Review: Spore

2008 saw the release of Spore, brainchild of TheSims creator and Steve Jobs-esque podium maestro Will Wright. Wright described Spore as a multi-genre, "massively single-player online game." The game had been in development since 2000, when it was known as Sim Everything, a title that would ultimately be discarded as too restrictive.

Spore offers players the chance to design a creature-- initially a microbe-- and equip it from an ever-expanding selection of physical features that will help guide it through the rigors of evolution.

Once creatures have advanced to the point of civilization, physical evolution halts, and the player's creative talents are shifted to designing buildings and vehicles.

It's in the customization aspect that Spore really shines. Spore's creatures are infinitely malleable-- anything from a flying unicorn-piranha to a three-legged toad-lemur is possible-- and with a little attention even the most chimerical creature can appear quite coherent and not at all Frankensteinian.

In fact, at times, Spore's creatures seem unexpectedly realistic. Through procedural generation, a process by which the program creates animations for creatures on-the-fly, you'll be able to see your toad-lemur sprint, fight, and dance in ways that look altogether plausible.

Throughout gameplay, you'll travel with your creatures as they fight off intruders, forage for food, reproduce, discover fire, and invent a society. By the end you'll have bonded to them a little bit-- even if they are ogrish, cycloptic gorillabugs.

Creatures at all stages of evolution, along with buildings and vehicles, are shareable via the Internet, and, if you've got a working connection, you'll also find your own planet populated by the creations of other players.

This allows for glimpses of some truly ingenious techniques of design, though it also guarantees that it's only a matter of time before you come across a herd of ambulatory penises named "dsagdaf."

And another caveat: though this is an "evolutionary" game, it is certainly not for the scientifically squeamish. The way that evolution is represented-- as a straight path toward high intelligence fueled by the spending of "DNA points"-- is enough to make any biologist cringe.

The game is divided into five discrete stages: "cell," "creature," "tribal," "civilization," and "space."

The mechanics of each stage are quite simple. The "cell" phase has the player guiding a unicellular organism through a two-dimensional space in search of food.

In the "creature" phase, the player must guide their organism onto land to either befriend or slaughter the other improbable beings who have nested in his area.

In the "tribe" phase, control extends to a small group of these creatures, now dressed in customizable, stats-enhancing clothing. "Tribe" plays like a simplified version of Warcraft III.

The "civilization" phase puts the player in charge of cities and vehicles, though the objective of either allying or destroying neighbors remains essentially the same.

"Space" is freeform, allowing players to terraform, colonize, or demolish worlds across the galaxy. YouTube videos have it that our own solar system is findable, though I haven't yet managed it myself.

Spore's greatest asset may be its expansiveness, but its greatest drawback is its lack of depth. Each stage, with the exception of the open-ended "space" phase, plays very much like an extremely stripped-down version of some other game.

There are only three vehicle types available in the "civilization" phase-- land, water, and air-- and whether your society is a military, an economic, or a religious one, the mechanics of uniting the planet feel pretty much the same.

An expansion pack is spoken of-- particularly, one that would allow the cultivation of underwater civilizations. If Will Wright and the folks at Maxis continue to work with devotion for innovation, I think we can count on Spore evolving into a franchise that will prove fitter than any of its Sim-predecessors.