What I Learned from Spore: Die Spode, DIE!

An incredibly fun game that had an inevitable amount of hype accumulating before its release, Spore also received controversy for both it’s portrayal of evolution and of intelligent design. Of course, the first three seconds I started the game, I kinda’ realize that single cell organisms by definition can’t have eyes, so I just enjoyed the ride without too much thought into it. I played a passive peace loving race called the Kibsy, basically giant mutant snails with wings that would sooner burst into song and dance than burst enemy’s faces open. That was until the Space Stage when all Hell broke loose.

So… what happened? Well, it started with these guys:

Well, that’s okay. Your race believes in an omnipotent invisible being named Spode, mine believes in an invisible magical girl with a tail that eats people, fair enough… then came these guys:

Well, I suppose the money is going to go to feed the homeless and support women’s shelters, so I don’t particularly mind pitching in, especially if intergalactic peace is an added bonus… but couldn’t you just ask for a donation instead?

I thought for sure that was all of them, I mean, how many of these kinds of races could be in a single galaxy anyway? Then I met three more Zealot races, all right next to each other, including this one :

That’s when I snapped.

Two Words:

PLANET BUSTER

This is what a planet looks like when lightly exposed to my unquenchable vendetta to wipe out every single fanatically challenged race that mentions the name Spode in every third sentence. That was it, no more unbeliever tax, no more arrogant know it all greetings, no more belittling and capitalizing of words that didn’t need capitalization. I ended up wiping out so many of them that I had to come up with new and original ways to start offing them even more, like this:

By the normal design of the game, the Grox are suppose to be the supreme evil in the game, but honestly, I found their emotional bluntness and on the fly stutter edits to be quite charming.

They’re just like a teenage girl who was dumped on Prom Night who goes home to eat ice cream non-stop all alone for an hour because there is no reason left to lose weight for — well, that and the whole evil gigantic empire thing. Compared to the Zealots, they’re actually quite nice, pure evil, but still nice.

That wasn’t the end of my Spode hate though. I used a Monolith to raise a new race into space, and out of all the different types of race personalities, like Scientist, Warrior, Trader, and Bard, can you guess which one they turned out to be? Yup, the Spode worshiping bastard variety, and the first thing they did was praise Spode. I terraformed your planet and uplifted you from feces chucking savages all the way to space age, and you thank SPODE of all things? That’s when it hit me. Maybe the player of the game is Spode? I mean, deity names get mistranslated all the time and it would make for an awesome plot twist… but then I read the Spore Wiki article… and went right back to more killing.

In conclusion, I didn’t learn much about evolution by playing Spore… although that was probably because I was too busy killing all the religious fanatics in my path to notice. X_X