Spore!!!!

I recently started playing a game called Spore. It is definitely one of the most addicting games I have ever played. You start off as a single cell organism and the goal of the game is to eventually spread your species all over the galaxy. The most amazing part of Spore is the ability to completely customize your creature, creature’s clothing, buildings, vehicles, society type, and diplomacy. That is an extreme amount of choice. The game play is also very fun. As a cell your goal is simply to find food, whether it is a plant or organism or both, and grow, then to evolve. Your actions revolve around dodging larger predatory cells and finding food. In the process of finding food you find ‘cell parts’ which you use to evolve your cell. Cell parts include cilia, spikes, eyes, and much more. After enough evolution you gain the ability to evolve legs. Next, your creature moves onto land and forms a pack with others of your species. The point of the game is still relatively the same. You must find food, again whether it is a plant or organism or both, and then evolve your creature. There are still ‘parts’ to find but now they encompass legs, mouths, arms, natural armor, and camouflage. At any point through this stage you can completely change the look of your creature in minutes. This, although it takes some realism away from the game, adds so much fun. If you want to try and make your creature a gorilla you can. If you want something incredibly unique like a slug with forty horns and twenty eyes you can. There is so much choice in this game that I cannot emphasize it enough. After enough evolution you gain the ability to move to the tribal stage. The tribal stage is now similar to a RTS and you control the whole of your group as opposed to a single pack leader. The point of the tribal stage is to absorb the other tribes of your species into your tribe. You can do this through peaceful or hostile means. You can also now build buildings in your village. The buildings allow your tribe members to hold special items or use special abilities. After absorbing the other tribes you advance to the civilization stage. Now instead of directly controlling your species members you control vehicles (which are completely customizable) and your relations with other civilizations. Now you have cities which are labeled as military, economic, and religious. The different types allow you to do different things to take over more cities. A military city builds military vehicles which allow you to take cities by force. An economic city allows you to build economic vehicles which allow trade and purchase of opposing cities. And finally religious cities let you build religious vehicles which allow you to ‘convert’ opposing cities that are unhappy. After uniting all the civilizations your creature moves into the space stage. This is definitely the most difficult and longest stage of the game. The point of the space stage is to colonize as much in the galaxy as possible until all planets are eventually colonized (virtually impossible as there are hundreds of solar systems each with multiple planets). In the space stage you control only a single space ship for your race that functions as a diplomat, trader and soldier. Unfortunately this is my only problem with the game. Your race has only one space ship. The other space civilizations have a seemingly limitless supply of ships. This is a problem when a war starts between you and someone else and they invade a couple planets at a time. They do offer help with this by (as your renown increases) allowing you to make a squad with a few of your allied races ships. Your ship is also significantly more powerful than any other ship in the galaxy. In the space stage you need to do missions for your and other races to gain money and renown. You can also trade to gain money. Eventually, after much work you become pretty powerful and can easily wipe out any race in your way and the only problem you face is the sheer size of the galaxy. If you stick with it your race can grow from a single cell in the ocean to the sole ruler of the universe.