I'm chomping at the bit. If you've never played Spore, this is the best time to start. The spore-sized and tribal stages are addicting enough, but pretty soon your civilized creatures will start venturing out into the universe, completing a full life cycle of game play. Not since SimEarth has any game boldly gone from the primordial muck to traveling the stars, and it's never been done especially well until Spore.

I gathered a collection of promos and gameplay videos to introduce you to Spore if you haven't played it. It's got elements of Katamari Damacy, Civilization, World of Warcraft, and when Galactic Adventures comes out in a few days, it'll beat Star Trek Online at its own game.

First, you're just a spore. You swim around eating meat that's smaller than you, avoiding or battling other creatures your own size or larger. The action is cute but deadly, and extremely free-form. Your little spore can fight smart and deter or kill gigantic predators, or flee certain death by plunging headlong into something even more deadly, only to slip out of the way at the last second. As you eat you get bigger and gather genetic power-ups, then you call a mate, and play as the newborn spore with new evolutionary selections.

Eventually you crawl out of the water and start the land-based adventure. This is similar to the watery spore stage – you're foraging for food, avoiding predators, mating and evolving, but it plays a bit more like an MMO or 3rd person action game. Eventually, you start banding together with your own kind, and the tribal phase begins. Here, gameplay starts taking on elements of both Civilization, and a real-time strategy. You build, develop a social structure, meet neighboring tribes and grow by either conquest or cooperation.

Finally, Spore: Galactic Adventures will take your advanced spore species into space for a kit of cute, zany and action-packed missions, and create new missions that other Galactic Adventures players can travel to take part in.

Here's more detail about the new gameplay in Spore: Galactic Adventures and one of the stock missions that comes with it.