Editorial Review:

Product Description:
The creators of The Sims present the next big bang - SPORE. Create your unique creature and guide it on an epic journey through a universe of your own creations. Play any way you choose in the five evolutionary phases of Spore: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. How you play and what you do with your universe is entirely up to you. Spore gives you a variety of powerful yet easy-to-use creation tools so you can create every aspect of your universe: creatures, vehicles, buildings, and even starships.

PC Minimum - Windows XP/Vista, 6 GB Hard Drive Space, 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent, 768 MB RAM, 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 Mac Minimum - Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher, 4.7GB Hard Drive Space, Intel Core Duo Processor, 1024 MB RAM; ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100

Amazon.com:
Create universal wonder in Spore, an exciting new simulation game that lets you develop your own personal universe. Work your way through five evolutionary phases, including Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization and Space, that offer unique challenges, thrills and goals. For example, you can start in Cell and nurture one species from a simple aquatic organism all the way until it becomes a sentient life form. Or you can jump right in and begin building tribes and civilizations on multiple planets. What you do with your universe is totally up to you.

The powerful creation tools of Spore are easy to use, allowing you to effortlessly design every aspect of your universe. Creatures, vehicles, building and even starships are all within your grasp. While Spore is a single-player game, your creations and other players' creations are automatically shared between your galaxy and theirs, offering a nearly limitless number of worlds to visit and enjoy. You can also go online to view the incredible things other players have made and can even pull those items into your universe. Spore gives you the chance to make worlds and beings that evolve, grow and delight you every step of the way.



Accessories:
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Accessories:

• Spore: Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Official Game Guides)
• Spore: The Evolution (Prima Official Game Guides)
• Spore Limited Edition Bundle: Prima Official Game Guide

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• Spore Creature Creator
• Spore: Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Official Game Guides)
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Rating: - Attention!!
Do not listen to other reviews! This game is very fun despite what anyone says. It has the greatest custimizing system out there. You do very fun arcade like gamplay in cell stage as a fish like creature. In creature stage you are in a 3D world inhabbited by built in creaturs and creatures made by other players. After you custimize your creature for the last time, you move on to tribal stage. Tribal stage is real time strategy where you control all of your creatures. Then you go to civilization phase where it's still real time stratedgy exept you command vehicles and fight your own creature since you divided up into cities. Last, you control a spaceship with a bunch of tools and weapons. You now go from planet to planet capturing and obducting.

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Rating: - Excellent Computer Game, Not Many Shortcomings
* When I heard the news about SPORE, I immediately decided to purchase it when it came out. However, I became slightly discouraged by (a) the repetitive creature creator and (b) the anti-secuROM reviews on this website. As a result, I was a bit reluctant, but I ended up purchasing the game. When I installed the game with no difficulties, I was pleasantly surprised. The game was not overly simplistic, and most of its elements I found to be very fun, with only a few shortcomings.

All stages (besides the creature stage) were quite fun, especially civilization and space. I enjoyed doing various quests, colonizing, etc. The cell stage, though quite simple, was an excellent preview of the game's elements to come. And during the civ stage, it was extremely entertaining to create vehicles for my civilization. Other pluses to SPORE were (a) the stunningly brilliant graphics, (b) the Sporepedia and the incorporation of others' creations into my game, (c) yours and others' spores' entertaining behaviors, and (d) the overall concept that YOU have created your own world. The concepts made in the space stage were very entertaining, and I enjoyed conversing with other civilizations, performing missions for them, and bombing my enemies into submission. The graphics during this stage were stunning, and I found the controls to be quite easy: to zoom into a star system, you simply have to scroll forward, and voila. This became especially entertaining when I began to run into other peoples' civilizations and got to see their creatures.

Despite its advantages, SPORE did have a few shortcomings, the biggest having to do with the creature stage. I found that this became very repetitive while my spore kept having to do the same attack/dance in order to accomplish things. As I did this, I felt myself looking forward more and more to the upcoming tribal stage. The only fun things in the creature stage were the infrequent modifications to your creature and the 2001 Space Odyssey-esque cutscenes. The creature stage was quite weak, but an overall minor disadvantage to a great game. T The other problem was with the space stage. This was that your spaceship maintains almost no contact with your civ, almost like you become a privateer. You constantly do huge favors for your empire and they give you a bit of cash in return. Hmmm. You can't even ask for military support from the empire: their spaceships fly around helplessly as you destroy the invaders for them. Oh well.

Despite its minor downfalls, SPORE is a revolutionary game that seems to have been given WAY too much grief by gamers. As of today, I have not had any difficulties with DRM or any of that (I run SPORE on a Mac), and this seems just to be a protection against software pirates. I do agree that the three-installation limit is a bit paranoid, but if this DRM does not interfere with my computer's regular operations, I am fine with it. One last note: I don't think that SPORE is for hard-core gamers, as it seems to be a tad simple, but kids and casual gamers like myself will be easily pleased by the simple gameplay, amazing graphics, and excitement of this amazing game. ...

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Rating: - Fun didn't last very long
The game starts off very fun: creating, growing, surviving. The game takes you through different gameplay styles from 3rd person action adventure to RTS style gameplay. However, the missions remain the same and as you progress through the game it gets tedious and boring. 3 Stars for the game. 1 Star overall for the use of SecuRom.

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Rating: - A 14 yr. olds Review of a HORRIBLE game
* When I first heard of Spore I was very excited because all of the reviews had been positive praising the games ability to let the user evolve the creature, and also sculpt huge empires. I was hugely disappointed when I played the game. My favorite games in the past have been the Age of Empires series as well as the Civilization series. When I heard of sculpting an empire and having your own creatures living inside of it I was absolutely pulled into the huge net that EA and Will Wright had spun. The truth is, you have little \"science\" involved in making your creature, and once you advance to the civilization stage you have no interaction with your creature at all. What I had wished for was to remain a god like figure during the entire game, but in the last stage (space) I found I was taking orders from my own creatures who would then give e 6 minutes to scan an area of over 100 stars travel to the planets and retrieve spice? Although the graphics were great the game play was childish, and I feel that I have been robbed of my complete experience.

Over the course of Spore, one must evolve their creature through five different stages in order to take over the galaxy.

1.) Cell
2.) Creature
3.) Tribal
4.) Civilization
5.) Space

The cell portion of the game simply involved my amoeba floating around while pressing one button to move forward. This allowed me to eat much like Pacman. This section reminded of the little kids playing some Sponge bob game in the apple store. This game was advertised to take 10 hours; I collected all of the body parts, and ate enough food in about 20 minutes. For the first half it was actually rather addicting yet it became a repetitive task. In this section the evolution seemed quite accurate. You had to choose between carnivorous or herbivorous, and had to make sacrifices for speed and defense. The graphics were stunning. The water rippled with each move. Smaller creatures jumped out of my way and screamed in little voice, while bigger creatures slowly lumbered by me. One thing that was rather confusing was the fact that one cold die, and be reborn instantaneously with no penalty. After beating this section I went back to play it again just for kicks, and found that it had lost all of its appeal.

The creature part was the longest more boring part of the game. In terms of evolution, it was also the most unrealistic. I had to take my creature, run him around the screen meeting other creatures, which led me into two options; combat or befriend. You have two options to befriend, dance or sing which are both illogical, hurt my ears during the high pitch singing, and didn't serve a function. The rudiments of the game were to accumulate as many DNA points as possible in order to give your creature the best chance of survival. With your creature being able to instantaneously revive, and having no gains as a result of peaceful negotiations I was forced to hunt. This ended taking me 3 hours because a creature called the \"Epic Mk31\" always was next to me when I respawned and killed me. When I tried to evolve my creature I noticed that it still had all of the options for herbivorous open, yet I was clearly a carnivore. Simple things like these and having to switch nests for no apparent reason built up my frustration, and I was relieved when I finally finished the section. The graphics and sound were great once again, yet the overly simplistic game play, little depth, and unrealistic evolution led to me feeling cheated.

It is worth noting here that once you leave your creature era you have no control over how you creature will look ever again. Looking at the history flow chart there is about 5 million years between the creature and the space, yet my creature still has never changed his looks. This game also pulls many corny moments out of movies like in the movie Space Odyssey, when the monkey has the stick. This hardly drew a chuckle, and led me to believe that that was aimed at parents who were helping their 6 year olds play the game. The difficultly with the creature creator should also be noted. I call myself a fairly adept person on the computer, yet even with the \"new graphics core engine\" in the game the tail on my creature would shoot straight through my creatures body while walking. I liked the look while it was standing still yet I had to change it for when it was walking.

The tribal stage was a repeat of the difficulty and the amount of time of the cell age. My experience of building an empire was confined to 12 villagers that went hungry every two minutes, even passing out in combat, as well as equipping them with stone axes which did no additional damage then the fists they were using before. This time was actually my favorite as it was fast paced and was much like age of empires. At this stage though you lose all control your creatures bodily form, and instead give it apparel such as goggles or a hat. WOW COOL! (sarcastic) This stage is also set in RTS, which made it fun too. Sadly I was forced to move on too the Civilization stage.

Civilization for me was basically making a vehicle and slowly waiting for it to kill every house then slowly convert the city. Minus the convert time this also probably took me 30 minutes. The process of designing your houses, and ships could be really fun if you are a graphic designer, but for the average Joes it was a gruesome and arduous task with no quick build function. The other civilizations on the map put up no resistance and once again I was off into another level, with my hopes of this game smashed.

I had the highest hopes for the space age. Everything that EA had advertised about the space age seemed to be the pinnacle of the game. I was cast into the game quickly making a space ship, then a box popped up. It was my creature speaking to me telling me that I had to go to some random planet to do a mission. Wait.... When did I become a chore boy? I pressed on thinking that this was some kind of \"initiation\" and I quickly did the task. Soon afterwards he gave me the options of 3 more quest, and I realized that this is what the end of Spore is. It was supposed to have an open-ended story line yet I was thrust into the world of carting around different animals I had abducted in order to get into the favor of some random emperor. One more thing. Your ship requires energy, which means that every 5 minutes you have to go back to your home world to charge for free, or go to some other empire and charge up for half of the money you have. At this point I quit the game, and I haven't played it since.

To me, Spore is a huge let down. I fell into EA's scams, and I learned the lesson of waiting for things to get reviewed by fans like me, and not letting some multi-billion dollar corporation convince me to get a shallow game just so they can make a quick buck. Although the graphics were amazing, the game had true potential yet Will Wright, and his development team screwed it all up creating a game that a kindergartener could master without ever reading the instructions. I feel cheated, and I want my money back, but because of the DRM no one will ever take it since I have used one of the installs, and the game is registered under my name. Thanks a lot EA.

Graphics: 10
Sound: 8.5
Story: 4
Gameplay: 2
Impression: 1
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Rating: - My kids LOVE this game
OK, so it was purchased as a present for my husband, but its actually my 6 and 8yo boys who adore this game. They play it almost daily, and even have friends come over to "watch". It definitely, to me, is great for younger kids, and I would ignore the 10+ rating. My 10yo daughter likes it too. I can understand the low marks this game received since it was marketed to adults but is really a child's game. I love the concepts it has taught my kids about life, life cycles, and evolution.