With Penny Arcade's recent mention of Spore, veteran game designer Will Wright's latest brainchild, I feel like mentioning the game, too. I've long held the (strangely uncommon) opinion that while Spore is pretty cool from a technical standpoint, it's also probably going to turn out to be a pretty terrible game if they don't do something drastic some time soon.

Let it never be said that I'm not a fan of procedural content. In fact, I'm writing my Master thesis on that very subject. I think procedural content of all sorts is really, really interesting, and I predict we're going to see a lot more of it in the future. I think it's awesome that Wright and buddies are doing the whole procedurally generated creature thing. Kudos to that, it's a complex issue and they seem to be doing a great job at it. Spore is technically amazing.

Unfortunately, this is, to me, where the awesomeness stops, because Spore isn't just technical innovation; it's technical innovation presented as—and dare I say shoehorned into—a game.

For those unfamiliar with Spore, the idea is that the player gets to go through the entire evolution of a species, from a protozoan level all the way up to outer space exploration. Each species goes through a number of stage of evolution, each corresponding to a particular gameplay stage; the stages are as follows:

• A tide pool stage, where the player controls a simple multicellular organism that floats around in water, eating other organisms and growing new features. Think Pac-Man.
• A creature stage, where the player controls a larger, intelligent organism of the species, going around gathering food, interacting with others of its species, etc. Think Diablo.
• A tribal stage, where individuals of the species start to form tribes. You lose direct control at this stage. Think Populous.
• A city stage, where the tribe has turned into a city that you can control from a much wider perspective. Think Sim City.
• A civilization stage, where you no longer control individual cities, but an entire civilization of your species. Think... Civilization.
• An interstellar stage, where your species goes off exploring other planets in the universe, populated by other players' species. I can't think of any good game to represent this.

Okay, so this sounds kind of fun, right? Pac-Man is fun. Diablo was fun. Sim City was fun.

The problem is, all those games were designed to be just that particular game. Diablo was fun because the developers knew what kind of game they were making, and spent lots of time making that particular game as good as it could possibly be. This takes a while, but the payoff is amazing.

Spore, by contrast, is trying to be six different games at once. This has a number of unpleasant side effects, perhaps the most worrying of all is that none of the constituent games could ever possibly be as good as their "predecessors". While it's fun to imagine that the creature stage is going to be just like Diablo and that you're going to have so much fun exploring the world, there's just no way it's going to pan out that way. There is only so much development time here, and when it has to be split between six disparate gameplay styles, the result is going to be only 1/6th as good.

Let's talk about how disparate the game styles are, too. While Diablo was a great game, and Sim City was a great game, I'm willing to wager that the overlap between these two groups isn't too big. In other words, while there are lots of people who like Sim City and lots of people who like Diablo, the group of people that like both is much smaller. Spore seemingly expects people to like all six game types at once. It just seems to me like the target audience for this game is vanishingly small.

All right, so you probably could enjoy each part separately. Maybe someone who likes Diablo-type games will enjoy the Diablo-y bits of Spore. But then, what about the rest of the game? Why spend $70 on a game where you're only going to enjoy about 1/6 of the gameplay? Why not just get Diablo? All this reminds of those strange 50 Games In One cartridges for the NES. You got exactly what it said on the box—50 games—but they were all mediocre-at-best knock-offs of better games. In the end all you got was 50 crappy games, which is pretty decidedly worse than just one good game.

But wait, what about the procedural creature part? Aren't we forgetting about that? It's true that, as I already stated, that the evolving creature part of Spore is really kind of cool. Unfortunately, it's the kind of cool that's only cool for about 10 minutes, at which point the novelty factor wears off and you realize you're just playing a glorified and ultimately inferior version of Sim City. In other words, while it's really technologically impressive, it's also not really going to change the way the game plays. I don't think that the procedural creature thing is going to be enough to keep me from feeling like I'm just playing a watered-down version of Diablo, or Civilization, or whatever.

I really want to be wrong, though. I want Spore to be great. I just can't see how it could possibly happen. Some say things like "But it's Will Wright! How could it possibly go wrong?" And I want to believe that, too. Will Wright is a veteran, and he knows what he's doing. (Usually. Who remembers Sim Life, Sim Earth or Sim Copter? Yeah, me neither.) Ultimately, though, it just seems like it's going to take some major black magic to turn what is basically at this point an impressive tech demo into something I'd actually want to play for more than a few hours.

Until this happens, I just can't be excited about it.