So Darkspore is pretty fun. It's an interesting take on a fairly well trodden path of the dungeon crawling loot action rpg (should we just be saying Diablo-like at this point?) with the sci-fi angle. Throw in the rock-paper-scissor mechanics of team building and hero use (you'll have to switch your hero on the fly based on what you encounter in a dungeon) and you've got a fairly interesting dungeon crawler.
There's a fair number of heroes to unlock and Darkspore makes use of a light version of Spore's creature creator that allows you not just to customise where you place gear on your hero, you can shape and alter the look of that gear in a limited fashion, you can also screw around with your hero's proportions to a degree. Gear is how you level up your heroes and experience goes to your level, the player, the Crogenitor's level. This allows you to unlock more heroes as you level up. Which gives you more options for your team composition. It's kind of like Pokemon, but with giant freakish aliens.
I just wish I didn't have to build an EA friend list to have in parallel with my Steam one. Not that there's the threat of too many people buying this game, looks like Darkspore is going to fly under everyone's radar. If you do manage to play with friends, or randoms, you actually get an experience boost.
As for the current topic of the thread.
1) Complaining about gigs of free content updates in the era of nickle and diming. Wow.
2) There is no single player campaign in either Left 4 Dead. There may be some bullet point somewhere that says otherwise, but it's a lie. You're playing with bots and that will make you very sad and/or angry. Which oddly isn't all that different from playing with people.
