:-O

that's....

it's....

wow.

the game was an INSULT.

it had been advertised as a simulation game where you'd continuously evolve a life form from single cell to space race.

and that's more or less what i expected.

what you got was a collection of 5 mini games for "single cell", "creature", "native", "civilization" and "space age" (names might have been dif, but that's what they were about)

"single cell" was a blatant rip off of a 90ies freeware game, you'd just swim around with your 1cell and eat stuff for ages. pac man with no maze, nothing more.

"creature", you'd walk around a tiny island landscape on a graphical level of populous 1 (no kidding!!) with you critter,

there'd be random other critters in nests, that just always stuck there, and you had 3 (!!!!) cheerfull and 3 aggressive moves - no more - you could approach them with, so they'd be enemies or friends.

which had no consequence whatsoever other than they'd attack you when you returned to their nests if you pissed them off (just like NOTHING in that game had ANY consequence whatsoever).

you could win hands down just by being friendly to everyone.

still, this was the only phase of the game that had at least _some_ charms, which 100% came from the creatures themselves (see below)

in "native", you'd get pretty much the same, but you had "villages" instead of "nests", expandable by 3 totally pointless building types.

and just as well, you could win hands down just by being friendly to everyone. no challenge in sight except standing boredom.

"civilization" had you build buildings etc you had no clue what they'd be for up front, which didn't matter though, as, just like anything else in the game, they were totally pointless, had no purpose and no consequence whatsoever. this phase could be won within less than 5 min by simply capturing all energy volcanoe thingies within reach.

and space age never saw me playing, i just didn't care anymore.

there was NO evolution in this game, nothing you did had ANY consequence whatsoever on anything later in the game, it just totally didn't matter what you did. the "continuous" were, as said, just a series of minigames, all in which was stolen together from other games, and glued together in ways that didn't make anything like a gameplay, it was boring, it was -except for the creatures- ugly, it was buggy like hell, it just was a continuous offense every single second you played.

the ONE single good thing about the game was, it had a builder to build your creatures with. they were really fun to look at and animated nice, point granted. they pre-released that builder as freeware upfront though, so you'd seen all the good parts of that so called "game" way before you bought it.

spore might not be the biggest piece of [censored] i ever played - i think "road rigs" will have that title for all eternity - , for the single reason the creatures were nice. but it most definitely was the biggest piece of [censored] i ever played compared to what'd been promised. and it most definitely was the biggest offense and organised customer betrayal i heard of ever pulled off by a major game corp.

if you don't believe me, just play it.

wonder what they payed that mag for that 91% rating...