MacMost Now 98: Spore Creature Creator

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today lets have a little fun and take a look at the Spore creature creator for mac. So spore is a long anticipated game from Will Wright and Electronic Arts. Will Wright was the creator of games like Sim City and The Sims. Spore it going to be the ultimate Sim game where you get to create life from a small microbe all the way up to intergalactic civilizations. So in anticipation of their games release on September 7th they've released a smaller game called Spore creature creator that allows you to play around with just a portion of Spore. Lets go and take a look how it works on the Mac. So here's what the game looks like. You can start off by clicking 'create a creature' and then you start off with basically a blob and you get to add things to it. So for instance you can go ahead and drag over a mouth, you can click on arms and legs. Drag over some legs, and you can see the creature's kinda playful and will kinda move around as you add things to it. Add some claws to it add an arm first, then you can change the type of claws. There we go, and go ahead and add different types of feet, add some sort of horn, and of course eyes so it can see. And then you can stretch out the creature in lots of different ways. And then the cool thing is that you can go ahead after you paint it like that, and you can take it for a test drive.Go ahead and use your arrow keys and move it around and see how it behaves. You can even go ahead and make it dance. So that's a fun little thing to play with , its only of what we'll see when the real game is released. But the weird thing is that not only is EA going and sending this out as some sort of promotional material for Spore, but its selling it as well. You can buy a bigger version of the Spore creature creator for ten bucks. Which is really odd to go ahead and try to sell us a piece of marketing when the final game comes out most likely to retail for about sixty bucks and theres going to be an even bigger version of the game that has more stuff in it for seventy or eighty bucks to see what the final prices are when it gets released. I love the whole idea of spore and I can't wait for the game to come out. But even I can't see spending ten dollars for just the creature creator now when I can wait for September seventh and buy the full game then. Now part of the Spore creature creator is that you can go ahead and upload your creation and share it with other people. Now, EA's already found that there's a problem with this because people are creating creatures with interesting body parts. Some that look like interesting body parts. So the problem with spore porn of course is that EA doesn't want any part of it. Now I can't believe that EA didn't anticipate this to begin with. For years now Ive been running a site called snowmanconstructionkit.com and Ive seen what creative young minds can do when they can draw anything they want and share it with people. So its a natural of course that with the Spore creature creator and then eventually with Spore you should be able to create anything you want and people will create anything they want. Problem is, in the final game, creatures that you create will then appear in other peoples games, and apparently this really isn't going to work very well now if people are creating interesting creatures. So I predict that sooner rather than later this functionality which has been talked about for years probably will be taken out of the game or somehow crippled. So what are they going to do, moderate everyones creatures? Look at each and every one and determine which ones are appropriate? If this game sells anywhere near the amount its supposed to sell they won't be able to do that. Now having a user system where people can flag offensive content is problematic too because its going to be easy for you to go ahead and flag your friends content, even when its not inappropriate. To download the spore creature creator just go to spore.com and this is also where you can find out information about the upcoming release. The interesting thing is that the upcoming release of the full version of spore will not only support PC's and Macs on the same day of release, but supposedly will also support the iPhone on the day of release. We'll just have to wait and see how different the iPhone version is from the full mac anc pc version when the time comes. Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now