I was gonna go for a milquetoast 4.5 star rating, but y'know what? I can't think of anything I don't like about this game. The configurable low-fi graphics, the soundtrack, the sound design, the setting, the tone-shifting, the over-the-topness, the sandbox of combos and ridiculous moves you can pull off, the fact that combat in this game feels like you're actually fighting for your life with millisecond precision and timing rather than playing a video game, and all under the fact that this game seems to have been made by a single man, make it legendary and inspirational in my book.

It certainly helped me work through some issues subconsciously after a bad break up last year too.

The first time I played this I had trouble remembering to eat, sleep, and go to the toilet. It's pure-bliss crack-cocaine energy of devise and optimise had me enthralled once I got in the swing of things. The drones were the coolest thing ever once I unlocked them. One day though, my base suffered from a power-failure due to an over-reliance on dwindling coal supplies as a fuel source in the mid-game, and my base was overrun with biters because I was using nothing but laser-turrets in my defenses.

Playing the game through from the beginning the second time wasn't quite the same, and hasn't been since. Developing new technologies was a lot of the enjoyment I got out of the game, and subsequent playthroughs feel quite repetitive. I can't really be bothered with mods in this particular game.

But I'm always open to coming back to it, and this game will always go down in history for me because of that first initial playthrough.

Also, the game just seems to be so nicely and efficiently made, I never witnessed any bugginess and I gotta respect that.

I have a distinct memory of my school mate, ca. 2008, whispering to me legend of a game where you could play as an entire species throughout every stage of it's evolution, eventually being able to free-roam throughout an entire galaxy and terraform planets, and everything!

This was the holy grail of games for me at the time. The one that I had been looking for. I can't remember why, but for a long time I was never able to play it myself. Probably because I had no money. But I didn't even get to go to that schoolmate's house to try it out! All I could do was watch gameplay longingly on YouTube.

One day, as the family was leaving my uncle's house where we had dinner, I laid eyes upon a copy of Spore: Galactic Edition sitting on the book shelf. I took it, and stared at it in my hands covetously, until my uncle decided to let me have it. I was one happy little brat.

I think it had a few issues running on our janky old Windows Vista family PC, but I eventually got it running through sheer will. A will to find any means necessary to play the games that I wanted to play.

The license key had already been used by my uncle, so I never got to experience the online features of the game, seeing creatures that other people had made and what not. But for whatever age I was back then, the game didn't actually end up being a disappointment for me. I enjoyed the style of it, especially the space stage. I played it through one and a half times, and then I was satisfied. Never to pick it up again.