While Spore looks very interesting and very ambitions, I think some gamers will find it too tedious or become too hung up on a single aspect, like the evolution, the design, or the city building, to fully appreciate the whole package. Still, I know that when I get my hands on a copy of the game I'll be playing it up to space exploration just to get a chance to beam some hapless critters onto a planet with no atmosphere as demonstrated in the gameplay video on Google Video.
As for Carmack, I think the main problem is that he's taking advantage of new hardware possibilities in the wrong way. With new hardware development the focus of FPS gamers has steadily been slipping away from the dark and narrow corridors that once defined the genre. These days they're more interested in the freedom games like Far Cry and Battlefield offer, not the rehash of old concepts that Doom 3 and Quake 4 were. If Doom 3 didn't have the franchise name or the name of the developers to back it up, it wouldn't have sold nearly as well as it did, and even then it was still a dissapointment.
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