Would it make me popular if I brought up the so-called "Mandela effect"? According to some forums, I'm not the only one in whose mind Spore had something to do with Peter Molyneux. On this occasion, the explanation is fairly mundane. It is a game liable for comparison with some of Molyneux's and Maxim's hugely ambitious designs like Black & White and the Fable series and certainly fell short of expectations for a not-insignificant number of people due to overall simplicity, contrasting with initial design concepts and probably also the marketing hype. A curious amount of attention was put on Spore by the scientific community because of being a high-profile game that, at least at some point, was going to render natural biological evolution and double as a learning tool. It's obviously not quite that, and there have actually been more fidelitous life simulators around for the longest time, just in the very SimFOO franchise alone, lead designer Will Wright's bread and butter. Still, to stand out, Spore attempts the game equivalent of a rhapsody, stitching together disparate genres of arcade action for the Cell stage, real-time/4X strategy for Civilization and Space, and whatever you'd call the other two.

Talking about stitching together, we have the perfect DIY kit for crafting an Individual Levels table of Easy mode runs of the five stages (in
0:30:41) plus an extra one for Space NG+ (in 0:03:23), the only stage that allows for it. The runner, 'KinglyValence' you'll remember for a Single-segment run a handful of updates ago, and he's taken our advice to go slow and steady, so even though he already had what technically counted as WR runs, he's honored the "above and beyond" philosophy that all SDA runners should uphold. The mechanics of the game, even coming from blank-slate starts, are complicated enough for speedrunning to make planning and routing far from trivial, and thus the supplied written commentary will certainly not go amiss with novices like me. They are... if you will... a door into Spore.