I'd be lying if I pretended I wasn't favorably biased toward Spore, and Will Wright in general, and yet I'm going to try and approach reviewing the recently released Creature Creator as objectively as a subjective review can be. I'll be covering Spore in depth when it's released in September, but for those who don't know about Will Wright's upcoming game, here's a brief synopsis:Spore is a game that allows you to start out as a single celled organism and evolve over the course of millions of game years into a multi-cellular being that eventually develops intelligence, forms a tribal society, bands together in a civilization, and ultimately takes to the stars to explore the galaxy. It's a type of game that's never been tried before, that blends various genres together in a single package. Spore is a 2d scroller, a 3d third-person adventure, an RTS, and an RPG all rolled into one. And the most groundbreaking aspect of Spore is that virtually all of the content in the game is procedurally generated by other players. While at its heart it's a single player game, players are able to create creatures, vehicles, buildings and more through a variety of editors. This content is then uploaded to a central server at Electronic Arts, where it's then spread out to everyone playing the game to populate their worlds.
The Creature Creator was released in June, and currently the database of creatures holds approximately 2.5 million creations by over 800,000 users, completely surpassing all expectations of EA and Maxis. Sure, it's a bit of a marketing gimmick, and yes, it's a way for EA to ensure that there's a host of content waiting for the game upon release that they didn't have to produce, but that's the beauty of the game and the Creator. I've made and uploaded over 50 different creations since June, and while I'm no artist, even the worst of the lot looks good thanks to the incredible team at Maxis that created a tool so simple to use that my mom could use it.You start out with a simple torso and spine that you can manipulate into different shapes and sizes, and add limbs, feet, hands, eyes, mouths, and practically anything you can think of to. All of the pieces are equipped with different morph channels that allow you to subtly tweak their appearance to your liking with a click of a mouse, resulting in essentially unlimited variations and designs. As you add more parts to your creature, it'll begin to come to life before you, and when you're finished you can texture it with a few clicks with either a pre-made three layer texture, or you can choose layers individually if you have a special aesthetic in mind.
You can also take your creature into test mode at any point to see how it will look in the game world, how it walks, how it laughs, plays, fights, etc. It's deceptively addictive and with a little work you'll be amazed at the types of creations you can come up with. Each part also has functionality in the game world. The type of mouth determines whether your creature is a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore. Different hands and feet have different attack and movement properties, and certain detail parts add to the creature's endurance or social abilities. You can also download creatures that other people have made to test them out for yourself.There are a few caveats, but they're mostly a matter of taste. Will Wright once said that there was an ongoing battle between the realistic team and the cute team at Maxis, and it looks like the cute team unequivocally beat the snot out of the realistic team and threw them off a bridge. Your creations have the capacity to look sickeningly cute, but you can also create some utterly frightening abominations of God if you want to. Beyond that, the Creator could use a few patches as it's a little glitchy, but doesn't suffer from anything show-stopping.
There's a trial version with limited functionality that gives you 25% of the total creature parts, and a full version for $10. I'd recommend using the trial version first, but most likely you'll find yourself plunking down that ten bucks for the full experience after an hour or two - it's just that good. If you have a PC and a soul, you owe it to yourself to head over to the Spore website and download yourself a copy.
