Holy holy invasion!

I don't know where to begin, but there are so many things I want to say about this game that I didn't realise I needed to play until I read this review. I'm torn between writing a clone or buying a PSP.

Let's just leave this at Spore done right.

Results for 'Which Spore phase did you find the least fun?'; new poll

Thanks to the 68 of you who voted.

Cell / Tidepool	7 (10%)
Creature	5 (7%)
Tribes	8 (11%)
Civilisation	6 (8%)
Space	7 (10%)
Spore: The DRM	23 (33%)
Losing your save game	7 (10%)
The crushing disappointment	14 (20%)
Adolescence	2 (2%)
Spore!?!	11 (16%)
Stat gain	6 (8%)

Next up - something from that 'Design a Magic System' guy...

Backup Spore Save Games

Since Spore save games seems to be driving traffic to this blog, you may find the following code useful to help you back up your existing Spore save game in Windows.

Copy and paste the following code into a file sporebackup.bat:

mkdir "%userprofile%\Spore Backups"
xcopy /e /y /i /r /h "%appdata%\spore\games\*.*" "%userprofile%\Spore Backups"

Then, when you double-click on the sporebackup.bat file, this will automatically backup your spore files to a Spore Backups directory in your user directory (one up from either My Documents or Documents). You may find this useful to schedule in Task Scheduler on your machine.

If Windows had a decent scheduling engine, or for that matter, an easy way to script actions on files being updated, I'd write something to do this automatically whenever you save your game.

This technique is relatively common to another game genre, roguelikes. You may find checking out the rest of this blog helps you understand the genre a little better.