As you might guess, you're not really being given a game here. Spore: Galactic Adventures is a toolkit used to make games, using blank worlds as a staging ground. It's impressively flexible, allowing you to play through adventures using your own custom-evolved hero or one determined for you by the scenario, and to create your own custom adventures with which to befuddle your friends.
The 2009 GameStooge Awards continue with the fourth part of the Awards – the Technical category that covers expansions, digital games, and the surprise games of 2009.
Winners:
Best Expansion: Fallout 3: Broken Steel
Best Digital Game (Original): Plants Vs. Zombies
Best Digital Game (Adaptation): Trials HD
Best Multiplayer: Halo 3: ODST
Best Game You Didn't Play: Dead Space Extraction
Best Surprise: Batman: Arkham Asylum
Stardock has released Impulse's Top 10 Sellers list for the week ending on January 9.
GP writes: "The sheer scale of Will Wright's vision for Spore was praiseworthy, even if the final product occasionally felt pinched and clipped.
In brief, Spore zoomed out from the microscopic to the telescopic in five phases as players evolved and nurtured a single celled organism representing a species into a space captain representing a galactic empire. Unfortunately, the first four phases played like a rambling prologue to the final galactic phase. But what it lacked in aspects of game-play it made up for in charm and creativity."