So, the creators of Spore, Electronic Arts, created an online discussion forum where people could talk about Spore.  Unfortunately they made the mistake of offering a feedback forum where people could post feedback about the game, and the reviews are positively ghastly.  So many people are irate about how shallow the game is and the various bugs in it that last week EA released a patch for the game, only a week after the game went to market.  Anybody in software development knows what happens when you rush a patch out the door.  And it happened big time... the patch made the game experience WORSE for a lot of users, fixing some bugs but creating a whole host of new ones.  Interest in the game is visibly on the wane, online Spore traffic has been pretty much falling since day one and people are already clamoring for "expansion packs".  It's generally not a good sign if you are looking for game expansions after owning the game for one week. By comparison I've owned Oblivion IV for over a year now and I only purchased one of the available expansions.  I haven't needed to buy any more because there is plenty of content there to keep I (and my family) entertained.  But I digress..

The interesting thing is (as you might expect) a number of EA's customers are not at all pleased that they are limited to 3 installs of their game before it won't install anymore, and some are unhappy with SecuRom being installed on their machines without their consent.  So along with feedback about various other flaws in the game, EA gets plenty of feedback about DRM and the headaches it is causing their customers.

Which they delete.

Yeah, you heard that right.  If you post feedback about the DRM in Spore, they simply delete your feedback.  They don't want customers discussing DRM or complaining about DRM.  And the reason is quite simply this:

DRM does not stop pirates. It never did.  The day Spore was released, there was already a DRM-free hacked version available for download from the various piracy sites.  ANYBODY who did not have an ethical problem with stealing the game, could simply download a fully functional pirate version.  Personally, I think game makers should be paid for their efforts, so this is not an option for me.

Electronic Arts isn't staffed by morons--they have tech savvy engineers working there who know full well that DRM will not stop pirates.  So why do they keep claiming they put it in there to prevent pirates from stealing their game?  Why is it really there?

My theory (and a lot of other people think so too) is they want to control (or basically kill) the resale market.  If you want to play Spore and figure you'll buy a used copy in a year or so, think again.  By putting the install limit on the game, EA prevents you from selling your property to a third party when you tire of it.  Why would anyone buy Spore if it had only 1 install left, or less?  So if someone wants Spore six months from now, they're going to have to buy it from EA--or they will get stiffed on reinstalls if one is ever needed.

That's fairly evil and a number of people (including myself) have posted threads to that effect on EA's feedback forum only to have them quietly disappear.

Which is also evil.

Okay, so gamers everywhere are upset about the Digital Rights Management that comes packaged with Spore.  If you don't have an internet connection (because say, you are using a laptop while camping, or your internet modem is on the fritz) you can't play... even though there is nothing on the internet you actually NEED to play Spore.  That's annoying, but if you are a home user who never upgrades their machine and has a solid internet connection, you may not care so much.  So let's actually talk abut the GAME--how does it play?  Is it fun?

The idea behind Spore is exciting and compelling... start with a microbe and evolve it into an intelligent spacefaring species.  The game is basically broken into five minigames--and that right there is a sign of trouble--the Jack of all trades is a master of none.  All five minigames have weaknesses and are pretty shallow simply because to invest too much development effort in one of the minigames means not investing it in others.  Plus there are annoying inconsistencies in the camera controls for each minigame.  What used to pan or zoom the camera in one minigame will do something else in the next, so at each transition you need to relearn how to do the same old things--that's right out of the Vista playbook... very irritating.

In conclusion, for $50 you get 5 games that are probably each worth about the $10 you are paying for them.  You would probably be better served by spending your $50 on ONE really good game.  I sure wish I hadn't bought this... because having played it one time through, I've gone from incredibly excited and interested by the game concept, to disappointed and bored.  I have zero interest in ever playing this game again.  Oblivion, Warcraft, and Civilization are all far better than Spore.  Don't waste your money.

What follows are detailed reviews of the five games in Spore.

Minigame #1 - The Microbe Stage
Ignoring for a moment that evolution is *not* a directed process, and therefore the concept behind the game is annoying if you are a scientist, the idea is promising.  But swimming around in fluid and nibbling bits of food gets tired very quick.  The graphics are very pretty, but users will likely get bored with the microbial stage very quickly.  As your germ wanders around it will collect "DNA points" that can be spent when it mates to pay for additional (or better) body parts.

Minigame #2 - The Creature Stage
All microbes must evolve into land creatures.  Why?  It's a testament to the shallowness of this game.  Germs become land animals.  You can give your creatures wings, but they can't live in trees or cliff walls... all they can do is wander around on the ground.  You can't choose to stay in the ocean and become an intelligent underwater race.  You can't burrow into the ground and become an intelligent underground race.  You cannot evolve or design plant life, or become an intelligent plant species.  The implication in the game is that though evolution you can evolve whatever you want.  You can't.  All you can control is the basic shape of your creature, its behavior toward other creatures, and what body parts it has.  And it is in the creature-creating portion of the game where most of the development time seems to have been spent.

But even this too is annoyingly limited.  The game wants all creatures to be vertebrates with bilateral symmetry--want to make a giant starfish?  Too bad for you.  Want a creature with two arms on one side and none on the other?  Too bad for you.

One of the depressing things about this is that body parts don't actually DO anything.  All they do is change your creature's stats.  Adding a pointed spike gives the creature a "strike" ability, but adding two spikes doesn't make any difference, nor does changing the position of the spike or even its size.  There's no reason not to throw your creature together haphazardly, because the actual arrangement of body parts has no effect on the game.  Once the user realizes this, the illusion is shattered and the process of developing creatures becomes boring.

Many of the body parts are completely cosmetic and do nothing at all.  Give your creature eyes on the back of its head and it gets no advantage whatsoever.  There are dozens of different "arms" and "legs" available, and they are all hard to distinguish from each other, and universally all do the same thing.  Add a particular leg to your creature and now it has a leg.  Choose a different leg and the creature's stats are unchanged.  So why bother having different legs then?  And why do all the arms and legs essentially look the same?  There are no hairy legs, legs with more joints, pseudopods, wrinkly legs, insectoid legs, etc.

Creatures have 4 basic social behaviors--singing, posing, dancing, and charming, and 4 antisocial behaviors--biting, striking, charging, and spitting.  You can pretty much think of your creature as a tally sheet with a score for each of these behaviors.  A creature with "sing 4" is really good at singing.  The animations for the behaviors are very pretty, but to initiate them is a little clunky and extremely repetitive.  Making friends or killing enemies gets tired fast.  And unsurprisingly, the game rapidly progresses through the creature stage and tries to push you into the tribal stage.

Minigame #3 - The Tribal Stage
Gather food, try to make friends (or destroy) neighboring tribes.  That about sums this stage up.  It will remind you of the original warcraft games where your drones gather resources to make buildings, but it isn't as involved.  It will remind you of civilization where you can sort-of acquire new technologies and interact with outher cultures, but it isn't as involved.  Fact is there are already good games that do both of these things better, and since this game tries to cram in both of them, it does neither well.  This stage is shallow but blissfully short.  One thing that might annoy you is that all the time you spent developing your creature's physical traits pretty much become irrelevant at this stage of the game (and in every stage after).

Minigame #4 - The Civilization Stage
Now instead of fighting (or befriending) tribes of different creatures, you are fighting or befriending nations of creatures like yourself.  The animations are stunning, but again the tactics are pretty shallow.  There is no deep strategy to be found here, no clever interplay of various social forces.  And this stage of the game too will end fairly quickly.

Minigame #5 - The Space Stage
So you finally made it.  The grand conclusion of the game... and it isn't fun at all.  At this point you should be controlling worlds and commanding fleets of ships, and instead you are basically an errand boy.  You get one ship to fly around in and fly around you will.  All that creature development is just a distant memory now... your beautiful creation is just a face on a communicator screen.  You will receive missions that basically boil down into two types: (1) go to this planet and scan/pick up/bring back a certian item or items within a time limit, (2) go to a planet and kill all the creatures/beings that are glowing yellow in a certain time limit.

Just getting around is annoying.  A mission says "go to planet Dingly Ball and bring back a Pferdburper plant", so the first thing you do is go to your star map (in steps, each step requiring a lengthy animation that you CANNOT skip) and you might expect to see a clear indication of the star you are supposed to go to.  Sometimes you will but usually you won't and you spend your time hovering your mouse over each star to try and find the one with the right name.  Yeesh... the star should have a blinking colored flag sticking out of it to tell you it is your objective... or the names of stars should appear next to them. There's no end of things that ought to be in here to make it less annoying.

As you try to negotiate trade routes or carry out missions you will CONSTANTLY be running back home to defend your homeworld (or your colonies) from pirates or enemies.  Every such encounter is exactly the same and rapidly becomes infuriatingly stupid.  I have a spacefaring race but I can only make one ship at a time?  Why can't I build a defense force and leave guards on each planet so I am not constantly running back and forth to fight the same boring fights over and over again?

And the ship-to-ship combat is the absolute worst.  Clunky as heck, and for all the pretty ships and lovely explosions, very little actual information is communicated to you... there is no useful tactical display--like say, coloring enemies differenly from friendlies, or automatically coloring ships in range differently from those out of range.

The space stage is, frankly, dismal... and should have been left out of the game altogether.