Friends, the wait is nearly over. In about a week Spore will be nestled comfortably in your PCs, and you too can play God, Zeus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster…whatever you believe in. However, just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years and still don’t know what the fuss is about, let me give you a reminder, straight from the Penny Arcade Expo.

Spore is a life simulation game in which you create a species as a single-celled organism and evolve it biologically and sociologically. There are five major stages of evolution: Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space. According to the EA rep, a speedy player who spends little time tweaking their creations can blow through the first four stages in roughly 6-8 hours, and about the same amount of time during the very open-ended Space stage. In fact, the rep predicted that players can easily spend about 40 hours in Space.

During the demo I played through the Cell stage. My creature was a carnivorous, single-celled, pinkish thing with googly eyes, a mouth, and a tail. It hatched from a meteor that fell to Earth. As it swam in the primordial soup, the rep gave me two words of advice: eat as much as possible, and don’t get eaten by something bigger than me. I noticed that the creature moved slowly in this 2-D environment, and wondered if it was because it was in the water.

The more my creature ate the larger it grew, which was good because as Qui-Gon Jin said in The Phantom Menace, “There’s always a bigger fish.” I spent a good deal of time dodging large organisms left and right. At one point I wasn’t fast enough and my little guy was promptly devoured by a blowfish-looking creature. But no worries; it re-spawned and continued on its merry way. At one point a very large organism bit into a meteor piece and released a special shield. Collecting these shields unlock new body parts for your character like claws or tails.

I then noticed a little icon at the bottom of the screen that served as a mating call. I clicked on it and sure enough, my creature bellowed, and his mating call rippled through the water, followed by little pink hearts. The call was answered by a creature that looked similar to mine. The pink hearts flowed between them and sexy 70s music started to play…ok, maybe that last part didn’t happen. Instead, I was whisked to the creature editor window, and added an extra mouth to my little friend.