Spore Review: ?/10

I was going to write a hate letter to Spore. I've been waiting on Spore for about 3 years- the guy who made Sim City making a game that starts at the cellular level and ends up with you colonzing outer space? That's the kind of thing I'd get excited about.

But playing it for 8 hours yesterday did not make me joyous, and those kinds of game usually do.

You start out as a cell. And you basically play a fancy version of pac-man for 30 minutes.

Then you get to design your creature- which is one hell of a good time. And then you play this weird Warcraft but simple game where you can either dance and sing and make friends, or kill everything that moves. Guess what I did? (I did both, but you know which one I enjoyed).

THEN you do basically the same thing, but there's resource gathering. I did a healthy mix of killing and dancing, befriending some tribes and wiping other ones off the map.

THEN you play a very dumbed down version of Command & Conquer until you take over your planet. The highlights here are you get to design your buildings and vehicles (or choose from a ton of them prebuilt). I had a blast designing my AT-ST walker- complete with blaring propaganda horns (by then I had become a "religious" nation).

By this time, it's 9 at night and I was incredibly underwhelmed. The character/vehicle/building creator is fun. But everything else is just so simple and limiting. I'm going to go through it all again on the hard difficulty, but I imagine that's just going to make it more frustrating and even less fun. We shall see.

After a break, I fired it back up to get to last stage- Space. I only got about an hour in before I realized it was ridiculously late, but it was the most fun I'd had all day playing it. I'm not convinced that it will save the rest of the game but it might. I'm going to figure out how to upload a pic of my starship- cause that was fun as hell to make. (This link might work- it doesn't look near as good at that odd angle.)

Anyways, I'll be playing it tonight, picking up creatures with my UFO's tractor beam, and throwing them into the atmosphere. That's the kind of thing I'm into.