'Spore' hits the stores

Spore is a multi-genre "massively single-player online game" by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation.

The game opens using the concept of panspermia. A meteor plummets toward a planet and into an ocean. The meteor, now a geode, then splits, from which a tiny organism emerges.

The first phase of existence, the cell phase, is sometimes referred to as the tide pool, cellular, or microbial phase. The player guides simple protean microbes around in a 3D environment on a single 2D plane where it must deal with fluid dynamics and predators, while eating weaker microbes or plants.

The creature phase is similar to the cell phase, but with several important differences. Principally, the environment is now truly 3D. Other creatures will inhabit the world, and most of them will have been created by other players. Creatures will automatically be introduced into the environment to maintain a balanced ecosystem.

After the player's species evolves its brain far enough, it enters the tribal phase. Physical development ceases, as does the player's exclusive control over an individual creature, as the game focuses on the birth of division of labor for the species. The player is given a hut, a group of fully evolved creatures, a mini-map of the world for the first time, as well as two of six possible "super powers." These are unlocked depending on the species' behavior in the previous phases.

The goal in the civilization phase is to gain control of the entire planet, and it is left to the player to decide whether to conquer or unite. When entering the phase, the player's tribal camp is now a city. Players now have two new editors: the building and vehicle editors. The game will attempt to detect what style of content the player prefers, downloading similar content created by other players and adding it to the buy menu. Players can construct a variety of land vehicles, aircraft, ships and submersibles. If the player elects to start at the Civilization phase, they are prompted to assign the new civilization a philosophy: militaristic, economic or religious.

The space phase provides new goals and paths to follow as the player begins to spread through the universe. The player may now terraform and colonize neighboring uninhabitable planets with special tools (water tool, volcano tool, etc). Terraforming tools include pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to act as a greenhouse gas. Left unchecked this can cause oceans to rise, then eventually to evaporate and transform the world into a desert planet, followed by a molten rock in space. The ultimate tool is a technology which has been dubbed the Genesis device, named after the device in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which instantly transforms a deadworld into a habitable one.

The space phase is sometimes referred to as a sandbox, because the player has near-complete control of everything. The space phase works on two axes: a horizontal axis (the ability to interact with many planets in a variety of different ways) and a vertical axis (the ability to revisit different phases of gameplay).

Spore hits stores worldwide this week.