Spore Spawn

So yesterday the Spore Character Creator Demo went live. Now Spore is an upcoming game from Maxis in which you create and evolve a simulated species. Sort of SimEarth with better graphics. Intelligent Design where God has a budget.

And the immediate reaction of the fellow designers was along the lines of "What?" - the game it is connected to won't be out for months, this is heavily nerfed (a lot of features disabled) and the complete version will be for sale separately. What were they thinking. Then we started dinking around with it, and within about twenty minutes, everyone was poking around with it.

And it is a surprisingly robust and dynamic engine, and its graphics make you drool. Yeah, its building critters out of component parts, but it proves very difficult to build a non-viable creature, even for those of us with limited artistic ability. The gang was soon creating Games Workshop Genestealers and Guild Wars Devourers.

And Pokemon. The inherent cuteness of the creatures make it a Pokemon generator.

Now I'm looking forward to the game itself, so Maxis has accomplished its goal. GG!

More later,