You're joking, right? This is actually some horrible joke gone completely awry, right?

Spore, for those of you who don't know, is a game recently released by EA, and comes from the mind of Will Wright - the guy that brought us all those Sims games. We were promised a lot with spore: physical, metal, spiritual, and cultural evolution, eventually progressing to universal domination.

What we got, instead, was this piece of garbage. To list my complaints:

There is no evolution. This is simply a string of mini games - cell, creature, tribal, and civilization - with one big game at the end - space colonization. Yes, what you do in the past - how you behave - directly effects what you can use later on in the game, but the scope of this is so limited that I can count how many variations you can achieve: 81

There are exactly 81 different, predictable ways you can play this game. Of course, if you're like me you're just going to stick to one "path" which limits you to three distinct choices (industrious, diplomatic, and militaristic). Wow, how evolutionary.

Your creatures, vehicles, buildings, and space ship are all just eye candy. Ultimately limbs, mouths, eyes, and everything else all becomes meaningless. In fact adding more shit doesn't help you in any way shape or form: if I add two sets of legs, I would assume I could walk faster, but I'd be fucking wrong!

The game is just plain dumb; for example, I created a tank of destruction known as the "Ass Kicker 9000" (with sister vehicles "Sea Kicker 9000" and "Air Kicker 9000"). the AK9k had one goal in mind: kill everything in its path. So I therefore loaded that son of a bitch down with every expensive weapon known to man. This vehicle has ridiculous stats: 80% weaponry, 10% speed, 10% health.

My problem isn't creating - the creator is excellent - my problem is with the game: why did my vehicle shoot the exact same crap with the exact same speed and exact same health as every other vehicle on the planet? Why, when I had so much weaponry, did I fire the same exact projectiles? Why, why I had an additional gun mounted on the sides, was I unable to shoot those and the cannons?

Of course now I'm on the space stage. At first I was blown away: it's huge! Populated with hundreds upon hundreds of planets. I thought to myself "yes! this is the game I've always wanted to play!"

It turns out this is not the game I've always wanted to play. Essentially you just hover around in your space ship looking for shit until you get bored and start to colonize a planet or two. Once you're bored with that you'll go out and explore the rest of the galaxy only to find out that it's populated by about 5 different "empires" and one big "empire" called the Grox.

While, by technical definition, there is a lot to do in the game, it's the same thing repeated over and over again. You either create trade routes, colonize planets, or blow the shit out of stuff.

That brings me to my next complaint: the battles. This part sucks. Oh, it's fun at first, but then the repetitive nature of it all just sinks in. You go to a planet, kill the defending armada, blow up the colonies. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Of course you'll be hounded time and time again to save this or that planet from invading hordes or an ecosystem collapse. You'll be hounded nonstop to the point where you'll just want to take Will Wright and shove a goddamn bullwhip up his ass. Let me give you space novices a little hint: fuck the colonies you can rebuild them. Every 30 seconds this whiny good for nothing bitches complain about some sort of catastrophe.

then it suddenly dawned on me: I have no armada. Every time I've conquered a planet, or been attacked, I've been attacked by a goddamn horde. Not just one main spaceship, but 5 of them, each with their own little clique of allied ships. Every planet in every empire I've been on had those - except mine.

Why the hell is my species so stupid as to not be able to have their own defense network?

I'm not asking for a lot here. I realize that commanding an entire fleet would put this game into the realm of "RTS enthusiasts only" but I am asking for some sort of backup. The only option is a high level item that costs around 2 million spore bucks - and it isn't even worth half a damn because if you leave an attacked colony unattended, the little fucker will just end up dead.

All in all, I'm left looking at spore and wondering "what the fuck happened here?" We were promised an evolutionary experience and instead we ended up with a DUPLO blocks space sim.

I feel like I'm in a sandbox. A round rubber "safe" sandbox - with no sand. And it's raining. And mommy left home to sleep with my new daddy.

Oh, yeah .. the DRM. Sucks ass. I downloaded my copy from Demonoid - came with a crack so I can install it on as many computers as I want. Fuck EA's 3 install limit (yeah, 3 installs - uninstalls don't count)