Yahtzee recently mouthed off in his charming British way about Will Wright's Spore. Does he like it much? Short answer: "Nooooooooooooooo..."
I haven't played Spore. My computer is from the Stone Age (2002) and completely useless for gaming. It's especially useless right now because it's been infected with the digital equivalent of late-stage syphilis and I do believe it's going quite mad.
As for Spore, I might pick up the Wii version once it receives all the necessary castrations. But I have to admit that Yahtzee's weekly snark-a-thon woke up an otherwise oblivious bit of my brain that's telling me, "Hey...you played Spore. On the Super Nintendo. It was called EVO."
Now kids, don't you all yell at Granma Nadia like that. I know Spore is far more complex than the 16-bit prehistoric gorgefest that captured my heart when I was fourteen-ish. But the idea of eating and growing appendages as a result of eating (wouldn't that make the obesity crisis a lot more interesting) took me back to a happy place. When we were kids, we wanted to genetically engineer nail-studded dragons with teeth like Ginsu knives and scales like tank armour. Oh, and they had to be able to fly, of course. Completely impossible by Nature's hoity-toity standards, but typical of the animals that rattle around in a kid's imagination. When Enix made EVO, it remembered the pencil crayon drawings that adorn every boy's school binder.
(And my own. We'll just say that my parents learned very quickly that I wasn't into Barbie.)
EVO isn't just about aimless evolution, though. There's a story going on, though it sort of runs with Nature's favourite plotline, "Eat or be Eaten." You begin life as a floating fishie thing, crawl on land as an amphibian, reign over the planet as a hulking dinosaur and settle into manhood as the Ice Age steals across the land. Granted, you don't have to make dramatic changes to your body for significant chunks of the game. For example, when the Ice Age turns the Earth into an icebox, you are welcome to continue roaring, "FUCK YOU, I'M A DINOSAUR!" Just don't expect to get any traction on the ice with your clumsy reptilian feet. If you evolve into some little ratlike critter, on the other hand...
There's no blasting off into space once you've filled in your evolution chart in EVO, though your ultimate goal is to become a human being and gain the ability to pee standing up. That is truly the pinnacle of our beautiful development.
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