sporesday

[phosfate]

Spore: The Whole Friggin' Game arrived yesterday. I'm RAMshy enough to make it a bit crashy, but it's still bitchin' keen so far. The music, graphics, and camera are all improved from Creature Creator. It's even slightly easier to read the painting thumbnails. But only slightly.

To start the game, you pick a planet (they're bigger than the Little Prince's planet, but you can probably walk around the thing in half an hour -- I assume they have magical superdense cores to keep the gravity on) and name it. Okay, Planet Butter. Then you make your first microscopic critter, with limited parts, and set him loose.

A meteor appears from behind the local sun (Buttersol), and hits Planet Butter, breaking up in the atmosphere. You follow a chunk that crashes into the ocean. In the sea, your meteor fragment splits open, and behold, the critter you just made emerges...Protobutter.

Millions of years pass, as you guide Protobutter through the ocean. He eats, he grows, he mates, he gets poisoned and electrocuted by bigger cells...aw, GODDAMMIT! But the nice thing about microscopic life is there's always another, and whatever befalls the Protobutter of the moment, there are more to carry on. Until, a bazillion years later, you've evolved to relative hugeness, you've acquired some defenses (or, in Protobutter's case, not really, because his operator has no idea what she's doing), and CLICK IF YOU'RE READY TO EVOLVE.

Well okay.

Protobutter acquires a pair of legs, a couple more parts, and general rearranging for life out of the water.

Then...and this bit is awesome...a whole swarm of your guys race out of the surf and up onto dry land for the first time.

Sadly, Protobutter was torn to bits by predators on his first trip out of the nest. He is survived by his family, Mrsbutter and the Bittybutters, and the other inhabitants of the Butternest.