It's easy to talk about what Spore is not, considering the concept behind the project is so vast and ambitious. It's not a sandbox game at all, first off. You do similar things to achieve your goals in each and every play with very little room for overall creativity. Spore is also not a toy - at least Spore The Game is not. The creature creator is for sure, and the tool set you are given to make creatures, buildings, and vehicles from scratch is very impressive and addicting. But when you get to the game itself you get a very linear, very focused path through the designated stages. The space stage opens things up a bit, to be sure. But once I learned the direcitons the game pushes you in I found no fun in seeing what happened to the creatures I created. Because Spore is also not that deep, it's disappointingly simple. In the Sims you create complex personalities with multiple needs that constantly change. In Spore your species can be either Really Good, Really Bad or Always Trade. And if you mix it up I find it's just a slower experience with no real reward. Civilization IV has dozens of resources that the player can consume, horde, trade, gift, or build with. Spore has two - food in once stage, then spice. And so on and so on.

Most importantly, and most disappointingly, Spore is not a game about evolution. It's better described as a game about intelligent design. I think it's rather brilliant how Will Wright makes a case for both schools of thought with his game, really. The thing is every decision about your character's evolution, from cellular to fully evolved, is controlled by you directly. What I wanted, and what it looks like a few others did as well, is a game like this based around controlling the environment and variables around your creature - creating different situations that over time induces a more procedural evolution, determining the ultimate outcome of your species' look, personality, ambitions and skills. That is something I could keep coming back to, and I hope a guy like Will Wright makes that game someday as well.

Look, Spore is pretty fun. It should be in every computer lab in every elementary school. And maybe I've just been having fun screwing around with ecosystems in Viva Pinata, which IMO is a better game, and I'm trying to turn Spore into something it's not. But if I had to recommend it to someone my age who plays a decent amount of games, I'd say wait until it's either $20 or we see Spore the MMO expansion or the Evolution expansion hit the shelves.