Create Your Own Creature

I've been hearing quite a bit about this new software that allows you to create your own creatures who can evolve into different states. It is called SPORE and it is pretty neat. Once you load the software you have two options - to load a creature or create a creature. Since you will have no creature to load the first time in, you will click the create a creature button. This takes you to a simple interface where you can take various "parts" and start building your creation. You get a wide variety of mouths, eyes, arms and legs, graspers, and other body parts. When you place your cursor over a particular part a menu appears that provides information on that part - for example the "mouth menu" provides the mating call a creature with that particular mouth piece will make (with audio file so you can actually hear the sound), the power of its bite, the song it sings, and if it is a carnivore (in the test version all mouths appear to be carnivore mouths). As you design your beastie it mutates and seems to start agreeing or not agreeing with your design ideas. Finished with the basics you can then change the color. Once you are happy with your creature you can put it in an environment and using various controls, see how it walks, runs, leaps, fights etc. You also get to test its various emotions - how does your creature behave when it is happy or angry?  You can even cause your creature to lay an egg! You can save your creature and create more, take photos and video of your creature and I imagine, once you've played with the program for a while, figure out all sorts of other things to do. I found myself fairly amazed at what my creature could do. I know my kidz are going to love playing this and I'm pretty sure I will be purchasing the full-blown version.

The program itself is not yet available but you can test drive the free trial version and if you like it, pre-order the full blown version which is scheduled for a September release.

Spore Creature Creator requires at least the following:

FOR WINDOWS XP
 * 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
 * 512 MB RAM
 * A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
 * The latest version of DirectX 9.0c
 * At least 190MB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for created creatures.

FOR WINDOWS VISTA
 * 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
 * 768 MB RAM
 * A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 
 * At least 190MB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for created creatures.

FOR MAC OS X
 * Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
 * Intel Core Duo Processor
 * 1024 MB RAM
 * ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
 * At least 260MB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for created creatures.

 This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac).

For computers using built-in graphics chipsets, the game
requires at least:
 * Intel Integrated Chipset, GMA 950 for Windows, GMA X3100 for Mac OS X
 * Dual 2.0GHz CPUs, or 1.7GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent.