Spore!

It seems like lately, after my old WOW guild broke up, my time in the game has actually increased instead of decreased. I usually don't play the game that much, but I've been playing it almost every day for a month with very little in the way of breaks.

So, finally I've taken a little break and started playing Spore. I know this thing has been hyped to hell and back...the whole thing literally reeks of corporate over-hyping. However, the game did appeal to me on several levels and it was worth it to try something out. And, for what it's worth I've been pleasantly surprised by it. Though I'm not convinced of it's long-term viability to hold my interest--or the interest of anyone else either.

The game is pretty simple--you start as a small micro-organism and feed, mutate, and grow into a large land-based creature into a galaxy-spanning civilization. It's a high-ideal game, which is surprisingly effective in presenting it's development from such humble beginnings to it's massive ending.

Unfortunately, the game is perhaps a bit too simple at each stage to make it truely compelling.

Now, the cell stage is surprisingly fun in a simple arcade-ish sort of way. You have a little cell, who eats either meat or plants. And you have 6 basic adaptions you can add to the cell. As you find all 6, you mutate your cell into something more sophisticated using the cell editor. It doesn't take that much time, and your options are a little too limited here, but then again you are playing a single-cell organism so I guess it can't be that complicated.

Once you reach a set size, you go into the creature stage. Basically your cell develops legs and goes onto land. This stage is the second longest, and is also a bit of fun. The point of this stage is to develop sentience, by killing, or befriending other nearby creatures and reach the top of the food chain. The amount of options available in this stage is truely bewildering, and you are limited on what you can find scattered around the game world which can force you to evolve your creature in some very different ways. This stage is actually a lot of fun, probably the best part of the game really. And it's wonderful going back and looking at the creature you started with after you get through the stage and seeing how it evolved. The only problem with the stage, really, is the fact that for all it's options, I don't think there are enough of them. It would be better if there had been more options here.

Past the creature stage is a the relatively short Tribal stage. This stage is essentially a poor-mans RTS. And it's a serious poor-man's RTS. At this point you are no longer making modifications to your creature, and you get through the stage through a combination of war and diplomacy. You collect food, equip weapons, or musical instruments, to either kill, or seduce members of other tribes. I didn't really like this stage because it's simply TOO short.

The tribal stage leads to the Civilization State, which remains nothing more than a poor-man's RTS, though a higher-level one than the Tribal Stage. In this stage, cities are divided into Military, Economic, or Religious cities, each type allows you to conquer enemy cities either through destruction, buying them out, or conversion. It has a more sophisticated diplomacy system, and you can have a lot of fun building and designing various units (Land, Sea, or Air)...but it's ultimately hollow.

Once you complete this stage you can step into the Space Stage. This is the final, and by far the longest stage. And quite frankly after 4 days of playing I haven't beaten it yet. It's...expansive..and daunting at first. From what I can tell there are 10s of thousands of possible star systems and worlds to explore, though that might be an optical illusion. And frankly, the Space Stage gets very hard to manage very quickly even as early as 5-6 systems. Events happen almost constantly, money is a huge issue, and once a war starts it's almost an unlimited amount of constant annoyance. I think that most people who dislike the game will dislike it because of the space stage.

The Space stage has a LOT of options. Terraforming, Starflight-like elements of trading and space combat; artifact hunting, diplomacy, and ship design. Oh, and it's got a plethura of options. But it's simplicity and lack of resources really does get in the way. Oh, and the constant zooming in and out is so constant that it was literally starting to make my hand hurt in only an hour of playing. And I use a computer, mouse, and keyboard a LOT.

I haven't completed the Space stage yet...not for lack of trying. Unfortunately, this is where the game has gotten buggy for me. It's not constant, but I've had numerous non-recoverable crashes which has set me back, and frequent issues in getting my colonies started which have set me back.

I'll definitley try to get through this stage and play with some of the options. I still can't figure out what making a Crop Circles does, or successfully terraformed a T3 planet (though I've got the terraforming piece down now). I know you can Uplift other creatures, and theoretically I've heard that you can genetically mutate and modify creatures but I haven't seen options for that yet. So there's still a lot of stuff to look into.