Well, this past Friday I went out looking for a game. My intention was to get Fallout 3 for the PC, but no store had it! There was a ton of Fallout for the 360 and PS3, but no PC! Anyway, instead of that, I got the next game on my list, and every store had plenty: Spore.

Spore is immensly fun. I've played for 22 hours currently(It's addicting!). On the plus side, there is no need for a disc. But, I've had one pretty major issue with it so far.

There was trouble during the installation. The EA Download Manager installed fine, but the game itself didn't. It never created any shortcuts, the AutoPlay wouldn't run when the disc was inserted, and I couldn't uninstall with the uninstal.exe file; I had to use the Control Panel>Remove Program thing. I contacted EA Support about this, and they told me to manually create a shortcut. I thought it was such a stupid answer, but it actually helped mostly. I got the game to run, but the patch for it and the inital start-up were an issue for awhile, but they were eventually sorted on their own.

Another addition that I think is related to the weird installation was that the game crashes infrequently, and often at random. It's only happened a few times, but the first time completely caught me by surprise and made me mad beyond belief.

I played for about nine hours, from the Creature to the Space stages, and got slightly far in Space, when this happened. When I rebooted the game, it kicked me all the way back to Creature! Nine hours of work wasted. Thankfully, it saved all my creations, (and there were cheats for me to skip right to Space, but only to the begining), and I was able to restart and get to roughly were I was in no time at all.

Anyway, I've allied myself with about a dozen Empires around the galaxy, and have destroyed a couple, and working on another, and possibly about to go to war with a fourth. I've seen several of my creations(my own spaceship was being used by my enemy!), including a few creatures I made back when I got the Creature Creator. I've allied myself with my creations, but one of them was destroyed by my Ally, whom I have waged war against for the atrocity.

I've also gotten extremely close the the 'mythical' center of the Galaxy, but it is surrounded completly by a hyper-violnet hostile Empire, called the Glox. Once I've defeated my immediate enemies and have upgraded sufficiently, I plan on wiping them out.

Space is by far the best mode in Spore to play. There is so much to do, and there are thousands of places to go. It should keep me occupied untill I can split my attention between this and Fallout 3, when I get it.