With Spore, game designer Will Wright promised an epic and (epoch-spanning) experience. During the game’s eight-year development cycle, regular press releases and preview articles painted Spore as the most expansive game in history. (At one point the working title was Sim Everything.)

In the end, Will Wright and his design team delivered a product which may not quite live up to the hype, but does hit most of the right notes for an unusual and frequently captivating game experience. More importantly, Spore is one of the few games to provide players with actual choices which influence the course and outcome of the game.

Game play covers five stages. The first begins when a meteor tumbles into the primordial sea on a planet and a single cell emerges. You make some basic choices about the creature’s physiology (location and style of eyes, mouths, flagella, etc.) and you’re off on your own. The challenge is to find and eat enough food to survive, grow, reproduce and eventually work your way out of the sea and onto dry land. Each time your creature mates, you have a chance to tinker with its offspring. The new critter can be a minor variation of the original or you can strip it back to its fundamentals and create something completely different. Creatures don’t evolve, they are built. Your choices do change the way you can interact with the environment. Some kinds of appendages give you speed, others grant maneuverability. Some mouth parts are well-tuned for eating plants, others work best on the tender flesh of other cells. Your choices drive your behavior and your behavior influences your future.

The creature stage builds on its predecessor and you find yourself struggling to survive on dry-land. You can make friends with your neighbors or try to consume them. Each action builds a sort of “reputation” that you have to live up (or down) to. Various in-game actions grant you access to new body parts which, in turn, grant you new abilities. Mate with another of your kind and you get the opportunity to re-invent your creation.

In the tribal stage, you control a village and your creations gain the ability to use tools and/or weapons. Conquer or befriend a set number of other villages and you’ll earn the right to move up to civilization. (For me, the path to civilization was strewn with the burned-out villages of those who opposed my rule.) Beginning with the tribal stage, you can no longer modify your creature, but you do have the ability to change its clothing. This (momentarily) takes away the creative freedom found in the other segments.

Civilization paints the same picture on a bigger canvas, but grants you the ability to design buildings and vehicles. This is the point at which the game begins to show some of the promised grandeur. The building tools are simple and elegant and even the most artistically-challenged player can create satisfying objects. Using Spore’s built-in connectivity, sharing your creations with the rest of the world is simple. Conversely, it’s easy to download other player’s creations. Sadly, some players delight in rudeness so players may be subjected to creatures and objects built or named with crude humor. Parents of young players may wish to keep an eye on the on-line portion of the game.

Once you’ve unified your planet (through conquest, conversion or diplomacy) you’ll gain space travel. From there the game unfolds in grand fashion with enough depth to keep you playing for a long time to come. In a manner reminiscent of Sid Meier’s Pirates, the relatively simple game mechanics set in a more-or-less open-ended playing field give an exhilarating sense of freedom.

In keeping with Will Wright’s philosophy of games-as-play (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/wright.html) Spore is fairly open-ended. There are certainly objectives for each level and the game prevents you from moving to a new stage until you’ve met the objectives of the current one. What makes the game stand out, though, is the freedom you have in choosing how you will meet the objectives.

It is this creativity that makes Spore worth playing. Interested in a race of octoped herbivores? They’re yours. Would you like a steampunk civilization complete with armed airships and wagon-wheeled war wagons? No problem. Want to see critters with the sunny disposition of Klingons and the dashing reptilian charm of a Sleestak? We have those in stock.

Spore gives you a chance to play in a world with few limits, but not without consequences. Create to your heart’s content. However, if your race is primarily war-like you’ll never be a great diplomat and you may have trouble becoming a major economic power. Your race of religious pacifist will struggle in the face of an aggressor.

In this, Will Wright has given his fans his greatest gift -- freedom of choice coupled with the sense that choices do matter and an opportunity to learn that what we do today will have an impact on our future.