Spore Creature Creator

Well it was finally put out for download and purchase yesterday, June 17th. Now this is the first Maxis game I have actually been pumped for, EVER! It is a very robust program, which I think the Sims could use (hint, hint Maxis). I only got the free trial version which you can download at Spore’s website, and for the free version I’m still very impressed. I may only have seen a tenth of what will be available, but it looked and felt really good! In a matter of an hour I had already made 5 very interesting creatures.

Now like I said the free downloadable trial version is not even half of the $10 version thats available through retailers. Even though this is so, it sure as hell is as nicely as polished and bug free. I was running it on a fairly powerful laptop and had no major problems. The game features many different graphical settings that look as though the minimum specs. needed for this game, could actually be enough to play it. Anyways it looks really good and I am thourghly impressed considering it only being one part of the game, it leads me to believe this could be one of the nicest looking games this year (year pending, who knows if they’ll delay it AGAIN!).

So it looks good, but the main question is: “Does it play well?” I’m happy to answer that it does. It is very robust for a creature creator, but it is also very simple as well. In a matter of 5 minutes you can have an interesting and, most importantly to me, a funny creature. You then proceed to put the parts on it, give it a nice coloring, and then name it. Overall its a simple but very effective form of gameplay (for the creating part anyway), that is quite enjoyable.

Another nice thing that Maxis and EA did was to make YouTube available for you to upload videos made in the game. This is a very popular thing to try to do now-a-days, though I have liked to have seen it done a little bit more efficiently. I believe that it took half an hour to upload a single 2 minute video. Thats a little much for me so I ended up leaving my pc on, allowing it to do its thing, while I left and had dinner. By the time I came back it was done, though I was gone for almost forty minutes. This may not have been fully the games fault however, so I’m not gonna let this kill the beauty of the game so far.

O.K. So how can I summarize this? I guess I can by simply saying: FREAKING AWESOME, I CAN’T WAIT! This is a very promising look at what this game could turn out like. I believe that if they can keep this kind of quality for the game, it will be fun, funny, and an immeasurable amount of complexity that can, but doesn’t necessarily have to, be utilized. Remember this game will also become available for MAC, Wii, and DS.

Heres an example of some of the different actions available to creators in the try it out mode (uploaded using the built in YouTube uploaded, sadly though it lessened the quality):

This early look at the game is very strong. But since it is only one portion of the full game, I can only give the game a: