SPORE (or Great, Like I Need Another Universe To Suck All My Time Away)

SPORE is out, and I have it. This is the Massively Single-Player Universe-in-a-box game I wrote about earlier, in particular for its amazing Creature Creator. The idea is that you start out as a cellular creature, eat and reproduce until you're advanced enough to go on land, survive predators, add more and more features to your body, making friends and enemies with other creatures, building civilizations, then finally heading out into space. There are now 13 million+ creatures in the system, most of which are created by folks like you and me. It's nice to know that my two species (so far) are either playing nice with, or beating the crap out of those from players in Toledo and Shanghai, Brownsville, Morocco and New York.

Suffice it to say, I'm no game player -- while coworkers (Level 70 WoW masters) have already gotten to space level, I'm still figuring out how to play in Tribal mode. However, I see it as my duty to experience the result of Will Wright and his team's ridiculously ambitious project. So far, it's very impressive and addicting.