Spore

A few weeks ago I told you a little about Will Wright’s latest project – Spore. If the idea of such a boundless sandbox intrigued you, you’d be delighted to learn that the game manages to deliver the goods. For those wearing a blank expression, here’s the lowdown: in Spore, you play God. You start the game with a cinematic of a meteor crashing into a lifeless ocean, bringing with it a microcellular organism. You can design this organism to look any way you want, and watch over it as it evolves (under your strict supervision) from an invertebrate to a complete warmongering, bloodthirsty civilization, that travels around the galaxy annihilating other civilization for your sadistic pleasure.

The game is crafted carefully into five different stages – the Cell Stage, the Creature Stage, the Tribal Stage, the Civilization Stage, and the Space Stage. It’s filled with a load of powerful, intuitive editors, that allow you to do everything from customizing your creature at different stages of its life to designing a town hall for its Civilization Stage, or an entire planet during its Space Stage. These editors play the biggest part in Spore, since the game depends majorly on user-generated content. Everything you create, be it a single-celled organism or a spaceship for the Space Stage, gets uploaded on to the Spore server to be shared with others. So eventually when you play the game, you’ll have the bizarre creations of others populate your game world at different stages. With so many custom created avatars out there, no two players' experiences will ever be the same!