SPORE

Last December, my brother installed a new game called Spore in our home PC. The game was created by MAXXIS, the same people behind the hugely popular "The Sims" and "The Sims2", two of my favorite computer games. I immediately immersed myself in the game and found it highly entertaining.

The object of the game is to help your creature evolve into a civilization that will ultimately conquer the universe. You begin as a single-cell organism, spored by a crashing asteroid, and go through a series of evolutionary processes. The creature's brain gets bigger at each milestone until it develops a civilization, conquer nations in the entire planet and so on.

I was so proud when I was able to evolve from a single-cell organism to a land dwelling creature in less than an hour. Before the week ended, I already had a tribe with creatures using weapons, fishing and killing off their rival tribes.

Then my nephews and niece came. It took them less than a day to evolve their creature into a tribe and in less than a week, they conquered other planets. Not only that, their creatures were so beautifully designed and made mine look like a work of a 5 year old kid. My 15-year old nephew even found tricks and shortcuts that I didn't even know existed.

Meanwhile, my creatures are still languishing in their tribal existence. They can't even neutralize the purple tribe which is so treacherous. Adding salt to injury, the inhabitants of my 10-year old nephew's planet came in a spaceship one day, abducted my tribe and summarily dumped them in a sea of lava.