I'm glad someone else remembers Derek Smart.

Have you played or seen Starbound?

There was an E3 demo with Robin Williams playing around with the Creature Creator toolset that was probably the best thing to come out of Spore's existence.

That seems a bit unrealistic: I'd say $3-4 per hour is more reasonable.

Well it was an experiment to see how long players will keep doing the exact thing over and over again for little reward / variation in the environment.

Yup, you're basically right on the money and the Spore comparison is apt.

The game is basically Desert Bus, except you have to get out and blow up rocks to refuel the bus every so often.

I'm guessing refugees of The Dissolve, Starwipe, etc who went over to Vox might know a thing or two about things dying.

Actually it's still more akin to the Mako aspect of Mass Effect 1: do you like harvesting minerals for hours on end with not much of a payout for doing such.

I felt Assassin's Creed 1 was honestly pretty boring (and basically a free-running tech demo that happened to be set in a medieval world). And then Assassin's Creed 2 came along and turned that tech demo into something fantastic to play and experience.

Hell even if they just took the physics engine sliders and randomized them to a mild degree for each world, you'd at least feel some sense that the worlds were mildly different and you had to think a slight bit differently on how to act in them.

"Ew, Vegemite tastes awful!"

I've read about 30 or so published reviews (from Metacritics Critic's section and focused on the large publication ones), and he's not wrong: very nearly every review has stated this is some fashion or other that players largely weren't sure what to expect going into the game, which could be construed as players…

Yeah that's the biggest disconnect I see with that argument that keeps coming up.

Penny Arcade pretty much summed up the issue in a poignant image

There's unfortunately a few problems with the "hype train" argument people keep making though.

Jason Mantzoukas thinks that's garbage.

Also, for reference for others:

Came here to post this.

I half expected Joe Buck to have people start referring to him by a different name when he started broadcasting games with facial stubble.