480: Spore

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Spore

Title text: Way to not support the GMA 950 under OS X, Spore. :(

Explanation

Spore is a game that was released in 2008. Spore starts you off as a cell, and when you become smart enough, you leave the water for land and start growing. To begin with, the scale of your interest is thus very small as you are only concerned with your spot of water. During the next two stages, the scale grows to being the entire continent. Once you start building cities, you get to view the entire planet. The last stage (and scale) is space, where you get to first travel through your own solar system, then the entire galaxy.

Cueball runs into a common gamer's problem, that being an inability (or unwillingness) to purchase a game on its release date due to the initial price. Since Cueball can't yet afford Spore, he instead is recreating the experience by playing older games, starting off with small scale games. In the comic, Cueball had just beaten the game Populous, which is on a planet scale, so now he can go on to the interstellar scale with the game Alpha Centauri.

The following three games could, for instance, have been played before the ones mentioned: SimAnt (ant scale), then moving up to The Sims (human scale), and then proceeding with SimCity (city scale).

The title text refers to the game not being able to run on the Mac using a GMA 950, which is a type of Intel integrated graphics processor. It was first supported in OSX 10.4. It lacked hardware support for vertex shader 2.0, which some games required.

Transcript

[Cueball sitting at computer desk, surrounded by game boxes.]

Cueball: Sweet, beat Populous. Now, on to Alpha Centauri.

Until I can afford Spore, I'm just playing through all my old games in order of scale.

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Discussion

Explanation mentions 'Civilization' for planetary scale, but comic explicitly suggests 'Populous' (which... though memory might fail me, was at least most of a planet in scope, controlled in one of the first popular God Game formats...). And SimSpace might well be Galaxy-level, but 'Alpha Centauri' is itself a game (semi-direct sequel by Sid Meier to Civilization itself), in case anyone thought that this was just a reference to the star(s) in such a galaxy-level simulation. 178.107.63.150 01:15, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

You can now get Minecraft (which should sate your need for evolutionary sandbox games) for free. 108.162.249.240 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

This is illegal, you know? Sobsz (talk) 00:05, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Not if you have a Raspberry Pi! Minecraft (Pi Edition) is include for free in Raspbian (Although I haven’t tried it, too busy programming various projects with my Pi’s 😝) PotatoGod (talk) 00:24, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

You can also get Minetest, which is free, legal and doesn't require Java. -- Hkmaly (talk) 16:31, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Based on title, I suspect "Cueball's" issue is not the price of game itself, but price of new hardware he would need to play it. -- Hkmaly (talk) 16:31, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
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