Spore Creatures That Look Like Stuff

So I was all excited to download the free Spore Creature Creator, until I was coldly informed by the installer that my Powerbook isn't up to scratch. I'm humiliated. All I can do is longingly cruise the Sporepedia, looking for Spores That Look Like Stuff. Geeky stuff, mostly, like the Trogspore above. That looks really good.

Spore Trek, Spore Wars, and of course Pokespore, after the jump...

STAR WARS

This Mon Calamari is right on, but the nudity upsets me. I don't want to see Admiral Ackbar naked. As a 18th Century Dandy, yes. Naked, that's too far.

This X-Wing is from Fark's Spore thread, though I couldn't find it on the Sporepedia. There were lots of imitators, if you search "x-wing", nothing quite as good as this.

Great looking TIE fighter, elegant in it's simplicity.

Shockingly accurate Watto.

Painful looking AT-ST, giving new meaning to the term "Chicken Walker".

And now, my two favorite characters from the Prequels...

General Grievous, with particularly good attention to coloring.

This could be Selbulba's ILM character model.

POKEMON

All of the original three starter Pokemon are really popular. There are tons of them, here are the most accurate ones.
Charmeleon.
My main man Bulbasaur Ivysaur Venusaur. Never mind, he's nobody's main man. In retrospect, I got this wrong because every other entry for Bulbasaur is just painful to look at.


A sickly Blastoise.Some sort of horrible bird Pikachu...I'll be seeing that in my nightmares, thank you internet.


I'm a Team Rocket fan 4 life, so I had to look for Koffing. What I found was...wow. Just wow. So close, and yet so far.

VIDEO GAMES

Most of these are via Kotaku and MTV Multiplayer...

An XBox 360 controller! Pretty terrifying. What are those joysticks supposed to be? Suckers? Nipples? Crazy.

Our old friend Purple Tentacle back from the LucasArts adventure gaming dead.
Mario Mario of the Mario Brothers. This looks like some crazy junkie muppet.Boo! Literally. Not really as cute as the real character, but good nonetheless.


A bomb, possibly a bob-omb.

Wierd old Mr. Saturn, quite well captured.

Goomba! This is deeply upsetting to me. They went way too far in making him look like a real mushroom, with that gross fungal texturing on the underside of his head.
Pretty great Yoshi.
Wobbly legged Mega Man.

An amazingly accurate Master Chief.

Pretty good Sonic, albeit with webbed hands.

OTHER NERDY STUFF

Now ZOIDBERG is the spore! In full mating season glory. There are lots of other Futurama creatures on the Sporepedia, including many many Nibblers. I couldn't find one that actually looked like him though, if someone wants to make one.

There were quite a few hulks, but this was my fave.

This is the best Batman so far. Humanoids are apparently hard to get right. Why the bare pecks, I wonder? Even better than this design is creator insertinear's species description: "THE BATMAN SPECIES HE IS THE DARKEST OF KNIGHTS WHO SOLVE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES."

The earth with a little mouth and eyes and one foot. Thaaats good.
Now we're talkin! The USS Enterprise. I don't even want to try to figure out how this is a organism. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is the best one I saw, but there are some really shockingly bad ones in the Sporepedia.

Here's a car. Little over complicated, but pretty neat nonetheless.
WHERE MY PEEPS AT. This is great. Even the texture is right.

A scary candy cane.

A plane - found this one on the Fark thread too.
Cool motorcycle.

Albert Einstein's head. This is like something you'd see on the ground in Dante's inferno. I think we've had enough.

Review: Yahtzee Croshaw's The Art of Theft

Geekanerd Adventure Game Corresponent Fred reviews The Art of Theft by Yahtzee Croshaw, of Zero Punctuation fame...


In the rarefied word of internet-based gaming fandom, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's star is on the rise. For those unfamiliar, Croshaw (Je refuse, pointless nickname!) made his first mark on the world designing a series of clever and engaging games using the Sierra/LucasArts-aping Adventure Game Studio. Quickly rising to as much prominence as that particular world affords, he spent a few years dabbling in web comics and blogging before finding his Rushmore: the brilliant "Zero Punctuation" animated video game review series. Demonstrating once again the world's need for an erudite Brit to verbally eviscerate something (anything, really), the series has rightly earned Croshaw a mountain of praise, not to mention an all-expenses paid trip to gamer Mecca, Valve HQ in Seattle. However, in the midst of this ascent, he continues to design games, and has recently released a stealthtastic platformer called "Trilby: The Art Of Theft." Let the schadenfreude...begin.

Actually, the game is decent. In "AoT," you take on the role of gentleman cat burglar Trilby, the protagonist of Croshaw's most popular Adventure Game series. Using a lock pick, a tazer-tipped umbrella, and a variety of upgradeable stealth tactics, you sneak from mission to mission, collecting lucre while avoiding security guards, lasers, and rotating security cameras. The graphics are lovably old school, the MIDI score is surprisingly good, and the missions are well-designed. The gameplay is another plus. Trilby's movements are smooth, and after a little practice, I had him zipping around the screen pleasantly. The obstacles are repetitive by design, with Croshaw mixing and matching them enough to keep the game fresh. My one caveat to this praise is the difficulty curve. After beating the seven primary missions, your next challenge is to beat all seven missions in a row without stopping, with a punishingly low margin of error. To put it mildly, it's a huge pain, and the only reward is a new costume that, as far as I can tell, has no impact on gameplay. I have been told that if you play this uber-mission all the way through wearing a bright white suit that makes the game about ten times harder, you can earn a gold suit or a ninja costume or something like that. Deciding that I could live the rest of my life fairly happily without seeing a pixellated stick figure wear a pixellated golden tuxedo, I gave up after beating it once, content that I had milked sufficient fun out of AoT.

The biggest disappointment, oddly enough, is the story. In his reviews, Croshaw regularly takes designers to task for hackneyed plot lines, yet AoT's narrative, revealed through a series of rather lame noir cutscenes, is weak and at times almost nonsensical. You start off robbing some rich guy, then someone tries to blackmail you, then the rich guy gets murdered by his wife for some reason, who is on your side but then she isn't, only you help her out anyway for some reason. Oh, and there's a big evil corporation. Admittedly, this being a platform game, I'm willing to cut it some slack, but even the details are phoned in ( e.g. Croshaw gives his antagonist corporation the not-even-trying name "The Company"). None of this severely hampered my enjoyment of AoT, but it was a surprise coming from Croshaw.

Overall, AoT is a pleasurable B/B+ diversion and worth a few hours of anyone's time. I mainly worry about Croshaw himself, who I fear is running the risk of developing what I'm going to call the Dale Peck syndrome. Peck, a novelist and literary critic, achieved notoriety in the nineties and early 00s by writing a series of scathing reviews in The New Republic (he famously declared Rick Moody "the worst writer of his generation"). The reviews were entertaining, provocative, and often hilarious. Great. Problem is, they ended up completely overshadowing his novels, all of which were met with a resounding "meh." Croshaw is a promising designer, and I would hate to see his games suffer from the popularity of Zero Punctuation, either by sucking up his time, unfairly inflating expectation, or putting him at the wrong end of a hiring desk, opposite some game executive he has enthusiastically pilloried.

Talk Like A Pirate Day Loot - Monkey Island Artifacts

It's International Talk Like A Pirate Day! I already blew my pirate-talk wad with last monday's Weekanerd. While scurvy-speak doesn't come easy for a city-slicker like myself, writer/comic genius Al Ewing over at Re-Retro seems to have been born with saltwater in his veins. He's put together a great post on Monkey Island, the swashbuckilingest pirate related property of all time. And yes, I'm including the PotC trilogy, which while exquisite in it's humor and use of Kiera Knightly in drag, does not match the hours of wit and adventuring to be found in even just the first Monkey Island game. Also, dig that Steve Purcell cover art. Ehh?

Also included in Ewing's post are a series of videos showcasing an amateur theatrical adaptation of Monkey Island. Oh yes. It's all there for you to ingest via YouTube, if your stomach lining can take the pangs of embarrassment that comes form even watching an school play based on a computer game. But once you build up your tolerance, it's kind of amazing. Pretty good job on the costumes, although it doesn't top my Monkey Island II Guybrush Threepwood ensemble, which was the hit of a certain Lucasarts Adventure Game Costume Party in the fall of 1992.