After ending my very first Spore gaming session a few hours after I startedmany hours after I started I sat back and thought about what I just played. Spore isn't an easy game to classify so much as it is five different games to classify all wrapped in an incredibly polished, coherent content creation sandbox. At numerous moments in my session that took me from the very beginning of a new species up through the beginning of the fifth and final Space Stage I sat back and realized that I'm the only gamer in the world who will have taken a blue race that resembles land-sharks called the Asplodians through each stage of the game but, when I was done, I won't be the only gamer who has had the divine pleasure of seeing my little blue carnivores in a game world due to Maxis' endlessly intelligent and well-assembled online distribution of player-created content. If anyone wants to play with my beautiful little blue babies, add "mittense" to your Spore buddy list.

First, to anyone who has yet to play, I'd recommend doing what I did and getting as many friends' spore buddy names as possible before starting and then, optionally, disabling content from anyone outside your list. It's far more enjoyable for me to see a creature in the wild, click it, and see the name of a friend or coworker and silently judge that person based on their creation than it is for me to see a giant walking pair of tits from El337nubPWN3r. And there were a great many times where I was faced with skyscaper-tall "epic" instances of my friends' creations that picked up my baby blue dinosaur-shark hybrid, gnawed on him a bit, and then threw him into the ground and killed him -- such an instance has probably tainted my friendship with that person irrevocably.

The first stage, where you're a tiny little wormthing with chompers swimming about in a primordial ooze, is a surprisingly enjoyable fifteen-to-twenty minute game of lion-and-cat-and-mouse where the lions and mice get bigger with your player-controlled origin of an eventual species. It is during this period that a player can get accustomed to a simplified version of the Creature Creator that will power the stage following this introduction to the game. Going into Spore I assumed this stage would be the game's weak point but that's not even close to true. The cell phase is a rightfully short-lived blast and I'm looking forward to doing it again when I create my next species.

The creature-driven phase that follows this is best described as a mix of the Spore Creature Creator (can I use this retail subset of the game to describe this?) and World of Warcraft. The player takes his newly land-bound creature from its non-aquatic immaturity to its near-civilized phase throughout this hour-long battle for supremacy as the player bands with the rest of his species to eliminate the other new nests that populate the world. This stage is, hypothetically, about making new friends and enemies in a world and defining a species' eating habits in a learn-by-eating method of sustenance through plants (herbivore), other species (carnivore), or a mix of both (omnivore). Killing or befriending other species will increase your DNA bar (experience bar) and each major experience block gives your creature a larger brain with the final block setting off the light bulb in a creature's head that he can use sticks to roast marshmallows.

The third stage is a tribal stage which tasks, emphasis on the word task, the player with guiding anywhere from six to a dozen of his units towards tribal victory in a real-time strategy-lite game. The idea behind this phase is alright, what with all of the inter-tribal negotiations and/or warfare that yield an increased familiarity with tools as a means to slice people, gather food, and impress other species with but, much like the forthcoming fourth stage of the game, too little of tasks that the player has to deal with in this phase can be completed with very little thought or effort from the player. The only meaningful choice in this segment to be made is whether a player wants his species to progress to the next stage by killing all of the fellow tribes, impressing them with their culture and music, or, uh, a third option? The customization options given to the player in this phase are as hollow as the gameplay mechanics as the only things a player can do are to equip nine variations of "clothing" per each of the five clothing types (helmet/chest piece/shoulders/accessories/one other) to increase the tribe's proficiency in combat, gathering, and culture.

The fourth stage is the civilization phase that gives players access to city customization (city hall, factory, entertainment, houses) and various vehicles (land, air, and sea) to wage the same sorts of war as in the third stage on a bigger scale. This civilization stage is made far less tedious in that it not only makes players balance numerous cities, compared to the third stage's one-tribe-only management, but it also provides a wealth of, admittedly shallow, content creation segments for each of the vehicles and buildings. There are also super-abilities of types that depend on the species a player has created over the preceding stages (warfare, culture, and that pesky third thing I can't remember since I killed everything I came in contact with). I used a nuke at the end of the stage and won which, really, is the best way to win. The biggest disappointment in this section is the really shoddy implementation of the vehicle creation compared to every other aspect of the game; a player can deck out a vehicle with weapons and thrusters and feet and all that jazz but, when it comes to actually utilizing it, the unit just moves and attacks with a generic animation. I can't even express my disappointment that my Asplodius Puppius walker land vehicle didn't use his head-mounted missiles to blow things up. I almost cried. Then I realized I had a landshark in the cockpit (or so I imagined) and that made it better.

I was told by all of my non-US friends, since we were one of the last countries to get access to the game, that the Space Stage is where a majority of the game time will be spent and now that I've reached it I can see why. The player gets access to an interstellar spaceship and is given a variety of missions, quests, and a very, very large map to explore in what has been described to me as a sort of 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) game. I've only gotten about an hour in to this stage but, thus far, I've gotten missions to meet new alien life form, establish trade routes, and terraform planets. What I didn't realize was, when terraforming, I can't just throw the species in my cargo hold to the ground of the planet or they die. So, uh, yeah. Now I'm going back to my home planet and "borrowing" some species to populate this alien world.

At this point, I can safely say that my expectations for the game were met and exceeded on almost every level. For every fault the game has, like the stupid vehicle creation limitations and the yawn-casuing tribal stage, there are a dozen other game mechanics that aren't only fun but contain their own metagames for a player to discover. And every aspect of the game is archived and categorized in one of the most important game mechanics I've ever seen: The Sporepedia (below). Now, back to my interstellar landsharks.