Spore - Day Two

As promised, I played Spore again, yesterday. I played for about six hours total, taking a 5-10 minute break every hour (gotta stretch). Reviewing my first impressions of Spore, I have some updated observations: Cellular - I still enjoyed this level quite a lot, mostly because the game play is different from the other levels. I can understand, though, why they limited the time on this level. However, I still think you should be able to earn some extra DNA after you beat all your goals. Creature - I went the herbivore route today. It's definitely easier to make friends when you are a herbivore. I could have written the Spore equivalent of "How to Win Friends and Influence People". This level was definitely more fun for me the second time through. Tribal - I started right off making friends with the new tribes. I still ended up destroying two tribes, though (they smelled funny :P ). My strategy improved for picking off the opposing tribe. I had improved my stealth rating in the Creature level, and it paid off. You need stealth for food raids. I decided to raid all the food of a tribe, then kill it's gatherers - it was a resounding success. To me, this is still the most difficult level, but I think the funness improved the second time through. Civilization - Because of my previous actions, I started the civ level as a religious city. I found out that religious vehicles can indeed attack military vehicles (but economic vehicles apparently cannot). Because I was social this time through, I made treaties with three other cities. At one point, I had two cities helping me capture a third city. I did find a small bug, though. I had asked Yellow to help me attack the Blue city. Yellow and I both bombarded the city, with my military winning and seizing control of the city. After the cut video, I become the owner of the city. However, Yellow is still attacking the city! I had to install all the gun turrets in the city for defense (I didn't want to directly attack Yellow, yet). My turrets killed the Yellow tanks, and everything went back to normal. Galaxy - I played galaxy for about 90 minutes. This level is very different, but fun all the same. I know understand why you control the spaceship the way you do (using the scroll wheel to ascend/descend). After playing the galaxy level, it makes sense. It's not cumbersome, like I thought yesterday. I didn't finish galaxy. I accomplished 2 of the 10(?) goals. This level definitely needs more time than the other levels. Maybe I still don't quite understand it, but I found making money to be much more difficult in this level. Overall, Spore is a great game. I'm going to raise my rating to a 4.5 out of 5, now that I understand the reason for the decisions the developers made. One final note, about the DRM. I haven't tried to make a backup of the game, yet (I make a backup of every game, in case the disc breaks - I've had several break or become too scratched to use). One thing I did like, though, is that I don't need to have the disc in the CD-ROM drive to play the game. I HATE when the company requires that.