I’ve played Spore enough to tell you about it, now. I’m sorry I didn’t get to this sooner, but again, I was busy playing Spore.
Let me mention that depending on how much of the hype for this game eeped into your skull, there’s a chance it could disappoint you on a few fronts - if you didn’t get your hopes into the sky, or at least tempered them, there’s much fun to be had!
Since everybody’s seen every part of this game, what I’m going to do is tell you what all of the gameplay videos, interviews, etc, don’t. We’ll do this by stage:
- The cell stage is fun, and is exactly like you have seen/heard of.
- The creature stage is (IMO) the best in the game. It’s fun, versatile, etc.. I’ll cover it more in-depth later.
- The tribal stage is fun, but trivial. There are only a few things you can do - only two weapons, three instruments, fishing spears… and that’s about it. You get food, and either ally or conquer the 5 or so tribes sharing the area with you.
- The civilization stage is fun, but I can’t imagine it being fun more than once. You design each thing, which is neat, but time consuming. You get houses, factories, and entertainment buildings, which must be made in balance to augment captured spice geysers (currency). You get three vehicles which are unlocked as you get more cities - land, sea, and air. When you capture all of the cities, you get to make a spaceship.
- The space stage (though I haven’t explored this one as thoroughly) is nothing like the previews. You do get the fancy ship with all of the tools, but it plays like an RPG. You must rank up, do missions, and explore in that kind of manner, upgrading your ship. You start with little. I was lead to believe that once you get here you get to play god, and you do, but not without considerable work.
Okay, with that rundown covered, back to the creature stage. This is my favorite. You can evolve your creature into innumerable multitudes of possibilities, and see how they fair against the world and it’s creatures. You eat meat, plants, or both, and it’s difficult (or maybe impossible) to change that once past cell stage. Otherwise everything is up to you - you can float, fly, walk on two, four, six, twenty legs… it’s pretty epic. One of the coolest things here is the dynamically generated animations. You can make insane things and see how they walk, jump, etc. The actual gameplay is centered on getting DNA.
You can get it in five ways: slaughter nests of creatures, ally creatures, unearth skeletons, migrate to a new nest, or kill the eggs of a rival nest.
I almost always go the “kill everything” route, but I also like to get every skeleton I can, and migrate a few times.
As you deal with more and more things, you get bonuses. You can start to have a squad of creatures that will mimic you, and do as you do. First one, then two, then three squadmates. This makes it easy to conquer nests. Sometimes I still go out alone though - fly into enemy territory and snag skeletons, only to fly out over the mountains, unscathed as the enemy runs after me.
This is a very fun game, even if you never make it past creature stage. I recommend it, as it’s already good even with it’s shortcomings, and there will be expansions to make up for those!
A warning to all the pirates out there, you don’t get any dynamic content from other users if you pirate this - it needs a login for that. It’s still fun without it, but it’s worth a buy, IMO.
BTW - this game needs no cd, and no registry entries… it can be carried around, say, on a jump drive (when no-cd cracked, ofc)… That’s right, Spore is portable! 
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