Alright, here we go again, this time I'll be talking about Spore, it was one of those I always had on my mind, and was planning on doing this for quite a while now. So let's get this show on the road shall we?

Once upon a time there was a man by the name of Will Wright. You might have heard of him, one day he designed a simulation game called SimCity, which was a massive hit and is still uber popular to this day. In this game you took a role of mayor (or something along those lines) and designed a whole city as you saw fit. Then one day he took things further and came up with Sims, a similar simulation game but with a twist. Here you took a role of a family that lived in that same SimCity, which was again a massive hit and is still uber popular to this day. However that was still not enough for Will Wright, he wanted to take things even further, and literally put his designs and ideas under the microscope. He came up with a new project codenamed SimEverything, which was an overambitious project for it's time. The end result was Spore. It's a game where you simulate literally everything when it comes to life of an organism. Sounds pretty cool right? Well, it is, in a way. Many people were hoping this game would be an incredibly awesome MMO, because the title had promised multiplayer, unfortunately the end result was nothing but disappointing.

The game starts with you being a single molecule micro-organism, where right away you get to make your first choice that will impact how EVERYTHING will work out in the end. Do you want your species to be carnivore or herbivore? This progression was depicted in a very simple color coded fashion, instead of your talent tree, you had an evolution tree, where you could see the entire timeline of your species through generations which also neatly displayed every major turn of events you had encountered or evolved into. If I remember correctly, the carnivore stuff was red and the herbivore stuff was green, though I think there might have even been something in between those too, I'm not sure anymore but it doesn't really matter. This first micro-organism stage of the game was very simple, just the life under the microscope itself. It was survival of the fittest, in a very casual and friendly flash game kinda way. You moved your little organism around in a basic two-dimensional field from a top down perspective. Your goal was to avoid bigger and more evolved molecules so you don't end being eaten while trying to find and smaller organisms so you can evolve. The choice of being a carnivore or herbivore was kinda organic, certain molecules were plants and others were more like, well you know, meat or whatever. As you grew bigger the camera would dynamically zoom out and would actually see yourself growing bigger and bigger while everything become more smaller and smaller, giving you more opportunity to eat anything you desired. This part of the game didn't take very long to beat, it was a simple introduction and was over in just a couple of minutes.

The next stage let you use the amazing creature editor tool. This was a really mind blowing thing at that time, and still is to this day, it was also undoubtedly the best part of the game. You could have literally designed whatever you wanted, from the number of legs, to the type of your body, head, mouth, in any shape, form or size. You slowly crawled from sea to shore, where you could gather little rewards from the environment or by completing objectives. These were like new types of legs, wings, types of eyes etc you could use and "equip" on your creature. It was almost like an RPG of sorts where each of the pieces gave you new abilities like faster running while also designing your creature at the same time. One of your objectives here was to travel around and find more of your species so you can reproduce and grow bigger. Along your way you were able to meet other randon species of creatures. It really was like an rpg, each of the creatures had like a level so you had to avoid higher levels and eat lower levels, or find plants and bushes if you were a herbivore.

Once you beat that stage your species would evolve, they would discover fire and become more intelligent. The stage was like a tribe stage. From an RPG, it evolved into a strategy game. You had to build a village, gather resources and fight against other tribes for supremacy of the randomly generated island you were on. This is the part where you also could design your own structers with a very cool and simple editor, the possibilities were endless. However the game itself was still very basic, as you only had an option to train a couple of different units, gather a couple of different resources, and build only two or three structures.

There's more, in the next stage your species would evolve and now it went from age of Empires to Red Alert. In this stage you could have designed your own tanks, aircrafts, hi tech buildings, walls, propagandas etc. All of this sounds very cool on paper, however each of this stages in evolution were just a simple short level in gameplay. All of these stages were over in just a couple of minutes (or maybe hours), while still being as basic as they can be. But wait, there's more! The final stage let's your species evolve into space exploration age, where you take control of an ace pilot with a mission of exploring the vast possibilities of space. This was the final and the longest part of the game, where you literally had an immense number of planets to visit. One of the features in this stage of the game was visiting random planets with all sorts of different layouts, terrain and textures etc. You could have designed your own little spaceship in which you would use terramorphing technology to literally destroy or shape planets as you saw fit. This is also the part of the game where "multiplayer" comes in. Unfortunately this "multiplayer" was in fact just a single player, or an offline ghost simulating online experience. Instead of you actually controlling your species in a universe with others, Spore instead simply uploaded your species that you created to their server into a database. The database would then sync with all other players (if you were connected online ofc), so each of the players could then be able to meet any of the other user created races or species while exploring their own instance of the universe offline. These were of course controlled by the AI, and apart from your name and skin, they would hardly have an identity or depth.

In this space age of the game you would meet all these other funky races that come into contact with you, and you could have forged alliances, traded or declared war. This was the endless and final stage of the game, where you could have took thousands of hours exploring the vast universe. However there actually IS an end to the game, there was special surprise awaiting you at the center of the entire universe, but getting there would take a long time even if you just bee lined straight for it. I won't spoil what happens or what you see there, but it certainly is interesting.

All of this sounds very cool and promising, however once you reach that stage of the game you notice how each of the stages in evolution are really shallow, basic and underdeveloped, all of them more alike to flash based iphone games instead of an epic experience. I would certainly recommend for you to check out Spore if you want to see something that's a bit like nothing else out there, overall it's a really disappointing game, not worth more than 5-10$ at most really. The end result is an ambitious project that wanted to create everything, dabble into all departments and nail none of them, and ultimately made pretty much nothing. There's still something interesting there to see, but the focus just wasn't directed where it should have been.