Spore for Mac: Straightforward and Entertaining

I purchased Spore (at his request) for my 11 year old son for Christmas. The essence of the game is that you start as a cell on a brand new world and then evolve based upon the choices that you make about food types and evolutionary path. Your character can evolve primarily using social skills to build alliances and relationships or combat skills in which you seek to extinguish other species and capture their skill sets and DNA.

The character evolves through from the cellular stage, through animal, tribal and then space. The developmental choices stay largely the same through each stage and it appears there is a bias more to combat and conflict in the later stages of the tribal and space stages. I have not played the game long enough to figure out a method of winning without engaging in conflict.

What is patently clear is that the game is simple and very engaging for the 10 to 14 year old. I installed the game on Christmas at lunch and then left my son with the game. The game required almost no explanation and he has been able to figure out how to build and develop characters entirely based upon the menus that are on the screen. My son has spent from one to three hours a day playing and creating various characters in the animal stage. This seems to be the more interesting stage for him then playing into the tribal and space stages of the game.

We have an iMac desktop. Initially I had a problem with installation of the game on my son's account because of the parental controls on our computer. That problem was solved by adding the spore server and web site to my son's accessible sites through the parental controls panel on 'System Preferences'. The other thing that you will find is that the single button mouse that comes with the iMac does not work well. The game requires a two button mouse in the tribal and space stages and my son preferred the classic two button mouse controls.

I was intrigued with the game but prefer strategy games in general and found this game a little slow. However, my son has greatly enjoyed the character creation, painting and shaping and has not appeared to be the least bit bored with the game over the past week. There are limited amounts of violence in this game and none of it is graphic. I would highly recommend this game for the 9 to 14 year old range.

Those children (and adults) whose taste runs toward more violent or conflict oriented games will likely not find this game attractive.