I didn’t get Spore Creature Creator when it came out, and I don’t own Spore. I possibly will buy a copy one day just to mess around with it, but I’m in no hurry. You see, I played this “game” back in 1990 or so. It sucked.
The fact that no-one in the media can remember anything should have stopped surprising and annoying me by now. Even Yahtzee seems to have missed the fact that before Spore and The Sims, but after Sim City, Will Wright did a game called Sim Earth. Aside from being technologically more primitive than Spore (it was 2d, for starters) it was essentially an attempt to do the same thing (evolution from single cell to interplanetary civilization) and while an interesting effort, it was an abysmal failure (both commercially and in every other way).
In all the hype leading up to the release of Spore I never saw anything to suggest that Wright had learned from the failure of Sim Earth. In essence, he’d added a whole bunch of eye candy to the same broken concept. Yes, everything is prettier now. And no, it still isn’t a game.