I am soooo upset with Spore.

Get ready for some serious steam...
For starters the game feels like I just paid $50 for a demo, plus another $10 for the creature creator back in June. Honestly each phase (save Cell) feels incomplete. Now I'll start up front here and explain that I had known and waited for Spore for a long time. Through two delays at least, as far as I can remember. But I also did my darnist to avoid as many spoilers as I could, especially in the past 6-8 months when they were really hitting the gaming websites hard. Sure I knew the gist of what each stage involved before getting the game, but not the specifics.
Right, so secondly for a game that is was pegged as the some sort of Super-Sandbox the game is horribly restrictive! Each stage has the bare bare essentials to fulfill its theme. Despite how many times I play through the stages, and no matter what my creature ends up as... 4 arms, 2 mouths, 8 legs, walks on its head. Doesn't matter... the stages play the same. Play them once and you'll probably hit all the highlights. I can get more in depth as to why I think this if you want me to. But in essence each stage boils down to "sing at it or eat it" and that's really all there is to do.
But really the reason I think Spore is a complete dud is that is lacks what I'll call "Legacy"... or Game History. If you look back at Will Wright's greatest works: Sim City, The Sims, SimEarth-Ant-Tower-Farm-etc. Sure there were some losers in there, especially back in the early 90's. Sim Isle anyone?
Anyway, what Spore lacks is that Legacy that those really famous Maxis games have. Take The Sims for example. When you play The Sims, you feel like your Sim is actually affecting the world around him/her. Your Sim builds a house... has children... leaves their spouse for a new one... the EX keeps the house... the kids grow up... eventually you have this story, a life story and you can load up a Sim and know that your original Sim you made months/years ago in the game is this new Sims' Grandparent! And vola the Sim already has a 'Legacy'.
The same goes for SimCity. You start off as a little rural hick town and built up to a huge megatropolis. But along the way you can look back and see those old neighborhoods... do you really want to bulldoze through that old part of town to make room for a new highway?
So far I have found none of this Legacy in Spore. Each stage feels very disconnected from the next. There are things that change between stages though, I'm not denying that. From one stage to the next your creature might... have an extra pair of legs or change its color. And you may even move slightly on the Good-Herbivore/Neutral-Omnivore/Evil-Carnivore slightly. But I've found that to be a very fickle system.
No, what you do during a stage really does not shape the next at all. Every stage is set in place. When I try to hunt off and extinct carnivores in creature stage, no matter what in tribal stage there will be a handful of randomly chosen herd animals placed around the area. Apparently a world without predators for a few thousand years always turns out the same in the end...
I mean, maybe I'm just not the target audience for this game or something. I dunno. The only reason I fire the game up now, other to grab that patch that just came out, is to play around with the creators.