From a basic, single cell organism, to a more complex being with a brain, passing through the tribal RTS stage, going through the civilization stage where you have to dominate your whole planet, and finally finding your way in space amongst thousands of different alien species and becoming the master of the galaxy, while giving the evolution of a wink on your way - welcome to the world of Spore.

Now don't think this will be easy, but Will Wright and his team of designers made sure that this process is in fact a lot easier than the actual evolution process.

While Spore delivers every promise that Will made when he presented this game, you will feel somehow empty and shallow after a few moments you start playing it, and unfortunately the feeling will never end.

But let's not be so pessimistic from the beginning, and let's admit the amazing accomplishments that Spore brings to today's gaming industry.  It succeeds in generating huge amounts of random content and distributes it smart enough to create a whole living and breathing world.

Every evolution era is completely different and unique, but your evolution and your decisions persist throughout the entire game, and shape your actions to come.

It all begins when a meteor of unknown origins impacts the surface a planet capable of sustaining life.  Of course you get to choose from several different looking planet environments, and then your meteor containing a single cell organism crashes onto the planet.

Cell

The game now looks more like "Feeding Frenzy"; you can choose to be a carnivore or herbivore, and then you have to start eating your way around until you get bigger and bigger.  As you navigate and feed, you find different power-ups that you can use to improve your abilities.  Equipping each of these power-ups requires DNA points that are also gained as you eat various things.  When you've got enough DNA points you can use the mating call button to find a suitable mate and evolve. 

The creature creator screen offers all the power-ups you found plus a few more options.  You can of course design the creature you always wanted, or import it from one of the existing models in the database.  The database contains thousands of creatures and it grows each day as the game exports user creations on the official Spore server and downloads them to your computer in order to populate your Spore world.

Of course, you can encounter the creature creator at any other state of the game, helping you design individuals, buildings, vehicles or space ships.  Your design and import options will grow as the game progresses.

Once you've seen everything you could have seen in the cellular world, and are big enough, you will be offered the possibility to grow legs.  This marks the beginning of the second era of the game.