  Thus, most of the creature editor is aesthetic, and doesn’t affect the creature’s abilities other than as an inventory of parts.

To be fair it may be impossible to create a realistic evolution by natural selection game, by definition.  If there is nothing for the god-like player to tweak, it’s not going to be a very engaging game-play experience.