Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Will Wright’s magnum opus, Spore.

This is a game that immediately grabbed hold of my interest the first time I saw a video demonstration of it a long time ago. I won’t go into details about the game here, there is too much to explain, so you would be best off checking the Wikipedia page on Spore for all of the information you need.

I bought the “Galactic Edition” which came with a National Geographic DVD documentary entitled “how to build a better being” (which I have still yet to watch), a poster, the game (obviously), a making of DVD, and a delicious hard back A5 sized art book which I absolutely adore!

The game, from the start, totally immersed me, something which very few games have done for a long time. I think the last to really keep me hooked was probably Half Life 2: Episode 2.

After installing and booting, I managed to play for a full 9 or 10 hour stretch without realising the time, the game is just THAT gripping. Although after a couple of solid day’s play (slotting around my work schedule) I am now feeling a little, not so much bored, just burned out perhaps?

By far, the best stages are the cell through to civilisation stages. Creating a creature from the ground up is a fantastic experience and thoroughly enjoyable, especially if you try to keep a theme throughout and create a sort of evolutionary line, without making grand sweeping changes. When you go back to look over it again at the end, you can see the changes to the creature and how its grown from a cell into a fully fledged creature, and it is a wonderful experience.

Admittedly, the first play through to the space stage I just added all the parts I needed to give me the best possible edge over every other creature, Min-Maxing my stats and just powering through, however, each subsequent play has seen me take a more relaxed approach, playing the game a lot more organically and just going with the flow.

One of the more annoying and frustrating, and therefore un-enjoyable stages (personally speaking) is the space stage. I enjoy terraforming and creating planets, colonising, trading, all of that stuff. But when your home planets are constantly being terrorised by aggressive civilisations, pirates, or ecological viruses, it becomes incredibly aggravating. Most of the time spent in the space stage is fending off would-be attackers and keeping everyone happy, it’s all a bit too intense for my liking.

All in all however, the game is fantastic, beautifully crafted, wonderfully designed, and additions like the Sporepedia give a sense of community and grandeur.

Having other people’s planets and creatures within your game keeps it feeling just fresh enough each play to maintain interest.

Luckily, I haven’t had any penis creatures in my games yet, although I did notice a planet named “Minge” I had to chuckle at that.

My spore creations

After a decent amount of time spent using the newly released Google Chrome web browser, I have come to a conclusion. I do indeed really like it, it is a hell of a lot dater than any of the other browsers I have used, however, that could be because my Firefox is bogged down with a lot of add-ons, Opera is a bit bulky anyway, and as everyone knows, Internet explorer is horrible.

There are a few things stopping me from making the switch completely, one of which, is because StumbleUpon have not yet released a version for Google chrome.

I use StumbleUpon extensively when I am at home. I find a lot of new and interesting things because of it, and after using Chrome for a while I felt the urge to stumble and couldn’t. Of course if StumbleUpon release a version for Chrome, I’m pretty sure that I would switch to using it full time when at home.

Work is different, as a web designer, I have to test every site and make sure it works in Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Internet explorer 6 (it’s disgusting how many people still haven’t upgraded from that shameful browser) and Internet explorer 7. I don’t test for 8 yet, as that is still in beta.

The problem is, for some reason, Chrome doesn’t want to load files from our internal server. I’m not sure why that is, but it just doesn’t. I can’t say I’d need to test for Chrome at the moment anyway. Chrome will most likely render pages the same way Firefox 3 does, and besides that, most of the end users of our sites won’t be the kind of people who would use, or even know about Chrome.

One of the features I find both useful and kind of odd, is the “most visited” home page. I like having my bookmarks laid out there for me, and it really does a good job of keeping my most visited pages there for easy access, but really, they are just the same pages that I have on my quick bookmarks tool bar, and since I am using the iGoogle homepage to have my feeds displayed, it doesn’t really seem all that important to me.

Another thing I noticed, is that pages seem to scroll a LOT smoother, which is nice, but takes a little getting used to.

Personally, I do think that Google Chrome is a truly fantastic web browser, and I would love to see it grow and have all of the features that user’s want, but still retain it’s speed and simplicity. But as for if it becomes a widely used browser, only time will tell. According to Net Applications, it’s not doing so well.

One final thing. What is the icon all about? I just don’t get it…