Ya, the E3 2005 version was WAY better than the end product. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dvMDFOFnA

Heck, I would buy the spore from that video in a heartbeat. Unfortunately they totally redid the graphics and pretty much all of the game to the point where it is a little kid game which should have been titled 'An introduction to video games.'

And to add insult to injury, put a bunch of DRM on it.

The box looks really good on my shelf >.>

I just hope that Sims 3 doesn't end up having the same fate. I doubt it though because of the type of game that Sims is.

I had high expectations for Spore, just like everyone else. And well, that's exactly why the game just isn't that great. People were at first led to believe that it would be a deep evolution simiulator of sorts with complexity far greater than any of Will Wright's other games. Well, not the case. It ended up being almost like a bunch of "big-mini-games" lumped together incoherantly one after and another.

Addmitedly, the game certainly did push the boundaries of what is possible from user creativity, as proven with the amazing buildings, creatures, vehicles, and planets that people have created. It's just unfortunate though that Spore was more like Little Big Planet than it was like Sim City.

You can play Sims 3 right now. It's called Sims 2. I don't recommend you buy the expansions, though, unless you want to spend $200 on that game.  Obviously, they are overpriced.

 Unlike the creepy and cute pack. That was only 40% the cost of the game for 100 MB's of intricate, timeless, and endlessly replayable content.

tool. You know what. That's mean. I apologize. But seriously, if you want to "spice" things up the right way, but Gal Civ Ultimate. That's set in space, and its actually fun.

Spore had great editors.  That's just about the only nice thing I can say about it.  It's case in point of how not to design a game.

I honestly don't know what to think about this whole disaster.  It's very clear that it was a screw-up, but why it ended up that way with pedigree game designers and virtually limitless development time is a mystery.  Some people say it was an attempt to "dumb down" the game to widen its target audience.  This is downright stupid to anyone who has ever watched a kid play his first RTS game.  They don't get caught up on the intricacies of deeper strategy.  It's the basic mechanics that they have to get their heads around, and once they do they tackle the depth of the game at their own pace, raising the difficulty as they feel comfortable. 

At the end of the day, I just have to conclude that the people making Spore didn't have a clue of what they were doing.  Oh, sure, they had beautiful ideas and the guys making the editors certainly did a marvellous job.  But the implementation was shoddy and lackluster at its best. 

Spore was very much an experiment, and some experiments just don't come off.

The main problem I think was that in order to appeal to more hardcore gamers (like the people reading this as opposed to people who occasionally play The Sims), it needed to not have EA on its back, but such was the technical undertaking, it needed EAs money to work.  I don't consider it as bad as some people say it is - they are trying to compare it to 'real' games like GalCiv, SoaSE etc (slight Stardock bias there ), when thats not what it is at all.  I agree with Nights Edge that it is in the same realm as Black and White, and I reckon that the technology used to make it will be used in many great games in the future.

As a comparison, has anyone heard of a film called Young Sherlock Holmes?  A pretty mediocre mid-1980s film, but it was the first film with a fully CGI character, created by John Lasseter who went on to found Pixar.

I wouldn't consider myself a "hardcore" gamer; I consider myself someone who accidentally wastes too much time on forums and games. I wouldn't play Command and Conquer III, for instance, mostly because I don't think my computer would come close to running that game, and I refuse to buy a new one. I can't justify that kind of expenditure for something stupid, like how I waste some time.

 I just like when games are fun.

I actually enjoyed Spore... for the first... 8 hours.  After that, I just couldn't play it anymore.  The idea is awesome, but the actual game was only good for a bit.  I think the only reason that I enjoyed it so much is because I kept comparing it to human evolution.  Taken in that way, it's a little more interesting (to me.)

This is true of any "Sim" game... for instance, Black and White, Sims 1,2, and 3, etc.  It's not about "winning", it's about customization, and feeling as though you are in complete control, and getting from point A to point B. (Literally or otherwise.)

Haha, that makes sense.  Sims are like virtual, complicated, Barbie dolls. 

"Game" is a word that covers a huuuuuge amount of ground though.  It doesn't neccessarily mean that you have to "win" though,  just that you have to participate, and, preferably, have fun.

I'd have to critique the creature builder as well, for some entirely unnecessary limitations. You can't use the carnivore or herbivore mouths if you're an omnivore, or vice versa etc. So if you want to have an herbivore with mandibles, you can't, because mandible mouths are only for carnivores. That limits both aesthetic and gameplay possibilities for no particular reason. You can just use the external creature creator and mix-and-match all you like, and then inject that into the creature phase, but then you miss out on being able to upgrade and evolve your creature over time.

After creature phase the polish on the game really starts to go down hill, but what really grinds my gears is how weirdly generic the vehicles are. Ground vehicles launch a single arcing projectile, Sea vehicles fire a single arcing missile, Air vehicles fire a tracking downward beam. This too kind of infringes on creativity.

That to me is the most damning issues with Spore, it's a game where, if nothing else, you can be creative.. and then there's these funky little limitations that infringe on that creativity. It's not a total failure in my eyes, it's still a pretty cool toy and I've spent probably a total of 2 weeks with it since I picked it up on release day, but it's notnearly the game that it could've been due to dozens of little balance issues.

The game can be a challenge, I'm a vet at spore by now but when I set it to Hard I died horribly the first time I played Tribe, and couldn't get through Civ phase at all.. at least not as an economic civ, which isn't able to directly attack enemies.

I use a 'Space is Fun' mod that reduces the occurence of attacks and epidemics so you're not constantly getting interrupted. It /is/ a lot funner this way, but there's a massive amount of grind in getting some of the badges. I tried for days to get the Holo-Projector tool -- it lets you beam down to planets and interact with (well probably just -look at-) creatures and tribes and such up close. I gave up after 4 days. I had to just jet around burning up time and buy up 50 systems or so to get the Trader 5 badge or something. Meh!

If they'd had the degree of complexity and interactivity shown in the GDC 05 video, perhaps the massive galaxies and far-off goals would make sense. But as it is, it's just too much of the same and I end up getting sick of the same old crap. Aside from a few super-weapons that some civs get, every race plays the same in space so there's really no replayability or variety to be had.

The problem is that EA had its fingers in it's development.  They tried to make it like another sims by gimping and dumbing down the way this was present in order to appeal to the masses.  Instead of making it deep (which very few people actually enjoy in general) they made it functional eye candy and gimicky.  Further, they purposely witheld many features that should have been included (first parts pack for example) in order to milk people for all they were worth.  Also, the SecuROM activations DRM method used ended up irritating more people then not making reviews not so good.  This decision didnt really make sense to me as the target audience for Spore was not hard core gamers (who typically can crack games and play illegal copies), but rather casual players (namely kids and female sims players who typically cant or dont do anything illegal within the digital world).  So why put in a harsh DRM into a game that is targeted at less then techy players? 

An example of this is that my sister, a casual sims player, saw a commercial on spore and purchased it.  She could not get it installed properly due to securom interfering with a few other programs she has (mostly 3rd party programs that are designed for private establishments to keep track of records and such) and therefore could not even play it.  Luckily for her I'm quite tech savvy and was able to help her get the game to install and run.  Once run, she's played it once, but ultimately went back to sims.  She and I have not purchased any other spore related things.

EA itself was the death of spore.  If they would have left things up to Will Wright and his crew, it probably would have been more of what we saw at GDC05 which would have appealed to the hard core gamers more so then the casuals.  Further, I dont think they would have sprung for such a DRM as to promote cracked versions over legit ones.  Now this is all speculation, but I think WW has more sense of what works then EA corporate.

Overall Spore's technology still has potential, but not under the watchful eye of EA.  Some smaller, 3rd party developers need to start working on such technology and incorporating into real game.  I think RTS's, RPG's and any other games could benefit from players being able to make whatever type of characters they want and apply attributes to them, play them multiplayer, etc...  A full RTS of characters and units custom made would be fantastic.