gamers play with evolution

By Colby Johnson

Evolution is an extremely long and complicated process in reality, but in the video game Spore, it can be completed in a matter of hours.

Starting as an amoeba, gamers decide if they want their creation to be an omnivore, an herbivore or a carnivore. Working from there, your creature has to eat its way through evolution until it grows a brain. From there on, your creature must continue eating and growing its brain, and it eventually becomes smart enough to start a tribe. In the tribal stage, you must expand your tribe while either defending or making friends with the other tribes. After some time, your tribe decides to start a city.

When you decide what they want their cities to look like, they find out that you are starting to use vehicles instead of creatures. Along with that, you also find out that your creature is the dominant species on the planet, so starting with one city, you take over all of the other cities on the planet. Once that task is complete, the species decides that the planet is not enough, so it decides to build a spaceship, and you move onto other planets, becoming either diplomats or bloodthirsty killers. This game was designed so that gamers would have a completely different experience each time they play the game.

Each stage has its own objectives, but the first couple stages and the last one are the best since they allow gamers to control their creature themselves, unlike the other stages, where they have you control many creatures or vehicles at once. Other cons for this game: the stages are repetitive, the earlier stages are very short, each type of creature has a limited amount of "parts" that gamers can choose from, and when gamers build their vehicles or buildings, the parts are awkward and difficult to place. In conclusion, this is a game for people who want to let their imaginations go wild.