Spore, The Year's Most Anticipated PC Game

Combat in the Tribal Stage is essentially one-dimensional (attack tribes that don't like you and raze their village centers to advance your own prospects); and this fact makes forming alliances with them a more substantive tactic. Playing musical instruments to impress other tribes is mildly diverting the first couple of times you do it. Even at its most complex, however, this becomes a shallow four-button game of Simon Says in which you press the button that corresponds to the instrument your audience signals you to play.

Fortunately this stage will end before you lose interest--it takes maybe an hour to polish off--and it's enlivened by the most amusing animations in the game, as tribe members perform flamenco dances around fire pits, retinues throw flowers and frolic as they trot off to "gift" another tribe, and music that suggests Elmer Berstein's theme from the movie The Magnificent Seven cues each time you domesticate a creature and march it away to a corral.