Will Right's Spore has finally been dated for launch on September 7th, but personally I am not half as excited about the game as I was a few months ago. I've come to think about it and to me Spore just seems really repetitive and boring. Last year (no wonder my excitement has faded) I wrote an article about my top 5 most anticipated games and Spore was right up there on the list. Now I would have to remove it from that position. Exploring planets generated by algorithm endlessly just doesn't seem extremely exciting. I prefer a game where there are interactions between players, not just some shoddy excuse for interactions where your race will be thrown into my universe without any form of intelligent leadership.

Spore allows the player to design a microbe which then grows into a land creature, a society, and ultimately a space faring technological civilization. How many times do you think this process will be entertaining? Is there a significant play difference between making a four assed monkey civilization and a mershaq (half mermaid, half Shaquille O'neil) civilization? Time will tell, but my current estimation is there won't really be a play difference that stands out. Basically it's an RPG with no dungeons, no quests, and no combat, but there are a ton of possible faces to put on your character!

Once you reach the vehicle phase and the space phase of the game all that distinguishes your character from anyone elses goes out the window. You design your vehicle, but it can be driven by anything, I highly doubt the controls are going to feel at all different. Exploring planets generated by algorithm won't be very fun. "Oh, another lifeless rock vs oh, another civilization to befriend or destroy." Where is the drama? There is no "need" to trade between civilizations, you will never get attacked by random hostile aliens that stumbled upon you, and most importantly you won't ever have a competitive experience.

What Spore really needs in my opinion is true multi player, even if it is through a mini-game. Have a tiny galaxy with 4 random players thrown into it and speed everything up so that it takes about a half hour to get into an interstellar war. Fighting a civilization controlled by another player would be fun. Endlessly fighting against the same AI is going to get boring to me very fast. Make it an RTS title instead of just a "sim" title where you explore and there isn't much else to do. I want the ability to turn my home world into Apokolipse (the planet sized warship made from a planet in the DC universe) , or build a Deathstar and destroy alien worlds.