This is a new series of articles I originally planned to cram all in one, but it's much easier to complain one at a time, unleashing my disgust for one popular game all at once.  I will admit this is intended to be a bit flamebaitish, but I hope it brings in some comments!

Spore is back in the news after the completely uninspired named Darkspore was announced as some sort of multiplayer action title.  I really don't know anything about the new game, but it did remind me how much I loathed my original Spore experience.

I could go on again about how Spore was one of my most anticipated games ever and how much it let me down, but I'd rather talk about what appears to be my disconnect from the rest of the video game review industry.  The game has a Metacritic score of 8.4 aggregated from 75 reviews while I gave Spore a 5 out of 10.  Two reviewers gave it a perfect score (including my personal much-hated G4TV) and there were only five sites that gave it a score under 70 (including Destructoid which I seem to line up with more often than not).  Spore was an uber-hyped, blockbuster game published by Electronic Arts and devised by the mastermind of Will Wright; were reviewers afraid to trash the game or did they honestly like it?  And if they liked it... what happened to me?

Announcing the 2008 Game of the Year Awards from the First Hour! I beat 16 games this year, check out which ones are named the Game of the Year, Older Game of the Year, and a few others! New this year are the Worst Games of the Year.

Spore was released a few months ago to much hype and anticipation. It was the game to end all simulators, featuring gameplay from the individual cell level to the entire universe. Will Wright and crew demoed the game more than two and a half years ago in what seemed to be a ready to release state. But the game would be delayed, and delayed, and delayed again, leading us to a September 2008 release. Spore was my must play game of the year, and play it I did. Was it everything it was supposed to be cracked up to be? Definitely not. Was it a disappointment in my eyes? Definitely yes. Please Greg, tell us why.