For starters I told myself I wasn't even going to buy this game due to all of the controversy surrounding the bundled DRM. Then for some reason I bought this game. I'll cover the DRM below, I don't want to ruin my review!
Wow! Just wow! It was amazing. I can't say enough good things about this. It was fun and easy to use. You get to drag numerous arms, legs, eyes, mouths, horns, and bladders around. Arrange them in any order that you see fit to make some of the most.. ugly and nonfunctional creatures you could ever dream up. Actually, it was better than that. I'm not a creative person but the ease of this tool made up for it. The best part was once you are done creating your own five arsed monkey, the game does an amazing job of animating it. I can't wait to see this technology filter down to other games. Screw the painted boar when you can just create your own six arsed monkey! Did I mention how much this rocked?
The game play is broken up into five stages.
You start faced with the choice: herbivore or carnivore? You then swim around in the primal ocean that is your new home, feeding off of plants or other single celled creatures and collecting DNA so that... WAIT, this part sucked. Really, it was stupid. The only redeeming factor of this stage was that it was certain to just be a prelude to much better things..
..but like the second matrix, it's suckiness was only compounded by it's successor.
Your creature has (hopefully) grown legs and evolved at this stage. You now travel over land, searching for food and upgrades. As you explore you will find many different species and are faced with the option of either befriending them or eating them. So after eating all of the nearby creatures I realized just how lame this stage really was. You'd think that giving yourself four +4 attack claws would result in +16 attack.. but not in this game! Which basically devolves all of your creature customization into a flat lame number. It is as if the game developers gave wings to their creation that is this stage, only to end with a dodo.
I've seen better games attached to the end of a key-chain.
Like a fat girl sticking a fake mole on her face is using the word "Civilization" in the title of this stage.
Yes, yes I was still playing at this stage. As if the last two hours spent since I installed this game wasn't enough to tell me what an awful investor I am, I forged ahead. In an effort to have not let the final stage of this game waste this paragraph as it wasted thirty minutes of my life, I will try savaging the rest of this paragraph with some useful information: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence.
Rarely am I given the opportunity to say that something is the worst game that I've ever played. But Spore delivered with the unthinkable! A five-arsed^H^H^H^H^H worst games ever!
Which brings me full circle to the DRM issue. As we reward the Darwin reward to the stupid not for the harm done to themselves but to the benefit done for all of us, so the DRM on this game presents a true blessing. Inspired by the lessons learned from Jurassic Park, DRM on this games only serves to protected the public by means of a remote kill switch.
As for my copy of Spore, it has devolved into a coaster.
I got about thirty minutes into the space stage before I got bored.
I played this game on the medium difficulty. I want some challenge the first time through a game, but don't want to get stuck in the save/restore cycle. Hard is for replaying a good game.
I think they spent years working on the creatures and just took a dump on the game play. I've been playing R.T.S. since Dune and can't think of a one worse than the tribe or civ stage (I refuse to spell out the word civ*****tion because someone might get confused and somehow relate it to anything that Sid Meier has ever done). These stages were like playing StarCraft without a tech tree and using only zergling against disconnected players. Say what you want about George Bush, but his single largest failure as president over the last eight year was allowing this game to be published (i should add that to wikipedia). I might file a complaint with the F.T.C. over this. Every stage in this game had better alternatives published during the Clinton administration. I am going to vote for Palin because I heard she likes to ban books and if she'll ban books there's a chance that she'd ban a video game and if she'd ban this game I'd be able to sleep at night without nightmares that I might somehow accidentally launch this game again. While playing this game, I found myself day-dreaming that I was asleep dreaming about grinding in the plane of justice. I know I could uninstall it but I'm still in the denial stage. I think this game disproves evolution because monkeys chewing on punch cards could have turned out a better game.
I'd mail this game to Emo, but that'd be like tricking your friend into viewing tubgirl just so he'll agree that it's disgusting. Also, I might get arrested and sent to Gitmo for mailing spores worse than anthrax. You think it's random chance that Bruce Ivins died right before this game came out? He trying to warn us but they got to him first.