Spore

Spore is one of those games that immediately sucks you in so completely its suddenly several hours later than you thought it was. You go through the first four stages of the game rather quickly, most likely not taking more than a few days. As you progress through these stages you build and modify your creature as you unlock more dna parts. Before you enter the final stage, the space stage, you finalize your creatures appearance (appearance is all they're good for now). Then you head off to what is supposed to be the real meat of the game, whats supposedly longer than the first four stages combined.
My first attempt through the space stage was an atrocity. I was a warrior nation, and as such I made friends with only 1 civilization and angered several others. This caused the game to come to a screeching halt, as I could do nothing but defend my home planet and the 1 planet I had managed to colonize. Whenever I left it was immediately under seige and I had to race home to save the planet from the same boring, stupid spaceships. To kill those spaceships you have to fly around in a circle and fire at them. That is all. So, I started a new race at the space age and was much friendlier towards several other nations. I had several trade routes, though their only purpose appears to be to allow the option to buy a civilization, heaven forbid trading with them would actually yield you some sort of profit. Instead you have to do this yourself. For every planet you've colonized, you have to fly around and collect the spice they've mined, then find someone willing to pay a lot more for it. Perhaps I was doing something wrong, but I never seemed to have enough money to afford anything, and even though I was being nice to people, they're were still the other warriors nations who attacked me quite often. Also the missions, frankly, as boring as hell. The first part, and usually the hardest part of the mission, is actually FINDING where you have to fly to, and then getting there. Then you jump into the planet, beam some stuff up or down or destroy some buildings. Oh, you can scan stuff too.

In summary, I am severly dissapointed in the last stage of Spore, and it lost its hold on me completely. I wouldn't hesitate to give this game one star if it wasn't for the 6 or so hours of enjoyment it gave me for the first four stages of the game. Spore's icon has been sitting on my desktop for a while, my excuse being that perhaps I'll go back some day and try the space stage again, but I don't see that happening. If I feel like playing something like Spores space age again, I think I'll go for a decent space sim.