July 16 2008 / by jcchan
Category: Entertainment Year: 2008 Rating: 9 Hot
Will
Wright wants you to play god. To open the floodgates of your
imagination and fill an entire living universe with unique
species.
His massive plan seems to be working as people are already
ravenous for Spore. In just 18 days nearly
1.6 million species of creatures were uploaded in to Sporepedia,
Spore’s worldwide database of user-created lifeforms.
The nascent Spore universe is already up to 1,876,714 creatures
(and counting) in its genetic database, surpassing the 1.75 million
identified species on Earth. By itself this is a spectacular feat
but even more so when you realize that the full game hasn’t even
touched store shelves yet.
Wright, Spore’s creator, and also of The
Sims, Sim City, and Sim Everything (an actual former name of
Spore), hopes the advance release of the Spore Creature Creator will tease
us into the full serving of Spore available in September.
With the Spore hype in full effect I thought to give it a test
run myself to see if such games are truly the future of user
generated content. So today I will take you on a brief tour through
the Spore Creature Creator.
The Creature Creator is available both as a free-trial version
with a quarter of the full content and a $10 boxed version with all
of the creature body parts. The version I am going to take you
through is the trial version, readily available at the Spore site.
Upon installation, the game asks you to register for an
online account to Spore. You can play offline too but you won’t be
able to store your creatures in the massive Sporepedia database. I
jumped right into “Create a Creature” mode and got started
with…
A Pear. Or a Gourd. I can’t tell, but it squirms around. I
assume it’s dying for its creator to give it some life. You are
given 2,000 genetic points to spend, and limbs, eyeballs, and
tentacles all vary in cost. The system is simple, drag body parts
from the menu to attach and pull to detach. (cont.)
So I look through the categories of body parts for eyes and
found a few pairs to go with. This long one looks cute, and it
gives my creature +1 to charm, neat! A few pairs of legs too, so
I’ll start with this dinosaur leg. 
Now, what does a creature need to survive in an hostile
environment? Weapons! I am going to give it a spiny head to
headbutt enemies with. I can adjust the size of each spine and even
the curvature.
A few minutes later, I think I’m quite addicted to pointy things
so I’ll give it an entire roll of spines as protection. My creature
will be totally ruthless, i assure you. My creature’s attack rating
is quite high now.
Time to give it a little charm to attract some mates. A pair of
feathers add a charm point, so I went overboard again and added a
crown of it above its head.
I also gave it a nasty looking mouth, giving it some more attack
points and a mating call. I go to the body shop for a few coats of
paint.
Here is my first Spore creature, I name it Lolita.
Check out its spines. 
The verdict? It’s a neat tool and I’m almost convinced to sell
Wright my soul this fall, but here is hoping that such an ambitious
project won’t fall on its behind this fall from bugs. Polish,
Polish, Polish! And if you were wondering, yes, there already has
been players making creatures that resemble certain body parts that
are on Youtube.
And in the Fall, I’ll love to see what crazy designs you come up
with.
First Screenshot courtesy of Maxis.
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