This is a topic that drudged up my feelings of anger and resentment at an ultimate let down. Spore was originally going to be a really cool evolution simulation. What I would label "Sims Everything". You would guide your creature through evolution in this world ecosystem and food chain, having it naturally evolve and adapt with some intelligent design to tweak it, and then you'd go through the steps of civilization, becoming the foremost species on the planet and then going into space and seeding the galaxy. Fun, amazing concept that would have been so cool. That concept in now, in retrospect, labelled "Science Spore". That's how it was going to be. That's what the early demos were.
That was replaced by a series of shitty, barebones minigames, where the evolution element was borderline nonexistent, where there was no uniqueness nor replay value, and where it was all set up for the Space phase. I cannot express to you how disappointing it was and how jaded it made me that a game I waited 2 years for with anticipation based on it's original promise turned out to be that.
Had it been that, Spore would have been a great game. As it was, it was a franchise they wanted that never became anything. It was the kind of thing game reviewers were paid to lie and say was great, and that players realized was AAA crap, watered down by EA and which Will Wright admits he sold out on instead of doing the original, interesting concept.