Money can't buy life.

Apparently, it can. I did this review for my school website. Its not perfect, but its my first story done for the website. I am actually a semi-decent writer, but I make a lot of mistakes.

Spore: Build A Species Workshop

Spore, a relatively new game released by MAXIS, is both a technological achievement, and a fun game. Though it isn't as good as was expected, it still manages to create a game that will provide many hours of entertainment and should be at least tried by most gamers.

The game doesn't center on any sort of game genre, but attempts to bring in many types of games into one. The player starts out controlling a cell, and slowly evolves until the player gets their creature to blast off into space. This is done by using 5 different types of gameplay, from a flOw-like cell stage to a Real Time Strategy civilization stage.

The game allows you to create your own creatures using an in-game editor, and then it uses procedural generation to make those creatures move and live, no matter how weird you create them. There is also a procedural music creator that generates the background music based on the parts you put on your creature. A national anthem generator allows you to make your own music once you get to the civilization stage of the game.

The game sells for about $50 to $80, depending on whether you get the original or the special edition, named the "Galactic Edition." Also, there is a DS version called "spore creatures" and a cell-phone/iPhone version called "Spore Origins." The former being a stylized version of the creature stage, and the latter being a copy as the cell stage.

Reviews are greatly mixed. It got 2,567 one star reviews on amazon.com, (Mainly for digital rights management issues with the game.) but pulled off a decent 85 out of 100 on Metacritic.com.

Personally, I love this game. I like how open ended the space stage of the game is, and the creation of creatures is quite fun.