In just one week, you will be able to order the trial version of the Spore Creature Creator! For those of you who don’t know about Spore…well first of all, it was my pick for Game of the Year at E3 2006, so get reading. The game itself doesn’t come out until September, but the Creature Creator serves two purposes in the interim.
First, it placates people like me who are most excited about the idea of constructing their own aliens. I fully anticipate spending many hours just playing around with the editor and seeing what it can do. If you haven’t seen it yet, it looks amazingly easy to build, paint, and watch your creations come to life.
But more importantly, the Creature Creator will allow users to pre-populate the Spore game world. You see, when you play Spore, you create your own life-forms, but you also encounter hundreds, if not thousands of other aliens as you explore your planet, solar system, and galaxy, and every one of those beings was created by another Spore player through an electronic form of cross-pollination. By released the Creature Creator early, Maxis can make sure that the game world is already teeming with life when the first player starts his game. It also appears that you can track aliens by who created them, and even tell the game that you would like to see more from that person, so this aspect of the game appeals to the artist in me.
As you can tell, I am incredibly excited about this! I will let you know more once I get the trial version, and since you can easily email pictures or upload videos to YouTube, I may even start sending out links to what I’ve done.
