History VideoGame / Spore

** It isn't easy to pull off, but if you're having trouble with a particularly difficult enemy in the Tribal Stage, you can set one of your villagers in front of an Epic creature and carefully lure it toward the enemy village... HilarityEnsues.

*** Though occasionally, circumstances allow a bit of cruelty in those stages, too. Say, in the tribal stage; another tribe raids you, and once you defeat their raiders, the tribe declares you their enemy. Kite an [[GiantMook Epic creature]] to their village with one sacrificial villager. HilarityEnsues as the Spore equivalent of a Kaiju completely decimates the enemy.

* HandyMouth: In tribal stage, the chief of a tribe without hands holds his staff in his mouth. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCcaor5W3vU Around 3:45 in this film]].

* UselessUsefulStealth: Played straight in creature where the only time stealth is useful is running from an epic. Inverted in Galactic Adventures though since only "[[ActionBomb Kamikaze Creatures]]" will attack the captain and make him visible.

* FurryConfusion: It's possible to have a sentient race on a planet, and also have the same race on the same planet as a non-sentient version.
** Made even worse due to one glitch that will on occasion put a tribal creature as a non-sentient creature.

* GenderBender: All of the creatures, upon gaining sentience, speak in a male-sounding voice, with female voices only heard from the Economic archetype in the Civilization Stage and as an uncommon colony voice type in the Space Stage. None of the voice options in Adventures later in the game are gendered (instead they're determined by pitch), and there is no visible distinction between those who lay eggs and those who don't.

** If you don't have many other creatures of your own design in the Sporepedia and move from Creature to Tribal, the Tribal Stage has an odd tendency to make some tribal villages out of earlier versions of your current creature, in addition to earlier versions sometimes spawning as non-sentient creatures.

** Heck, it's almost enforced by the mechanics of the game - if you wish to colonize a solar system already inhabited by a sentient species, even if it's in a tribal stage of development, the simplest way is to just annihilate them. The humane alternative involves uplifting them to interstellar civilization status using an expensive one use item, negotiating a trade route, and then buying out their home system after the trade route has been in place for long enough to activate that option. And even this method smacks of economic imperialism. Incidentally, if they sell your their last planet, their empire is still wiped out, and the game informs you of it. The best choice is to meet the two halfway. Uplift them to the space stage, then wipe them out and move into the colonies THEY built (and since it's their homeworld, they'll have more then the maximum number of colonies. Though it's not neutral as much as it's outright slave labor.

** The cruelty potential skyrockets when you realize how many ways there are to defeat an enemy in the Space stage. Bombs and lasers work just fine, but you also have the potential to use your terraforming tools to ''un-terraform'' your enemy's home planet. You can literally land on a lush, verdant planet with billions of animal and sentient inhabitants and do one of the following: make their atmosphere too dense to be livable, use a heat ray to turn the planet's surface into molten slag, use a freeze ray to turn the planet into a ball of ice, or ''suck away the atmosphere until there's nothing for the inhabitants to breathe.'' The best part is that if you do this before officially declaring war on the inhabitants, they won't realize what's going on until the planet hits T0 (uninhabitable), at which point they'll wise up and promptly declare war. At this point, though, all but one of their colonies will have vanished.

** The game released an expansion pack consisting of mechanical parts, available to only those who live in the USA ([[OfferVoidInNebraska except Maine]]) who have bought a bottle of specially marked Dr. Pepper and input the code on the bottom of the lid into the computer. Needless to say, [[SubvertedTrope There Was No Rejoicing]]. It is available on the internet though. Maxis and EA thankfully didn't take them down, but instead they warned that the pirated version won't allow players to share creations with these parts. They also noted there's a bug in both pirated and non-pirated version that installing them before Galactic Adventures would cause problems to the game.

The game has had a few spinoff games: ''VideoGame/SporeCreatures'' for the UsefulNotes/NintendoDS, which uses a 2D creature designer rather than 3D, ''Spore Origins'' for mobile phones, which is basically a port of the Cell stage, and ''VideoGame/SporeHero'', for the UsefulNotes/NintendoWii and (as ''Spore Hero Arena'') DS, which is more of an adventure game than the original, and focuses more on story and the evolution aspects. Another spinoff, ''VideoGame/{{Darkspore}},'' was released in April 2011, combining an updated Creature Creator with an action-RPG.

** The complexity meter serves as this in a meta-sense--game performance would take a hit if it tried to render a too-complex creature. On the other side of the coin, the complexity cap is increased to 75 points(from 70) from Tribal onward, so anyone who maxed out their creature's complexity in Creature would still be able to get item buffs in Tribal.
** In the Civilization stage, once an opposing Nation gets big enough, you can start a trade route with them as long as they're not at war with you, when they normally have to be friendly with you(Blue Face). This keeps someone trying to win via Economic means from being [[UnintentionallyUnwinnable stonewalled]] if they can't get their relationship with the last opposing nation any higher.

** The game features a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AA1itwphfM remix]] of the iconic theme from ''[[{{Videogame/MULE}} M.U.L.E.]]'', which plays in the communication screen with Trader empires and can also be used as background music in Galactic Adventures.

* BabyPlanet: All of the terrestrial planets are oddly small...

** The planet seems much bigger from ground level (Creature and Tribal Stages;) this trope mainly takes effect after you hit Civ.
* StandardSciFiFleet: Averted with the player's empire, which has exactly one ship: [[TheOnlyOne yours]]. NPC empires have patrol ships that defend their planets, as well as cruisers and fighters they use to attack others.
* StatGrinding: A variant of this occurs during the creature stage: when unlocking new creature parts, it's more likely to encounter upgraded versions of the parts currently being used by your creature, meaning it's usually easier to enhance abilities you already have than to respecialize with different ones.

* LoadingScreen: "[[RunningGag Reticulating]] [[JustForPun spines]]..."

* GameplayRoulette: Edging towards a Thirty Genre Pileup.
* GangUpOnTheHuman: Tribe Stage. Good luck trying to befriend a tribe when there are two inherently hostile ones in the opposite direction that take turns attacking you, and you don't have enough food to buy them both off.

** Thankfully Averted in the Civilization stage; if you keep your relations with other nations high, they'll leave you alone and focus on each other.
* GemTissue: Any creature with the Mackne, Derma Bark, Baublewarts, Jemite and/or Stealing Crystals parts can probably apply.

* {{Macrogame}}: One of the basic precepts of the game's uniqueness.

* MegaCrossover: The game can become this, if the player is skilled enough (or just downloads the right sporecasts, anyway...)

** Due to the way the creatures you find on planets are often randomized, once in a rare while you may run into a planet that contains the same creatures your race evolved from. While there's no gameplay differences, it can get interesting should you decide to use those creatures to help stabilize T-scores on planets, or to use a monolith on them.

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: This can be possible in the core game, and it's employable in Adventures, all thanks to the power of the editors (and of course, your imagination). You can even make those [[Videogame/{{Earthbound}} exploding trees]] if you wanted to...

* FourX: The Space Phase. Not so much the Civilization phase, oddly enough.

** If you don't have many other creatures of your own design in the sporepedia and move from Creature to Tribal, the Tribal Stage has an odd tendency to make some tribal villages out of earlier versions of your current creature, in addition to earlier versions sometimes spawning as non-sentient creatures.

The game has had a few spinoff games: ''Spore Creatures'' for the UsefulNotes/NintendoDS, which uses a 2D creature designer rather than 3D, ''Spore Origins'' for mobile phones, which is basically a port of the Cell stage, and ''VideoGame/SporeHero'', for the UsefulNotes/NintendoWii and (as ''Spore Hero Arena'') DS, which is more of an adventure game than the original, and focuses more on story and the evolution aspects. Another spinoff, ''VideoGame/{{Darkspore}},'' was released in April 2011, combining an updated Creature Creator with an action-RPG.

* LethalLavaLand: Easy to make in ''GA'' by increasing the planet's temperature.

* PlanetLooters: Pirates will occasionally raid one of your worlds, or one of your allies, and try to steal your spice. You can also do that to other civilizations, although doing so will anger them.

** Some Maxis-made missions even have [[IncrediblyLamePun giant eggs]] just standing there.[[spoiler: They are always next to goodies that help with the mission.]]

* EverythingsBetterWithPenguins: The [[IncrediblyLamePun Knot the Grawx]].