I’ve played Diablo II and never got into it… Eventually sold my copy for ten bucks to a guy who’d been banned on his previous CD key. I played Titan’s Quest for maybe an hour, and I don’t even know where that went. Never tried Torchlight or Deathspank or any of the other Diablo-esque games that have come out (actually I tried Hellgate: London a little bit), because they just never hooked me on the “collect rare lootz” premise.

        Spore was… ok. I played it long enough to get to the space part, and promptly wanted to leave. Controlling the creatures themselves was really the best stage. So as a game it didn’t really get me. The animation and random creature generation, even the creature editor itself, that stuff was all great. But it wasn’t a whole lot of fun, when you include all the various stages.

        Darkspore, first of all, is an inevitability considering they probably didn’t make any money off of Spore. They’ve got amazing procedural generation (clearly a hot topic recently) for both the creation of random creatures and animating them, so why not make use of it? I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the game’s assets were made by a guy pressing the “generate horrific monstrosities” button and then picking the five coolest ones out of the thousand possibilities that came up. From a business point of view, they’ve hit the jackpot, because the Spore creature editor will probably always be cool.

        As a game, though, it’s actually pretty sweet. You’re a Crogenitor (pffffft), and what that really means is you’re one of the demi-gods blessed with the ability to genetically modify powerful mutants. The game doesn’t say this, but you know that it’s true. In your role as “the last surviving god-thing from Spore,” you control a squad of Genetic Heroes (read: deadly mutant creatures) and you upgrade them using the various shiny pieces of equipment you find while running around murdering things.

        The heroes have subtypes (Necro, Plasma, Bio, Quantum, stuff like that) which decide their powers (summon ghosts, stun guys, create minions, slow down time) and then classes (Ravager, Sentinel, etc.) which determine your main stats and attack type (strength and melee attacks, dexterity and melee attacks, mind and long range, etc.). Then they have some detailed backstory stuff I didn’t read, which may or may not have been randomly generated too. The equipment you find is equipped to them in the same way body parts were in Spore, and I think you can find new body parts as well eventually. And of course the equipment has all sorts of stat boosts and cool adjectives like “Laseth’s Thunder Claws of Sharpness” and there’s a few levels of rarity. You can gamble your equipment by beating progressively harder levels one after another - double or nothing, essentially. Beating multiple levels in a row also increases the odds of getting rare (rarer?) items.

        Collecting some ugly little staff that claims to be a mystical bone wand, but really looks like every other staff, isn’t very engaging. Collecting energy claws, mystical hoods, cybernetic implants, crystal growths, etc. etc. and “equipping” them through the creature editor, however, is a whole lot more awesome. Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s that they took the good parts of Spore and the good parts of Diablo, but I actually liked playing Darkspore. That’s pretty good, since I didn’t like either of those games. I don’t know if I’ll buy it, but the beta’s free until friday, so go check it out. We can team up and stuff and maybe that would be cool?

        (some dumb people in the game’s chat were like ‘wait is this game free to play’ and 'screw it if they want a monthly subscription’ because they don’t realize it’s a normal retail game lol)

        The game has a campaign mode, with extra unlockable difficulty levels (and, I assume, better lootz) with co-op that increases the shiny stuff you and your team members get. It also has PvP (unlockable through a purchase at like level 9 or something) and I don’t know how that works. I have no idea if the full game is going to have more in it? I assume the campaign is going to the only single-player mode, which is ok I guess but it’s not like it has much of a story or anything. You’ll be hard-pressed to remember what the cutscenes tell you after five minutes of murder.

        Anyway! As I said, free until friday, we can team up and stuff if our schedules work out. In fact, I’m free tonight… but it’ll take like two hours to download. I’m ok with this multiplayer because it’s co-op and everyone wins.