Spore: The god of video games arrives

Spore - seven years in the making - is finally out.

Nothing can prepare you for how addictive and absorbing the seven-years-in-the-making Spore game is.

As soon as I got it on Friday night, I began playing it and was shocked when I realised how many hours had passed and the Saturday sun was almost rising!

By then I had developed my creature from a single-cell organism swimming around avoiding hungry predators in the primordial sea to finally reach landfall and emerge resembling something like the platform game character Spyro the dragon.

Of course your creature may look quite different as it sprouts legs and hauls itself out of the water because this is a game about creating a life in which you are fully in charge of the creature's abilities and your evolutionary story line.

As most gamers should know by now, Electronic Arts' Spore is turning the concept of evolution into giddy fun with the extraordinary skills of

game legend Will Wright

who borrows from his own Sims series with a nod to the likes of Civilisation to create a unique new game that reaches out to a much wider audience.

You choose to start off play on easy, normal or hard but even on normal, the game gets complex quickly and you will need to manage your creature's physical attributes and abilities to avoid succumbing to untimely extinction and being wiped off the gene pool list.

This becomes more of a priority as you progress through the game and enter the tribal and civilisation stages and you can get frustrated when you encounter a creature you made personally back when the creature creator came out and it is the cause of all your distress.

In the ocean and throughout the rest of the game, you sing and dance to attract a mate and so life renews but once on land, you have to either get along with fellow citizens allying with them through impression, or attack and conquer to gain their DNA and add it to yours!

Your approach to bonding and hunting will dictate what sort of world you live in and how well you survive as you interact with the other species. You form tribes, you build cities, you meet others, and then you go into space.

Check out the civilisation stage:

The recent Spore Creature Creature gave us just a small task of the building tools. With the full game, editors let you create buildings and vehicles but it's the creation of creatures that are the most satisfying part as you determine whether it is a person of beauty or the most hideous evil- looking Frankenstein imaginable.

Eventually you get to explore space and meet other online players civilisations and I can not wait for that.

Spore's big leap in gaming may well be its innovative web-approach to community. Online, the Sporepedia lets you tap into the creatures others have created including EA's own monster creations (Epic King Kong size creatures with 1000 health points compared to your 30-150).

Wonderful, entertaining, funny, invigorating, Spore will keep me going for weeks.

Some gamers wondered if it would ever eventuate or could live up to its expectations. It was certainly an ambitious title so may never fully live up to the initial hype. But so far in my playing, it's a massive winner.

The good news for Mac users is you can also play it on a Intel Mac (Leopard OS and above)