Posted May 25, 2010
It's just not funny. It's like playing Sims. You can spend a good hours (or minutes) at the beginning while you see your own creatures growing and thinking. But then... what else? That's all. Your creatures will keep on growing and eating and learning words and ignoring your orders.
The interface is rudimentary enough to make it hard to play. You need a lot of opened windows (I mean Windows windows) if you want to see the evolution or changes affecting the creatures. You don't have a clear objective, you can't make them eat when they are hungry and you can't rise their low levels using the objects you have (unless they want to). There is a limited set of actions they can perform, and they will do them when they want.
Anyway, it's exciting to think about what is behind the scenes and it's a very good AI experiment. I understand they wanted to convert this in a game with a friendly interface in which agents become hairy cute creatures who react to environmental stimuli. But this only thing is not enough to be a game. You *are not* any of those creatures, you are just a hand giving orders. They should have used this AI to construct something bigger. Maybe a character commanded by you that should learn while other creatures learn by themselves around you. A spectacular Artificial Intelligence exercise surrounding a plot with real objectives, not just watching what happens.
It's nice to see one of those games by yourself, but not buying all of them, because there is no good reason to play them.
The interface is rudimentary enough to make it hard to play. You need a lot of opened windows (I mean Windows windows) if you want to see the evolution or changes affecting the creatures. You don't have a clear objective, you can't make them eat when they are hungry and you can't rise their low levels using the objects you have (unless they want to). There is a limited set of actions they can perform, and they will do them when they want.
Anyway, it's exciting to think about what is behind the scenes and it's a very good AI experiment. I understand they wanted to convert this in a game with a friendly interface in which agents become hairy cute creatures who react to environmental stimuli. But this only thing is not enough to be a game. You *are not* any of those creatures, you are just a hand giving orders. They should have used this AI to construct something bigger. Maybe a character commanded by you that should learn while other creatures learn by themselves around you. A spectacular Artificial Intelligence exercise surrounding a plot with real objectives, not just watching what happens.
It's nice to see one of those games by yourself, but not buying all of them, because there is no good reason to play them.