Starting up Spore brings up the main menu where you have three choices: Play, Create and Share. Share is basically being able to check out other players' creations in Spore and sharing your own. Create opens up all of the game's various editors to allow you to make creatures, buildings, vehicles and space ships without the need to actually go in and play the game at all. We suspect a lot of folks might just ignore the actual game side of Spore and dive into making stuff.
Then there's the Game portion of Spore. As you may know, Spore allows you to conduct the evolution of a species from a microscopic level all the way up to a space faring civilization. You begin by picking one of several planets in the game's galaxy. Your first stage begins with a cut-scene that shows a meteor with lots of alien microorganisms colliding with your picked planet. Your species comes out of one of the rocks swimming in the planet's liquid primordial soup and encountering other organisms.
You can select whether your first stage organism is a herbivore or a carnivore and the editor allows you to do some customization but not nearly as much as the second stage creature editor. Most people will blow through the first stage in under a half-hour as you control your microbe and make it move around. It eats plants as a herbivore or meat and other microbes its size as a carnivore. The microbe gets bigger and bigger with each item it eats and it can also get extra body items from other meteor shards (better stuff for eating, swimming or keeping predators at bay). In order to use these extra items, you must find a mate in order to enter the editor by issuing a mating call and following the response to its source.
Again, the first stage is rather short and bears a massive resemblance to thatgamecompany's arcade title fl0w (so much so it makes you wonder if the fl0w dev team are honored or upset) and very soon your creature's teeny tiny little brain will grow just a little bit larger and realize that it can leave the water and head to land.
This is when you enter the creator creator editor, the same one that EA and Maxis had as a separate stand alone product last June (by the way if you already have the Spore Creator Creator installed, Spore will uninstall it before it installs itself although you can keep any creature you made with it since its release). Your microbe has now evolved (with your guiding hand) into a much larger animal and you use the editor to give it legs and anything else you have available. Your limit is the amount of DNA you have collected; basically the more food you eat the more new parts you can install for your creature.
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spore is very interesting game. i played through to the space age in my first sitting and it took me a little under 4 hours to get there... i think. any way it can be really fun but you can tell that the space stage is the most full featured of the bunch. each of the four sections that came before them are nice but they just feel like they could use a little bit more fleshing out. i am not saying the game isn't fun its great fun but plan to be a little disoriented after each switch to a new game type. also there are a few annoyances such as an inability to side scroll or select units by group in the tribal stage. this is made slightly more infuriating by being able to do both of those things in the civilization stage of the game, making them seem more like aspects of the game that were removed in order to make the civilization stage more different from the one before it.
even with its faults the game is still quite fun and strangely addictive. all in all its a great game but Maxis could have spent some more time on the first four stages making each one a more unique experience instead of a funnel to the space stage. now if you'll excuse me i need to go back to flying my space ship, which actually looks like a ship, around the universe.Posted at 7:27PM on Sep 5th 2008 by shaden79