I own the CD version, and we never connected our copy to the online servers. My younger daughter spent hours just messing about making creatures and buildings, without actually playing the other parts of the game. My neighbor's son had hours of fun playing through the other stages. It's an excellent game for the 5-to-10 crowd.

No, it's an okay game, actually. The problem is that it was completely different from what was promised. It was supposed to be (and hyped for years as) a science geek's wet dream of a game. Then about a year before release, EA decided that they could probably make more money if they targeted the game at The Sims fans instead. So they changed the graphics to be cartoony and cute, and dumbed down the gameplay, introducing a number of "social interaction" mini-games among other things.

When you get to the galactic phase, the game becomes quite tedious and repetitive, but apart from that, it's an okay game.

From a technological perspective, the game is impressive as hell. It really is amazing what they achieved. Too bad they wasted it on a game which in the end is merely "okay". When I think of what Spore could have been if Will Wright had been allowed to continue with his original vision, I get quite angry.

I've only ever played the base game, but it has tons of content. I never felt the need to get the expansion packs at all. In fact, I just bought the base game on Sunday night to replace my secuROMed CD copy.

Just a word of caution - I bought the Complete Pack for my sister last year and we were never able to get it to run with the expansion packs installed - only the base game would run, and we had a really tech-savvy person on it. Not sure if that's still an issue, but it would be worth digging into.

As for the servers being offline - I played online for awhile, but have had it turned off in the last few years and haven't missed it. There were a lot of penis monsters when I had the online sharing turned on, LOL.

Thanks for the replies, everyone! I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger and grabbed the complete pack. We'll see how it goes, but I'm pretty certain my youngest will enjoy the game (she's a big Sims fan, so this should be right up her alley). Anyway, again, I appreciate the input from everyone. :)

Guilty as charged! But EA could have added some "[ ] share your own content" checkbox.

nuff said really.