The animal interface is tied into how your Sim gets on in life. The pet salon is your main source of income, and in order to make good money, you must tend to other pets that customers bring in. You get a notification that a new customer wants pet service, at which time you have the option of taking the elevator down to the salon on the ground floor. You can use touch screen to perform tasks like clearing up fleas, picking a new collar, and eliminating funky odors from the pet. If you don’t want to be bothered with cleaning up someone else’s filthy pets, you’ll still earn money, but it won’t be as much if you take charge of your shop and do things manually.

The Sims forces you to apply cold gaming logic to your jam-packed, far-too-busy life. This can manifest itself in a couple ways, the most obvious of which is the hallucinated grid you place on your own home. God help you if you move into new digs and have to arrange furniture - you’ll be positioning and repositioning couches, desks, beds, mirrors, anything that isn’t nailed down until sun comes up. It has to perfectly comply with arbitrary feng shui that dictated your Sim’s virtual home.

That said, EA doesn’t want to burden Spore with having to live up to the extremely high bar set by The Sims either. “I can tell you that no one at EA is measuring Spore with the yardstick created by The Sims,” Patrick Buechner, vice president of marketing for Maxis, told Cnet. He added, “They’re two totally different animals. Spore is a game that has a lot to offer players long after they make the original purchase–a much different business model than traditional video games.”

EA: Don’t Measure Spore Against Sims

There’s no universal connection of all “Spore” games yet, but the creators’ intention is for every version of “Spore” to access and use the content from the same, single Sporepedia. That isn’t happening with the first wave of “Spore” spin-offs, albeit the iPhone version could be patched to include such functionality.

MTV Multiplayer » ‘Spore’ iPhone May Connect To ‘Spore’ PC… Someday

I think part of it will result from word of mouth and viral marketing,” said Lazard Capital’s Sebastian. “Is it something that people want to talk to their friends about, friends and family taking notice and saying, ‘Gee, I want to do that as well.’ It’s a little bit premature to say definitively whether Spore will do that or not.”

And even industry insiders like Crescente who have a keen sense for what works and what doesn’t say it’s still too early to tell whether Spore has the kind of legs that will lead to big sales and the long life of expansions that Riccitiello imagines.

Can ‘Spore’ meet its lofty expectations? - CNET News.com

There is an ultimate objective to the space section, and thus an end to the game, but you won’t reach it anytime soon. Your ultimate quest is to make it to the very center of the universe in order to understand all time’s great secrets, but you can’t just launch your ship, point at the middle and then go. Instead the game limits your spacecraft by forcing you to return to your home planet every so often for repairs and recharging. However, as you complete missions and earn power-ups the leash gets longer and longer, letting you venture out further into the cosmos. Just how long, you ask? The team is planning in the neighborhood of 500,000 explorable worlds, so you should have something to do pretty much at all times. While you obviously don’t have to visit every planet to beat the game, with all the content crammed into Spore, you may just want to.