In the beginning, it was all about food, sex, and death.

At the moment, my peaceful, musically-inclined race of cat-centaurs is parading around the continent in a walking pirate ship I’ve dubbed the Pope-mo-boat, converting as many of the unbelievers as possible.  Only yesterday they were a species of angry, spiky chickens trying to impress carnivores by posing and shaking their extra-spiky derrieres (this is called “charm”). Before that, they weren’t much more than eyestalks and flagella. In this world, evolution works, and it works because the player needs it to. It’s fascinating to watch  your creatures literally evolve at your demand, not just because it’s fun, but because you need them to.

Still, there’s a definite theme to the first few levels. I eat things, I kill things (sometimes; my first carnivores were wracked with guilt after the babies of the creature I’d just eatern cowered big-eyed and shivering under the nearest bush) and I mate with someone when I want to better myself. Not that there’s a mating mini-game, per se, but I’m still amused that I’ve gotten it on nine or ten times in an hour, at Spore’s encouragement, and nobody bats an eyelash – and yet one barely-reproductive act in Liberty City gets a year’s worth of press. There’s definitely a double-standard for humans.

What surprises me about Spore, working title “Sim-Everything”, is how shallow it is. I don’t mean that as a negative, necessarily. We have this expectation that our games must present as deep, rich, and complex an experience as possible, and then we end up with a game like Grand Theft Auto 4, which is huge and compicated and brilliant – and something that nobody I know has actually finished. I find it charming that Spore presents a broad, fun experience, not a deep one. Each of the various levels, with the exception of the galactic areas, feel too short but not too simple; it’s just enough of an experience to keep me moving from level to level, but not such a complex one that I feel like I’m playing seven or eight games at once. That said, I worry that in replay, now that I understand the rules of the tribal stage, I’ll want a harder challenge than conquering a few tribes on one map – and I don’t necessarily want to play that challenge from the vantage point of a space-faring civilization.

Tim, my significant other (Significant Tim?) says that to truly understand Spore, you should realize it’s a casual game at heart. Despite the criticisms that the initial levels are overly simplistic, I’ve had fun with it just the way it is. As far as complexity – and this is odd – I haven’t yet felt limited by any of the creator toolsets, and those constraints are usually the first things to bother me. When I first heard of Spore, I wondered that it would be a drain on creativity, something easier to play with than writing stories or creating images on ones’s own; I feel now that Spore’s tools are so easy to play with that they will inspire more than it ever prevents. I wonder too if Maxis is right, in that a certain sect of their player base will never actually play the game, spending all their gametime in the toolsets instead. It’s a nice example of games for the creative class looking more like tools than like traditional “games”- and frankly, it makes me anxious to see the inevitable expansions and patches.

I don’t know how innovative Spore is, from a gameplay standpoint. It seems to me that the strength of Spore is how it pulls so many genres together in a way that makes sense, not in that it adds anything brand new to the field (and I’m speaking solely of design here, not of the truly impressive procedural tech). But who am I to criticize? My Perchance have only just converted the whole of Planet Verily, much less the galaxy. I wonder that I’ll feel differently when I’ve fully explored the endgame, which is starting to feel like the actual game after four levels of well-crafted, carefully-disguised tutorials.

**Editor’s note: No, I’m not going to talk about DRM. I’m not happy about it, but this isn’t the place for that rant.