Platforms
Spore is available on the PC/Mac, Nintendo DS, and mobile phones. Oddly, the game wasn't released for the PS3 or Xbox. In the beginning of the game players choose a planet that they will call home and then a massive asteroid crashes into the ocean of the world seeding it with life.

Cell Stage
Players choose how their simple ocean dwelling creature looks, whether it east meat of plant (or both) and how the creature evolves as it eats and grows larger. The creator allows players to evolve their creature with different offensive weapons, defensive weapons, mouths and more in the beginning. The creature swims around eating and evolving until its brain grows large enough for it so evolve legs and venture onto land.

Creature Stage
Once on land the player creature forms a pack and sets about making allies of other packs on the planet or destroying them to gain new parts to continue to evolve. As the pack grows, players can ally tribes and add members to their pack for fighting.

After all packs on the planet are extinct or allies of the player pack, the creature evolves to the tribal stage. The move from the pack stage to the tribal stage is the last point where the creature can be changed physically with the addition of parts or removal of them. The form the creature has going into the tribal stage is the form you live with for the remainder of the game.

Tribal Stage
Once into the tribal stage, the tribe members can no longer evolve, but attributes can be changed to some extent by modifying the tribal uniform with different parts to make more efficient warriors or gatherers. The goal of this stage of the game is to defeat all other tribes or ally them to gain technology and ultimately transform into a civilization.

Civilization Stage
The civilization stage is where the game gets the most interesting to me. In this stage, your options for changing your environment become much grander. Players have to design a city hall to start with, and the level of customizations is impressive. After the city hall is designed and placed in the first city of your new civilization, the players have to design a land vehicle. The land vehicle is used to claim spice geysers to make money for the city. As money is made additional structures can be added to your city for making the masses happier like entertainment, houses, and factories.

As the game progresses at this point the player can design ships and aircraft as well. The goal is to destroy or assimilate the other cities on the planet by brute force, religion, or economics. One all cities on the planet are under the player's banner, space flight begins and the scale of the game grows massively.

Space Stage
In the space stage, the player has an entire galaxy of planets to explore. Players can war with other planets, make friends, and establish trade and more. As unclaimed worlds with no sentient beings are found, the player can colonize them to add to the empire. The ultimate goal is domination on a galactic scale by force of friendship.

The only real low point of Spore has been well publicized -- the copy protection the game installs. I had no problems with the copy protection on my test computer and I think most gamers won’t care that copy protection software is used. For the gamer, that likes to avoid any title that has copy protection built-in -- avoid Spore. For me the copy protection is not a real concern and would not stop me from playing or recommending Spore.