The game's wider presentation, however, is often less perfect. gif files, suggesting that Lolcats and headswaps of Shigeru Miyamoto may soon have a new enemy in the battle for message board mindshare. Showing off the finished product is a typically polished process: snapshots can be emailed, film clips can be directly upload to YouTube, and - both blessing and curse - Spore can export creatures in the forms of animated. The quest for perfection quickly becomes all-consuming, and the ease with which you can start over - a creature can be built in well under a minute - means that you're driven to try again and again. Luckily, iteration in Spore is fast, and a single click can take you back to the editor to undo your damage. It's also often slightly distressing to see the way your attributes have played out: if you haven't given your creature legs, it will wriggle about uncomfortably if you've stretched its mouth to comical proportions, its voice will be weirdly distorted.
Test drive allows you to add children, which awkwardly mimic their parent's actions, to differing degrees of success. It's shocking how independent their behaviour seems - you may have prodded them together, but they emerge into Test Drive palpably powered by their own intelligence. It's a combination of the animation (comic yet convincing, and filled with one-off touches: one of our creatures examined with interest the arm we'd just given it) colliding with the behaviour attributes born out of your design choices, but it's also much more than the sum of its parts. The first time you click into Test Drive is a genuinely thrilling moment: your creature suddenly bursts into life in a way that manages to feel thoroughly unexpected but absolutely right at the same time. The emphasis is on easy experimentation, and switching from Editor to Test Drive mode allows you quickly to see the creature in motion and demo everything from the way it walks and attacks to the sound of its mating call. From changing the body size using the scroll wheel, to dragging joints to stretch out the arms and legs, every tool in the Creature Creator works intuitively. Every part can be fiddled with - resized, angled, repositioned - and a paint menu allows you to colour in the creature's skin, or select from a range of pre-made designs.įorging the appearance of your creature is game enough in itself, but each addition is also shaping their attributes - altering a range of on-screen stats controlling everything from abilities and attacks to diet and socialising. And Mister Potato Head would be proud at the range available: there's a comprehensive selection covering everything from eyes and mouths to weapons and special details such as gills. Around the spine is a blob of chewing gum flesh, which can be squeezed or inflated before the body parts are selected and applied, Mister Potato Head-style.
Your starting point is the spine, which can be pulled into various shapes, all of which affect how the finished creature will stand and get about. Considering it takes you from a handful of vertebrae to a feature-complete, all-dancing, fin-wielding life form, the creator is staggeringly simple to use.
0 kommentar(er)
