Spore Creature Creator!
Will Wright’s burgeoning masterpiece Spore may have been in development for what feels like an eternity, but we finally got to mess with the toys he had teased us with all those years ago, today. The Spore Creature Creator is available to download as a trial or buy with a full set of creature features (the price is refundable against the full game, due in September… around my birthday… *cough*). You take an amorphous blob, fiddle with the spine, add a mouth (or two), a few legs (or a dozen) and virtually anything else you can think of, then watch as your Noodley Appendage sculpts a brand new creature. I tried to run it on Ubuntu with Wine, but there were some graphical glitches. Oh well, on to Trina’s Vista laptop, at least the Creature Creator gives the awesome guys at Wine 3 months to get everything running smooth!
Of course, as a dino-geek (you know you’re one, when your daily reading includes Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology) most of my creations have been of a decidedly ancient variety.
This is my “Ankylothera” and a humanoid family. The dino is obviously fictional - I wanted to play with the spikes but the trial comes only with carnivore mouths - hence the less-than-dexterous predator. The monkey-human was surprisingly easy to do and used up the least DNA, and wobbled about like an unsure toddler. Oh, you can’t edit the brain power yet - perhaps thats why he looked so perplexed by being unable to run very far! Silly monkey - invent a car.
This is my Deinonychus. Obviously, again, it is a little bit fictionalised, within the constraints of the trial editor. However, it was very pleasing to see it stalking about like it wanted to rip my guts out but couldn’t find adequate ambush cover. Clever girl!
Of course, no set would be complete without the top predator. My T-Rex was actually quite tough to make - there simply isn’t enough vertebrae to go around, to deal with the real giants! But the end result was again very satisfying. Sniffing the air, wiggling his little arms (I had initially made them a bit too big; its easy to forget how comically stunted Rex’s graspers are. Trina pointed this out!) before bellowing a mighty roar into the dawn air. It was all a bit much for me; Spore’s release date suddenly seemed very far away, again.
Spore Creature Creator is available free or for the price of a pint from EA’s Spore Store
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Tags: dinosaurs, games, linux, pc games, spore, video games, will wright, wine