Spore is decent mindless fun on the highest difficulty setting (which, ironically, actually became much easier for me because apparently all it does is lower the hitpoints of
everything, meaning if you can apply a good bit of force, you can slaughter everything pretty fast, instead of it being a long grind back and forth, most noticeable in the tribal phase). Except for the Civ stage, which is horribad on any difficulty. The key, I found, is tanking to the exclusion of all else. Speed means nothing, because combat goes on so long, attack means very little, because it doesn't provide enough gank to justify the hit to health...
Space was boring, until you get the non-one-shot terraforming tools and can just fly around turning enemy planets into molten heaps of slag.
Which gets boring after you've done it a few dozen times, flown through a couple of random wormholes, and proceed to do it a hundred more times in a quest to cleanse the galaxy of Spode worshiping heretics!
