Well Ive had a bit of a surprise over the weekend, SPORE is 9/10ths a space game. And a pretty darned interesting one at that. In fact large sections of it could be seen as a cartoonised sim city \ elite love child. Theres a huge procedurally generated galaxy, very frontier like, with proper solar systems etc, theres pirates, theres trading, the combat is more Zarch than Elite, which is good for ground combat not quite so cool for the lack of deepspace seat of the pants flying.
You get political issues to deal with peace deals, wars, you get to terra form whole planets (or lay waste to them) your ship you build yourself, with a wonderful creation tool, first rate stuff you get to design you buildings in your cities your people, their armour, you can choose the exact make up of plants and animals for your planets, Why not colour coordinate your higher primates with you shrubbery?
All in all though its probably the best sand box space game released for a long time, and there I was thinking it was all about amoebae...
Shame about the lack of cockpit based combat though... Although many FE2 players will be glad to here theres at least semi newtonian physics involved in the space flight
