Spore™ Game Play

The Cell Stage of Spore™

"Start at the very beginning. Nurture your own creation from its humble aquatic origins to its evolution as a sentient species in the epic journey of Spore."

You will begin Spore™ by choosing whether you would like to be an herbivore or carnivore. Starting from within a meteor hurdling towards the planet, you will eventually dominate, you await a crash landing bursting your space carrier into bits, scattering pieces everywhere.

Thankfully you land in a body of water with all the necessities to grow and evolve your microscopic lifeform. Now your long journey begins. Swimming around with other creatures large and small. You must find food to survive while at the same time not become lunch for one of the larger creatures nearby.

Complete the goals and reach the end of the level by eating and evolving until you are ready take one last look at your aquatic surroundings and climb onto land, so beginning the creature stage of spore.

The Creature Stage of Spore™

"Evolve your creature to become the first sentient species on the planet."

You begin by crawling towards your first nest and getting the first view of your new world.

"It is the beginning of a new day... and for you, a whole new strange and wondrous world. Air fills your longs as you stretch into your limbs in your new home... dry land. The race to evolve has begun..."

You've made it to land, Whew! You start with a small clan, of five in my case, and have control over one character to start roaming and scanning the area. You will quickly find another nest of creatures nearby. Most of the island's inhabitants are neutral and perfectly willing to be friends. Others will not even give you the chance to make nice. It's fight or flight with these colonies.

With the nice nest of creatures you will make friends by singing, dancing, posing and charming the pants off them. It will depend upon each creature you encounter. I found it more fun to make friends than kill other creatures. I get enough kill kill kill in other games I play. Besides, you're usually forced to fight some one sooner or later, so you get that experience anyway. It all depends on what outcome you want your history to record.

This is a very interesting level. It's all about relationships with others and of course finding better body parts to use to build a better creature. You get a great understanding how it was to be an inferior creature and how through understanding the surrounding conflicts you were able to adapt abilities through evolution to make yourself stronger. The tons of body parts you will find will allow to change your character as often as you like, perfecting the creature you will use to carry on to the next stage of spore, the tribal stage.

The Tribal Stage of Spore™

"Complete with rival tribes to build your tribe of three to a burgeoning village on the path toward civilization."

You've become a bit more intelligent and now work together as a tribe to forge friendships with the other tribes which in turn gives you more choices for huts or conquer them and plunder their goodies by force. You can assign duties to your tribe members so that they don't just stand around. Duties such as gathering food or stealing from another tribe are among the few. Food is what constitutes as money in the tribal stage of spore so gather lots of it.

You'll have your own village complete with huts you'll add as you can afford them and collect them. This will give you weapons for fighting and musical instruments for making friends. Also huts for items useful for gathering food. You'll eventually build your tribe up to 12 members strong. This round is not about evolving physically as much so as it is about evolving psychologically.

You must learn to work together as a tribe performing several chores at a time to eventually either conquer or win-over the other tribes before they conquer you. Do this and you will be that much smarter and able to form a leadership with your tribe and a unison of thought. A thought of a more civilized world which allows you to progress to the civilization stage of spore.

The Civilization Stage of Spore™

"Develop from city to global nation overcoming opposition from your own species. Succeed and you'll find the key to the cosmos."

In the civilization stage of spore you don't control your citizens directly but rather through vehicles. Spore allows you so many details and items to create the coolest land vehicles, sea faring vessels and air craft to perform your handy work. This includes mining for spice both on land and sea. Mining spice earns you money to grow your city and forces.

In the civilization stage of spore you will do allot of creating. You start by designing your town hall. Then you go on to design your house, entertainment and factory buildings. From there you get to design your sea, land and air craft. The best thing is you are given a huge sum of money to build your items so the limits are only your imagination.

You will also have to deal with the other locals in one way or another. Everybody has gotten a lot smarter and you have to make some quick decisions Your goal is to dominate the planet. Careful planning and persistence will be necessary to make it through this level.

The Space Stage of Spore™

"Take on missions from your homeworld as you cruise the galaxy in your spaceship on your journey through the cosmos.

The space stage of spore is the longest of all the levels. As of this posting I have not finished this level. You've got to get past some pretty unreasonable beings and they are being bit temperamental. They are known as the Grog. That's much later in the level though.

You will start by creating your space vessel. Again, you have hundreds of choices of do-dads, body shapes, embellishments and more. This vessel allows you to rise above your planet and leave its gravity for the first time. You can now explore your star system, travel to other planets to form friendships with other worlds and races or conquer all that stand in your way.

This is a level you wish you could just casually explore but duty calls and there will be time to explore here and there but you will mostly be needed to stop hostile UFO's, personally save planets from ecological disasters, rush to stop pirates from plundering your spice mining planets.

It's not all work, work, work though, there are plenty of tools available to allow you to terra-form planets. You can raise and lower the atmosphere and temperature as well as change the planets formation. Raise and lower mountains and hills, create rivers and seas, plant trees and populate the planet with wildlife.

This is how you will develop planets into habitable worlds to mine spice or just to have fun changing the look of a planet. The coolest thing is that when viewed from the star system view the planet actually looks like it does in planet view. They have thought of everything to make the little details matter. You literally create your own galaxy just they way you want it.

All the while you'll be working your way towards the center of the galaxy. Making friends and enemies along the way. Good luck, I'll let you know how it turns out when I finish.