Title: Spore
Platform: PC, Mac
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Maxis
ESRB Rating: E10+ for Everyone 10 or over

Much has been said about the death of PC gaming over the years. Recently when this topic would surface, Will Wright's Spore, his follow-up to the cash super-cow series The Sims, would be listed alongside other PC exclusives as clear evidence that not only was PC gaming not in any danger but that it was actually thriving. Will Wright is as good a champion as any for PC game development considering that The Sims games have sold over 100 million copies worldwide (although Sims games have been ported to consoles as well). But the idea with Spore is not to continue in The Sims tradition - it's to tear down the walls those games put around gamers. Spore started development known as SimEverything, which suggested that pieces from all the Sim games would find their way into the end product to create a kind of omniscient playground for gamers to create worlds and watch them evolve. On paper these aspirations are to be lauded. In practice, it is another story.

The mission of Spore is to take an organism from single-celled anonymity all the way to space-faring glory. From a game designer's perspective, that's not an easy task to say the least. Instead of trying to find a single control scheme or gameplay element to drive the game from start to finish, Maxis (developer of Spore) has broken the game into five distinct sections along an evolutionary line: Cell stage, Creature stage, Tribal stage, Civilization stage and finally, the Space stage.

Starting the game puts players in the Cell stage after picking a planet from the Galaxy menu and deciding between a diet of meat or vegetation. The Cell stage is very simple - players swim around in the murky biomass of this newly inhabitable planet eating and collecting DNA strands that are used to upgrade the organism in the Creator, which opens when you put out a mating call. Comparisons to the Playstation 3 downloadable game flOw are certainly appropriate but Spore allows more control over the evolution of the cell through the Creator. It's simple and straightforward and even the Creator has very few options to start.

In the Cell stage you'll compete with other cells for food. It's eat and grow or be eaten.

Each stage of Spore has a corresponding progress bar that shows how far the organism has evolved through the stage. Completing mini-goals - such as "eat five pieces of microscopic vegetation" - and objectives move the progress bar along. When the progress bar fills up, the next stage becomes available. Completing the Cell stage takes no more than a matter of minutes and very soon you'll move on to the Creature stage, which involves adding legs to your organism to facilitate its climb from the primordial soup onto dry land.

Spore's Creature stage moves from the simplicity of flOw to the rudimentary mechanics of an MMO: exploration, socialization, gathering and combat. In the Creature stage, you'll still collect body parts for use in the Creator but the mini-goals also include befriending or eliminating your fellow species on the planet. As you curiously approach a strange species you can opt to engage them socially through mimicry or attack them. The social communication involves responding to the actions of the species in a similar manner. If they sing, you sing. If they dance, you dance. If all goes well, you can impress the species and make them an ally. Sometimes, however, it isn't enough to play the mini-game perfectly. You're only as good as the sum of your parts, which have stats to improve social and combat actions.

Of all the stages the Creature stage has the best sense of discovery. Walking on the face of a strange planet meeting strange creatures while digging up body parts to add to your own creature adds up to some enticing gameplay. What makes it more interesting is how pack instincts take over your thinking. Whether going with a social approach or a combat approach, it's always better to go after the babies or try to single out a loner, and the primal way of thinking, "Can I eat it or can it eat me?" becomes an accurate gauge for interaction. The game even reacts to your tactics somewhat intelligently. Babies will sometimes refuse to socialize at all and run behind the nearest adult to watch you warily. The gameplay is bare-bones simple but still strangely compelling. Once the progress bar is full, last minute changes to the creature are allowed before evolving to the Tribal stage.

NEXT PAGE: Tribal, Civilization and Beyond

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