Spore
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Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): Simulation, Strategy Home Page: http://www.spore.com
Cell Stage Swimming around in the ocean, trying to avoid being considered food. In the beginning... there is an asteroid that crashes into the ocean, and from the asteroid's remains swims out a little microbe. Spore avoids the whole drama about the origin of life by basing the game on the concept of panspermia - a theory that simple forms of life can spread from planet to planet. Except that the primordial soup where our little microbe lands is already teeming with competition, and it's all about eating or getting eaten. You can choose to be a herbivore or a carnivore, and after some tinkering with body parts you pick up from the sea, you can also end up being omnivore, eating both. While you can (and should) upgrade your little bug with additional body parts, the cell stage is mostly about just chomping up enough food to grow until you finish the stage. Food also credits you with DNA points that are used as currency for adding new body parts. This stage is very short and simple mini-game, and serves as a nice introduction to the game. In this case simple is good - you are talking about microbes, after all. Visually the cell stage is very impressive. As your creature grows through stages, previously massive monsters swimming in the background become big creatures bent on eating you - until you out-grow them and turn the tables. Once you have grown out of the soup, the creature creator prompts you to add some legs to your proto-creature, and then it's off to land. Creature Stage The first meeting to plot out galactic domination - "let's kill the critters on that hill". As you hit the land, you start from a nest with fellow creatures of the same species. Initially you have a very limited selection of body parts to customize your creation - and initially only a mouth is truly mandatory so your creature can eat. You quickly encounter other creatures roaming around their nests, and you have two ways to deal with them - either eat them or make friends with them. Either activity will reward you with DNA points that allow you to improve your creature. Additional body parts can be collected from piles of bones or from specific "Alpha" creatures of competing species - whenever you kill or socialize with them, you unlock additional body parts for the creature editor. DNA points can be spent to upgrade or add parts in the editor by visiting your nest and producing an offspring with another creature of your species. Funnily when the new creature hatches from his egg, all his companions have magically transformed to this new creature configuration as well.
 Socializing is for wussies. The game also dishes out simple quests - the most basic one is to kill or socialize with a number of creatures based on your stance (combat or social), either making that species extinct or making them friendly to you. In order to be efficient at killing or socializing, you can add parts to your creature that add and improve your abilities. For combat you can add parts that allow you to bite, charge, strike or spit poison and for socializing there are creature parts that allow you to sing, dance, charm and pose. New parts provide higher bonuses to these skills, and these stats are the only bit that matters from the perspective of the underlying gameplay. It doesn't matter where you stick your poison gland or horn, as long as it gives a bigger bonus to spit or charge, it improves the killing performance of your creature. As you advance in the creature stage, you "level up" your brain and gain more hit points. You also gain the ability to add friendly creatures by forming a pack. While it's theoretically possible to complete the stage without a party of creatures by just killing things alone, the game expects you to use this ability as it greatly boosts your ability to kill or impress other species. In fact, for the pacifist it's not optional. As soon as you can add one creature to your pack, it becomes almost impossible to impress any other species unless you first recruit an additional creature of your own species to your pack. Yet as soon as you do that, it's almost impossible to fail while singing and dancing with another species. The only challege is to figure out what the game expects you to do. In a way the creature stage is a cute setting for playing around with the creature editor, and you can build some truly bizzarre creations. Yet the question arises - "why?". Most modifications change absolutely nothing with your creature's performance, and as you can't stack parts that give the same bonus to your abilities, there is zero reward for ingenuity in creature building - you just bolt on the part that gives you biggest available bonus to each stat. As a game, it's overly simple and far too easy. As soon as you have figured out the simple parameters of the actual underlying gameplay, it's laughably easy to guide your creature through this stage. It feels like a simple kids game. Tribal Stage The moment is at hand - time to go tribal. Once you have filled your DNA bar as a creature, growing your brain to a level where your pack of creatures turns into a tribe, you get a nice 2001 Space Odyssey homage as a cutscene. Other factions on your continent evolve simultaneously, and you move to tribal stage. Before the stage starts, you have one last chance to modify your creature to your liking, and after this all previous stat bonuses and functionality is thrown out of the window - the shape and form of your creature is pure window dressing from here on out and you can no longer change it. You also get the chance to add some tribal clothing to your creation. Different clothing dishes out some rudimentary bonuses, effectively allowing you to specialize either towards war, gathering or diplomacy. Then it's off to gather food, produce offspring and conquer neighboring tribes. You can either assimilate them with arts or just go on a rampage and kill everything. Each tribe you take out adds to the totem pole in your camp, and once the pole is filled up, the brain grows again and it's time to move to the civilization stage.
While the tribal phase allows you to do some additional activities such as domesticating creatures and building up your village with additional buildings that bestow you with new abilities and bonuses, it's all mostly about gathering food to spawn more offspring and then using all that manpower to deal with the competiting tribes. The underlying gameplay is very simple and forgiving, and it's almost impossible to truly fail this stage.
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