That “one more thing” mentality meant that, at a certain point, the team had to recognize that development could not continue indefinitely. “EA’s been very patient with the game,” Roarty says. “As strange as it might sound, it definitely is a game that could continue. If there wasn’t a time we needed to ship it, we could continue to make it. …It was hard to say, ‘No no no, that’s it! We gotta stop! This is good enough!”

Wright spoke to me via telephone from Florida, as a tropical storm blew overhead and made soggy work of his late-summer family vacation. During that conversation, the edited version of which follows below, Wright talked about “The Sims” — its astonishing lifespan and the importance of community participation to its longevity.* We also talked about “Spore,” and the creativity he’s already seeing from players that downloaded the “Creature Creator” tool released earlier this summer.*

SPORE includes not only the Creature Creator, which was released before the main game, but also Cell, Building, and Vehicle Creators. In addition to designing unique cells and creatures, you can build and paint city halls, houses, factories, entertainment centers, land, sea, and air vehicles, and starships. You can even create a national anthem that plays during the Civilization stage. Through the SPOREpedia, you can subscribe to your friends’ content as well as create and subscribe to SPOREcasts, which filter out content based on specific criteria, such as all ships inspired by certain science-fiction movies.

Although playing any game on the iPod is a solitary experience-there’s really no effective way to manage multiplayer capabilities, though Spore Origins does have the ability to share creature designs with other players. As you evolve your Spore through the Evolution Mode, you can trade your Spore designs with other Spore Origins players and combat against those designs in an Arena Mode. This requires you to set up an online account on the Spore mobile Web site, and it also requires you to manually import and export your Spore designs (using “DNA codes” that determine how the creature is built). Also, there’s no real interactivity, except for camera control—the Spores fight each other automatically. Still, it can be fun to watch them battle against each other.

1.* No autosave.

That’s right, the game doesn’t automatically save your progress, which causes mass panic each time Spore crashes. Crashes? Not often. But in all of two weeks playing through multiple worlds and stages, it did crash three times, at one point dragging me back from the beginning of the Civilization Stage (after a very successful and pleasing run through Tribal) to the end of Creature — from fourth to second, in other words. Fortunately you can restart from any stage you’ve already visited and import your creature, but you’ll sacrifice your history timeline in the process.

“I’d say that’s quite accurate,” Wright told me. “We were very focused, if anything, on making a game for more casual players. “Spore” has more depth than, let’s say, “The Sims” did. But we looked at the Metacritic scores for “Sims 2″, which was around 90, and something like “Half-Life“, which was 97, and we decided — quite a while back — that we would rather have the Metacritic and sales of “Sims 2″ than the Metacritic and sales of “Half-Life.”

The Good

• Creature Creator tool is user friendly and fun to use.
• Varied gameplay with something for everyone
• Play at your own pace
• Impressive Space Phase
• Will play on most PCs

The Bad

• No autosave feature
• Mediocre graphical presentaion
• No real Multiplayer
• Slightly buggy

The Ugly

• The possibility of waiting two years and spending $200 on expansions to play what Spore should have been at launch.

Verdict: Rent

8. First, protect your hut.

Take care of your home before venturing out into the world. Once I’d reached the Tribe stage of the game, in which my little tribe of sapient Spikes had developed crude weapons and loincloths and were domesticating stupider animals, I discovered that I had to go out and attack neighboring tribes to wipe them off the continent. But I got cocky after an earlier victory, and sent my whole village out to raze the next tribe. Big mistake: Another tribe came over and sacked my village, and the Spikes were no more. I had to start the entire stage over again: This was how I found out that Spore has no auto-save feature, and that you have to manually save your progress. What’s more, there’s only one save slot and you can’t backtrack, which means that your decisions become finalized once you commit to them.