Their simple design is appealing to the eye but is not immune to errors. The exporting option may be difficult to locate since it’s already built into the video editing timeline. It is only accessible via a right-click, which is not the case with other computer software. You’ll need to read the manual because the layout isn’t as easy to understand as other editing software. You can use command keys (like Delete) to clip the video. To trim a part of the footage, simply slide the scrubber to highlight the section you want to segment. Press the Delete key on the keyboard to apply the change. Maxis games have always been a little bit frothy. They’re very up front about the fact that they are games, to the point where they had this as their company ident circa SimCity 2000. “Software toys” sums up Maxis games perfectly for me they are almost universally open-ended sandbox designs where you’re set loose in a virtual playground to do what you will with the systems Maxis have provided, and they’re presented with a thick layer of light-hearted frothiness to encourage you to have fun. What made Maxis games so successful – up until this point – was the fact that that layer of froth usually concealed a deep and comprehensive game experience lurking beneath. I’ve invested dozens of hours in the various SimCities connecting up plumbing and worrying about my education budget, and even the unapologetic virtual dollhouse of the Sims is surprisingly complex for what it is. They may be frothy, but they are not shallow.Īnd then we have Spore, a game which deals with possibly the most complex concept possible - the evolution of an entire species from the single-cell stage all the way up to interstellar spaceflight – and which is nothing but froth. It’s actually kind of shocking to me just how lightweight this game is, even despite all that I’d heard about it in the four years since it was released. I guess I always had trouble believing that Maxis could stuff up such a good concept so badly surely there’d be at least some fun to be had just watching your creature evolve all the way up to a tool-using organism? Even the worst Civilization-style games offer the vicarious thrill of developing nuclear weapons while everyone else is still figuring out which end of the gun goes bang, after all, but in Spore? In Spore your choices are so insubstantial – the game is so insubstantial – as to be essentially meaningless. The creature creator that comes packaged with the game is actually fairly comprehensive and making it so that the wide range of body parts available all fit together and animate smoothly is a genuine accomplishment, but it’s one that’s utterly undone by the in-game functioning of every creature you make being completely identical. Add one pair of legs and you get a speed of 2. Add six pairs of legs and you still have a speed of 2. That’s fine since you don’t want the secret to making a powerful creature to be cramming as much stuff onto it as possible the problem here is that if you then add some feet with a speed of 1, the creature won’t have a speed of 3. The game picks the highest available stat in each area to determine a creatures ability rather than a sum of all stats, and since there are rather more creature part types than there are stats it becomes pathetically easy to maximise your creature’s ability in every area rather than building for speed or strength or whatever, with all further changes you make to the creature being purely cosmetic – which, as far as I’m concerned, is another word for “pointless”. It’s nice to build a sleek, efficient killing machine of an animal. It’s less nice to build a sleek, efficient killing machine of an animal that functions identically to the nest of peaceful cud-chewing herbivores over on the next hill. So the main draw of Spore is a bit of a dud. Take that out, and what else does Spore have to offer? I was going to use the phrase “at its root” here, but Spore is basically all root and no actual plant so it would be pointless.
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