‘Spore’ allows players to create own species, help it thrive

Will Wright's latest video game, "Spore," fails to live up to the standards set by his earlier games, such as "SimCity" and "The Sims."

While the other games embrace casual play by allowing players to do whatever they want for hours without any particular goal, "Spore" has a plot, a beginning and an end. Since the best part of Wright's older games is the freedom of pointlessness, "Spore" is a bit disappointing.

Each game of "Spore" starts with a meteor hitting a planet and life forming as a result. Players create an organism and guide their species through five phases. The stages -- cell, creature, tribal, civilization and space -- each feel like their own game. With the exception of space, which can be played for days, each can be completed within an hour or two.

In cell stage, players control a two-dimensional cell, swimming around and looking for food, which makes the cell grow, and meteorite bits, which provide players with more body part options. To change the cell's appearance, players make it mate by pressing a button and following the trail to the nearest member of its species. The two cells create an egg, and the player is taken into creator mode to add and move parts to the cell, change its color and so on.

Once the cell has eaten enough food it suddenly has a brainstorm and evolves into a land-walking creature. After the final space stage, the creature stage is the longest. To evolve out of it, players must earn DNA points by either having their creature befriend other species or by hunting other species into extinction.

Once the player's creature is clearly the planet's dominant species, it has another brainstorm, invents fire and creates a tribe. Tribal stage is quick, but difficult to adapt to after playing cell and creature stages. While in the first two stages you control only one member of your species, in tribal stage you control a whole growing tribe. And where in cell and creature stages left-clicking selects an object, in tribal stage you must right-click -- which, by this point, feels entirely counterintuitive.

To complete this phase, the player's tribe must either befriend other tribes by giving them presents and a concert or destroy other tribes by attacking them.

Then the creature has another brainstorm and creates cars and a town hall. Civilization stage begins. This stage is more of the same, plotwise. To advance, the city must take over all of the planet's other cities by either conquering them through military power, converting them to that city's religion or taking over their markets.

It takes less than an hour of hard playing to conquer the entire planet. For whatever reason, doing so makes your creature have (gasp) another brainstorm and invent spaceships (which, of course, you design).

The space stage is completely unlike the other stages. In it, the player jumps from star system to star system, trading with other species, setting up colonies and performing missions to make money.

While the space stage quickly becomes boring and repetitive, this is more than made up for by the ending scene and its several clever references to a true pinnacle of geek culture, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

All things considered, the best part of "Spore" is not the overly simple plot and game play but its editor modes and the easy access to playing with other players' creatures.

"Spore" is a decent way to spend a weekend, but not so wonderfully addictive that it is an awesome way to spend a year, as many of Will Wright's previous games have been.