Well, I finally got my copy of Spore yesterday, and I loaded it up on my iMac (which is about a year and a half old) and excitedely waited for things to be ready.
HOLY COW, this installation takes FOREVER. It's the longest installation I've ever done on my Mac, it actually took about 15 minutes to install. Not sure what all it's doing, but it's a 4gb install.
Finally got it done, started it up, beautiful graphics, welcome screen, clicked on my 'Universe' and then picked a planet and was plopped down in the Tidal Pool.
Thank goodness it doesn't take too long, not a terrible amount of variety here, you can 'discover' various extra traits for your little cell, then as he evolves he gets bigger and can get more complex. I like the way this was done, it made a lot of sense and I could always see the larger creatures in the background as I was swimming around.
Finally got to the point where I got to grow legs. Added some legs, and walked up on shore.
Then BAM, everything, and I mean everything slowed to an absolute crawl. I had been running about medium settings which it had suggested, and I had bumped my resolution up to 1680 x 1050 I think it was. So that was the first thing to be bumped down to 1024 x 768. Still absolutely no change, and I don't mean a little bit of lag, it was un-playable. So I went and cranked a few of the details down, very very slight improvement. Ok, turned EVERYTHING down, and now it is running smoothly.
After that frustration with the video lag, the rest of the experience so far has been a HUGE blast. It's a ton of fun, and although you could read the manual, the in game tutorials do a great job of teaching you how to play and evolve.
I'll have to post some videos and pictures of my creature, the wonderful 'Gobstopper' when I play again tonight.
All in all so far the experience has been excellent except for the video requirements. Maybe it'll get addressed in a patch :)