i hear u, i played it from cell to space when i first played it but that was the only time i played it, it was to redundent with nothing exciting. i remeber seeing earlyer previews of it and they actually look BETTER than the released game... but yea i wouldnt recomend it to anyone really, and the critics are just there to sell a game, no reall insight to a game through them is what ive found.

Ya, the E3 2005 version was WAY better than the end product. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dvMDFOFnA

Heck, I would buy the spore from that video in a heartbeat. Unfortunately they totally redid the graphics and pretty much all of the game to the point where it is a little kid game which should have been titled 'An introduction to video games.'

And to add insult to injury, put a bunch of DRM on it.

Definitely agree with above posts. I borrowed the game from my brother to try it out. It was all right, had some fun with it, took it off my hard drive and gave it back to my brother. Did not bother to buy it. Was not worth the hype.

Did you clear out the hidden Securom installation that stays behind? (you need the utility from the Securom hompage) That's the most vomit inducing part of that particular DRM trend for me. (though the limited online activations stuff comes a close second)

The box looks really good on my shelf >.>

I never picked it up and so have only seen the demos and such, but from what I have seen it basically looked like four mediocre genre games rolled up into one.  As for the critics, well I learned long ago that a lot of game critics are shall we say not always up to snuff when it comes to professional objectivity and avoiding fanboyism when it comes to one's pet developer/publisher/genre.

I just hope that Sims 3 doesn't end up having the same fate. I doubt it though because of the type of game that Sims is.

I had high expectations for Spore, just like everyone else. And well, that's exactly why the game just isn't that great. People were at first led to believe that it would be a deep evolution simiulator of sorts with complexity far greater than any of Will Wright's other games. Well, not the case. It ended up being almost like a bunch of "big-mini-games" lumped together incoherantly one after and another.

Addmitedly, the game certainly did push the boundaries of what is possible from user creativity, as proven with the amazing buildings, creatures, vehicles, and planets that people have created. It's just unfortunate though that Spore was more like Little Big Planet than it was like Sim City.

I dunno, it is fun on occassion. I usually just start it up, create a few things, and turn if off. I mean, the gameplay was all pretty mediocre, and too easy. The end game was a bit lackluster, but the Galactic Adventures expansion will probably spice things up.

Overall, it was a nice tech-demo in my book (programmer here) and so it gives me some hope of seeing this sort of technology in the future. So, here's hoping that Sproe 2 is better... You know it's coming in a year or two.

The Spore in that video was the same Spore we got. The only real difference was that the game in the video had more "Earth" tones and the current game is a little more colorful. The gameplay would have been the same.

You can play Sims 3 right now. It's called Sims 2. I don't recommend you buy the expansions, though, unless you want to spend $200 on that game.  Obviously, they are overpriced.

 Unlike the creepy and cute pack. That was only 40% the cost of the game for 100 MB's of intricate, timeless, and endlessly replayable content.

tool. You know what. That's mean. I apologize. But seriously, if you want to "spice" things up the right way, but Gal Civ Ultimate. That's set in space, and its actually fun.

Spore is crap, it was all set to be the best of the best in God games / simulations, and ended with you just being a lackey with cool editors.

Spore had great editors.  That's just about the only nice thing I can say about it.  It's case in point of how not to design a game.

I honestly don't know what to think about this whole disaster.  It's very clear that it was a screw-up, but why it ended up that way with pedigree game designers and virtually limitless development time is a mystery.  Some people say it was an attempt to "dumb down" the game to widen its target audience.  This is downright stupid to anyone who has ever watched a kid play his first RTS game.  They don't get caught up on the intricacies of deeper strategy.  It's the basic mechanics that they have to get their heads around, and once they do they tackle the depth of the game at their own pace, raising the difficulty as they feel comfortable. 

At the end of the day, I just have to conclude that the people making Spore didn't have a clue of what they were doing.  Oh, sure, they had beautiful ideas and the guys making the editors certainly did a marvellous job.  But the implementation was shoddy and lackluster at its best. 

Well the Sims 1 was also kind of crap in actual gameplay terms once you removed the novelty. Or how about Black & White - the strategy element just didn't work. But they were still both amazing and important games.

I'm still glad they made it, and I found it very entertaining for a while.

Spore was very much an experiment, and some experiments just don't come off.

The main problem I think was that in order to appeal to more hardcore gamers (like the people reading this as opposed to people who occasionally play The Sims), it needed to not have EA on its back, but such was the technical undertaking, it needed EAs money to work.  I don't consider it as bad as some people say it is - they are trying to compare it to 'real' games like GalCiv, SoaSE etc (slight Stardock bias there ), when thats not what it is at all.  I agree with Nights Edge that it is in the same realm as Black and White, and I reckon that the technology used to make it will be used in many great games in the future.

As a comparison, has anyone heard of a film called Young Sherlock Holmes?  A pretty mediocre mid-1980s film, but it was the first film with a fully CGI character, created by John Lasseter who went on to found Pixar.

Not to mention how much it costed just for the game it self