So I've completed the first three stages of Spore; a game I have been waiting for for about the last two years. So far I have played the Cell, the Creature and the Tribal phases, and I thought I would post my impressions so far.

I think the best summary would be that it's a really fun toy: none of the modes I've played so far are "deep" enough into that specific genre to really warrant wanting to come back and play through them again. The stages I've played through so far are both too long (repetitive and a bit dull) and too short (it abruptly ends and you're expected to move on, even though you have probably only discovered maybe 25% of the available stuff).

There are some really fun touches, like seeing the occasional spaceship fly overhead and abduct someone, and there are a few "epic" creatures scattered about the world which are just huge versions of a specific creature type, and they have loads of health and give lots of food when killed (but it took about 30 deaths of my guys to kill it).

I suppose my main gripe with the game is the way some of the stages hang together; for example when you click the button to exit the tribal stage, you get a cutscene where random symbols appear over your creatures' heads and then it just dumps you into the building editor, and you're supposed to know somehow that you're designing yourself a city hall. After that you get dumped into another editor and this time you're building your military vehicle... it doesn't seem to introduce it very well. Also at the end of the tribal stage, it just throws up some text saying something like "your creature has now spread across the world, but has broken into factions"... I would have much preferred it if they actually showed this happening in the world rather than just cheating and sticking some text up there. The stages feel a bit too discrete and could have used much better storytelling to link them together I think.

So now for the more petty gripes: the control scheme is a bit rubbish. I suppose they copied it from the Sims or something, and additionally there is the need to have a consistent control scheme throughout all the modes, but still it felt kinda awkward.

Also, the tribal stage customisation is a bit lame. You get bits of outfit to put on your character: hats, shoulder­guards, back­packs, and so on... but there are no restrictions on the number of hats (for example), or where you can put them... so I ended up using hats as kneeguards :) But you don't really feel like you're dressing your character, more just sticking badges on him.

So anyway despite those flaws it still is fun to play, but I don't see it having a huge amount of lasting appeal... but maybe the later stages will have more replayability, I don't know. Also I think it might be more fun if I knew a few people who were playing and then would see their creatures in my world rather than the Maxis pre-loaded ones or ones from general randoms.

There's a bit of a revolt kicking off over on Amazon over the draconian DRM that Spore comes loaded with, too. It wasn't a deal-breaker for me, but I am dreading that fourth install after wiping my PC again...

I wanted to like Age of Conan, I really did. I tried, twice. World of Warcraft has become kinda boring for me, and while I'm sure that the next expansion: Wrath of the Lich King will have me sucked in once again, it would have been nice to have something else to keep me entertained until then.

I think my problem with AoC isn't so much that "it's not WoW", but more that... well, unless you can come up with something much better, then it should be as WoW-like as possible: surely that's your target market! For example: the chat system is awkward, the friends system is awkward... It all makes me feel that they never actually used it themselves.

To take a simple example: they use forward-slash (/) for commands, just like WoW, but in WoW you can just type a forward-slash to open up the chat window and keep typing, it's all automatic. In AoC, forward-slash is bound to some other action, so you always have to press enter first to open up the chat box. I've lost count of the number of times I've forgotten to do this and had to re-enter my command, and it quickly becomes frustrating.

Another simple example is key bindings: there is no excuse here at all to not have the default keys set up the same as WoW. Key bindings are instinctive, and are often used without thinking, so why on earth are the strafe keys bound to Z and C instead of Q and E? A sure-fire way to annoy any WoW converts is to have them perform random actions when they are trying to do something else... and even when I tried to fix it using the key binding UI, my changes wouldn't save.

That brings me to another point... AoC is probably the buggiest game I have ever played. For a long time after I installed it, I just couldn't get textures to work. Everything else was fine, but all the 3D models has a sort of chess-board black and white pattern on them. I would love to tell you how I managed to fix this, but in the end what happened was the game crashed and burned, and when I restarted it had magically fixed itself!

There are lots of things that seem completely overcomplicated, I suppose because they thought they knew better; again it makes me think they never really tried using it. An example: emotes. Pretty simple, right? In WoW, you can do things like "/smile Kotaro" and it will smile at Kotaro! In AoC, emoting requires some crazy-ass voodoo like /emote social_expression_suspicious, and half the emotes you are used to using in WoW don't work; and I don't mean anything obscure here: there is no smile emote that I can find. Maybe AoC developers just don't like smiling.

Oh, and there is an emote UI, but you first have to find out how the hell to turn it on (press Y, if you're interested), then you have to select from one of about 50 emote categories (happy, ecstatic, sad, melancholy, friendly, etc), guessing which one might contain the action you're looking for, and then, finally, you can wave at someone... about five minutes after they have already run off and found something better to do.

There are other things that are more fundamental, too... like every single character you create starts off in the exact same place with the exact same quests, regardless of class or race. This means there is almost no incentive at all to try any of the other classes, and the game quickly loses any interest.

When you look at it, compared to all the other games, it's pretty amazing what Blizzard managed to create with WoW. Somehow AoC manages to be smaller, more buggy, less immersive and harder to use, when AoC actually had the luxury of having WoW right in front of them to copy. They had a golden opportunity to steal so many WoW players, but in my opinion, they have wasted that chance.