I was so excited for Spore. Dragging biting corpses, then moving to drag them? Awesome! Aquatic creatures and kingdoms?
Awesome! Flying around empty space, alternately molding or smashing planets at will?
AwesomeThen it came out.
I -never- return or sell my games, just in case I want to play them again. I returned Spore.
Sadfaced while ragefaced.
Cell phase really was the most fun. Creature phase was alright - mostly because the
editor was
cool. Tribal phase? Alright, but
damn, the editors are completely cosmetic now.
City phase was tedious. And what? I can only have one kinda vehicle of each type? Lame. Wait, the only peaceful thing for my planes are
speakers that shoot pretty music from up in the atmosphere?Space phase was unplayable. I made friends with a nearby race, but every
five minutes pirates attacked something of mine, and they were
deadly as hell. Despite full walls and defense guns to every city on my home world, they were -totally- incapable of defending themselves, and I was just as vulnerable as they were. Trying to work my first colony's world such that it was livable was a chore devoid of fun with that BS going on - rushing three systems back home because my homeland can't afford to build a defense fleet, then jumping three systems back. Then I'd have to fly over to each city and manually tell them to rebuild every thing - which took
obscene amounts of money. Sometimes both the homeworld and the colony would be under attack at the same time - until the colony fell, anyway.
Then while this crap was going on, my friends asked me for help against an aggressive invading race. So I fly over, shoot at their ships, but
Christ they tear me apart like nothing! And while I'm fending off some raiders, I pop back out into the star map and notice my friends have vanished, their system now conquered and hostile.
So, constantly under devastating attack by pirates and hostiles, no free time to explore the universe, and no money due to repairs that cost more than my magical hammerspace-storage-enabled, free-energy spaceship, but were completely useless.
/quit
The lack of any sort of spaceship besides your dinky scouting thing was so lame, too. No capital ships or space battles or specialized combat/trading/whatever functionalities.