Meanwhile, in Australia, some people decided to make a game that totally isn't Spore called Species: Artificial Life | Real Evolution. A game that in theory accurately simulates natural selection allowing you to witness evolution before your very eyes! The alpha stage is free, and their business model is like Kerbal Space Program. The latest version of Alpha will be the demo and later iterations will be purchased. Also meanwhile, in Australia:
Wow, that looks quite awesome! Plus those rover physics are hard to pass up. I'll be sure to check this out.
I just "played" a couple of minutes, it's definitely alpha, but still pretty cool. The rovers are spasmodic but there is literally a "murder button", and a "radiation button" to deform offspring.
I played an hour - two half hour sessions. It was irritating. I had a population of 800 herbivores. Why on earth did none of the various species of omnivore evolve to be carnivores when I started lowering fertility? They all competed with the herbivores more and more. Although there was one species which was scavenging dead bodies... unfortunately they existed in geographic isolation, so they were scavenging off the dead bodies of each other..
