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Stephen Totilo, game blogger extraordinaire, wrote a long-ass article on Spore based on a demo session he had with lead designer Alex Hutchinson. Heraclitus should read this, it answers many of his questions 
Choice quotes:
Choice quotes:
[H]ardcore gamers should really think clearly about what they want to get out of ”Spore.” They won’t be getting hardcore gaming thrills.
And how to do you get that “Sims”-size audience? Maxis hopes the answer is by making “Spore” the world’s coolest version of Photoshop or YouTube... by making it the wildest content-creation tool available on people’s computers... by making sure that people can’t help but create, create and create some more. It’s not as important that it’s a gamer’s game, he was saying. The five playable stages of evolution — Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, Space — have been tuned. But, he said, “the games are specifically designed to not be that complex.”
I asked if there was a problem with the graphics. Not that they weren’t working, but were they possibly a little too cartoonish or goofy to appeal to the crowd who like “The Sims”? Were middle-aged moms going to be turned off? “That possibility was inherent in the there to begin with,” he said. “When you say you’re going to be making aliens, exploring space, that’s kind of a nerdy thing.”
Okay, but what about illicit content? “You can have a penis car flying into a vagina house,” he said, more colorfully than I expected him to. “If you want to live in penistown, that’s fine. We’ll give you the filter to ban it out.”
But my PC at home isn’t that powerful. Am I boxed out? I have an Apple laptop. “Your MacBook will be fine,” Hutchinson told me. That’s all I needed to know. Demo over.
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