Fair Warning: At the time of writing I haven't slept in a few days so can't guarantee my rant will actually be coherent (this is also why I've overused parentheses, as structuring things well enough that I can fit everything in requires brain power, and me no can brain right now), though if you've understood all this, it probably isn't that bad
Honestly, part of me really doesn't want to blame them for messing up the Space Stage, it keeps telling the rest of me that "Too many people wanted to many different things from the Space Stage, some wanted an Exploration game, some wanted 4X, some wanted an Elite Clone, and some people just wanted a sandbox they could play god in".
Then I remember how everyone of those parts taken on their own was completely broken. Exploring was boring, as most planets looked too similar (Plant Editor would have really helped here), just with a pallet swap, or slightly different looking cliffs and hills. Hell, for the most of the early game you only got at peoples creations(You know, the selling point) as little dots before you unlocked the Hologram. And nothing says exciting Space Adventure like the Captain of the Starship being down a Slow Moving Ugly Hologram of himself to observe the natives. But that's pointless as they all do the same thing regardless of the planet you're on (Though, credit were credit is due, I did enjoy watching Civilisations battling for supremacy of the planet like some). If I want to find cool creations people have I'm better off going to the Sporepedia seeing as it's less hassle.
The 4X game was completely broken on release, with the possibility of you being constantly blown to bits because you can't pay your space protection money to the local space Mafia who are all too eager to go on a genocidal Space Jihad against you.
And the game won't even let me play in the Sandbox, as barely(Yes, there are a few, you don't have to remind me about the monolith) anything I do outside of the 4X part of the game has any real impact on the universe. I mess with a few primitives, they get scared, they worship me a little, then they get on with their lives as if just played the Most Dangerous Game with them and a heat ray. No Golden Statues, no sacrificed virgins, no way to assimilate them into my empire(Why is everyone in a Space Nazi anyway, seriously where do the creatures go when you buy all you buy everyone of their planets?). This is the same if I uplifted a species, nothing other than a small bonus to my starting relationship with the Space versions of them. Seriously, I bring you from Apes to Angels and even you get anger when I break the "Galactic Code" no one told me about (The Code makes no sense anyway, Blow up a few uninhabited rocks that are blocking my view of the nicer planets and I'm evil, but hunting sapients with mercilessly with a LASER for fun is OK? Boo-yah, just hit a sobbing mother as she clutches her children to try and comfort them, 150 bonus points!)
Though you could mess with Civs and change the outcome of their wars, which was fun, and is probably the reason I enjoyed messing with Civ Stage creatures so much
Then there was the fact that while playing in the sandbox, the game had an annoying habit of kicking over my sandcastles. Terraforming(Terrasculpting?), is probably the area of Spore that disappointed me the most, seeing as the last time we saw it before release we seen LASERs which would allow us to carefully sculpt a planet to our liking. Now, the cool things we could have done with something like that (Hi person who's thinking "Draw a penis lol") like an idea that I threw around in my head was making something like a chess board, then using creatures to play games of chess (the idea was to use really Steep cliffs between the squares to keep the creatures from moving) and yes, I could have just played chess, but it's so much more fun when you do it god style. Or hell, we could even have just done something silly like write our name in an enemy's homeworld. Spore, however, doesn't quite stop disappointing there it keeps on going like the coal train behind the Santa's Sleigh, as the stupid random craft missile things (Who'd want a game with it's biggest selling point being creating things to actually let you control what's being created?) don't even have the basically random changed they make save properly(did they every fix that by the way?)
