To make it easier for you all, below are all the website reviews of Spore posted so far . So far Spore has an average review score of 86.5% (including gaming magazines)! Good news!!!

G4 - 100%
Gamer 2.0 - 93%
Videogamer - 90%
Boomtown - 90%
Gameplanet - 90%
Gameplayer - 90%
Gamervision - 90%
Eurogamer - 90%
Totalvideogames - 90%
GameSpy - 90%
NZ Gamer - 89%
IGN - 88%
Cheatcodecentral - 82%
Actiontrip - 81%
Gamespot - 80%
Gamedaily - 80%
Games Are Fun - 80%
Giantbomb - 80%
Thunderbolt 80%

August 22, a group of Spore webmasters and staff was invited to the EA Maxis Emeryville Studio in the San Francisco Bay, in California. It was an amazing experience full of nothing but Spore talk. It was great to finally put faces to those I have known online, many of them for years. Aside from trip details, I want to get right down to the game itself. After a tour of the studio we landed in the ‘garage’ with Spore Producer, Caryl Shaw. Caryl showed us a walkthrough of the game, primarily the space phase, where we could ask questions along the way. Here are some key points I scribbled down..

[read more to continue everything I learned, and to see your questions answered!]

[see more]

It's ShackNews' turn to get a try at Spore, read their article here.

Gamespot went hands-on with Spore and described mainly the Civilization stage of the game:

Once our creature was complete, we had to determine whether our civilization would be militaristic, economic, or religious. This choice, we were told, would affect what buildings and vehicles we could build and would be a general guideline for our world domination strategy. Since our creature had some nasty teeth and a few other mean-looking features, we went with militaristic.

The articles just keep coming! It appears the large gaming sites have already had their hands on the much awaited creature editor. Just another article about the creature editor, but as of right now, expect some more videos to come out of the other phases (tribal, city, civ, and space). Here's a snippet from the article found over at Gamespy:

The Creature Creator will also launch with a fully-functional "Sporepedia," which will be populated soon after launch with all the fruits of the community's labor. EA announced a while back its partnership with YouTube on Spore-specific channel. The "Sporepedia" will mimic some of the popular site's functionality, allowing you to "subscribe" to specific users' creations, and providing you with alerts whenever something finds its way into the metaverse bearing a creator name or tag that you specify.
-Miguel Lopez, Gamespy.com

Ah, we've read it all before, but it's been a while since we posted news of a preview. The latest one popped up over on NextGen:

The missions we accepted were of no particular complexity – little more than introductions to the tools. However, producer Thomas Vu insists that as the space section progresses, players will be required to employ some strategic thought, culminating in an ‘ultimate quest’ which determines victory. Indeed, this final section of the game is far more involved than its predecessors, which will last between one-and-a-half and three hours each depending on how much time you put into editing your creations. The game’s complexity scales along with your organism, it seems.

I hereby nominate the gaming press (um, that's us over at Hooked Gamers too of course) to be relegated to 'lemming-status' and 'us' (the Spore fans) are happily following suit. I'm sorry, did that sound like a complaint? It isn't, really! Everybody and his mom is posting articles on Spore and who can blame them, there is a lot to tell. A wrap-up of some new things we found today:

Bit-Tech posted a lengthy preview that is very readable indeed: Sporepedia is the framework around which all of Spore is built. At its most basic level it’s little more than a catalogue of free content and a help-desk through which players can get tips and guides. Delve a little further though and Sporepedia becomes much more and players can start to take advantage of the social networking tools held within.

CNN Money posted a very cool video filmed in the Maxis/EA offices, interviewing product manager Darren Montgomery. Good footage here!

BusinessWeek posted their preview saying: Quirky cinematic sequences track the development of a player's creature. In one sample video, as a creature begins to form a civilization, the short parodies Stanley Kubrick's famous simian sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Oh yeah, we have dug up a couple of new screenshots as well, they're in the gallery.

Gamespot has the scoop on the playable version of the current status of the full game. Besides mentioning the game feels pretty much finished, they also had a couple of interesting little details:

Spore has a very dry sense of humour, and it calls on you to collect creatures for your own nefarious ends. However, there's a downside to your scientific experimentation, and in our demo we managed to introduce a rogue infection to our city by collecting bug-ridden creatures. The result: You have to eradicate the surrounding colonies with your onboard laser, using the left mouse button to fire. Before you can start exploring and colonising other worlds, your final task on your home planet is to colour it purple, although we couldn't quite understand why.