![]() Once you’re up and winging around the galaxy, you’ll discover that things never settle into the redundant rhythms that held the other stages back. Do you have to pursue it? Nope, and even if you do, the game lets you keep exploring afterward for as long as you like. At the galaxy’s center, an ominous bulge of white teases an optional endgame story line that you’ll encounter as you expand your interstellar empire. Pull back all the way, and you’ll find yourself gazing at a twinkling spiral-arm galaxy flush with thousands of systems harboring who knows how many player-created life forms, any of which you may explore at your leisure (or maybe not, as hostile species come a-knockin’). Pull the view back farther, and you’ll hover in your local galaxy–surrounded by stars that you can radio-scan for sounds of life with a SETI-scope and that your preliminary spaceship can just barely reach. ![]() Pull the view back, and you’ll see your solar system–its sun in the middle, comets hurtling by like slow-pitch snowballs, and planets whirling on colored orbital paths that indicate their propensity to support life. Everything up to this point has been preparing you for the shock you’ll experience as you pull your preliminary spaceship up above the clouds of your planet and gaze at the stars. When you finally hit Spore’s sprawling Space Stage, it’s like booting into a completely different game that you somehow already know how to play. Even at its most complex, however, this becomes a shallow four-button game of Simon Says in which you press the button that corresponds to the instrument your audience signals you to play.įortunately this stage will end before you lose interest–it takes maybe an hour to polish off–and it’s enlivened by the most amusing animations in the game, as tribe members perform flamenco dances around fire pits, retinues throw flowers and frolic as they trot off to “gift” another tribe, and music that suggests Elmer Berstein’s theme from the movie The Magnificent Seven cues each time you domesticate a creature and march it away to a corral. Playing musical instruments to impress other tribes is mildly diverting the first couple of times you do it. Combat in the Tribal Stage is essentially one-dimensional (attack tribes that don’t like you and raze their village centers to advance your own prospects) and this fact makes forming alliances with them a more substantive tactic.
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