Hands On: Spore Creature Creator

Spool up EA's lightweight Spore Creature Creator and you're greeted by a swirling galactic nexus accompanied by celestial chimes and brooding strings, teasing the many places you'll eventually have the chance to visit once your stalk-eyed, six-handed, single-legged baby's all grown up.

The trial version of the Creature Creator -- about 200MB and available now for either PC or Mac -- only lets you fiddle a few body parts (mouths, eyes, arms, legs, weapons) and upload them to a MySpace-like template called MySpore Page. At last check, there were some 30,453 total creatures in the database, 26,847 people joined up since yesterday, and 18,678 creature uploaded in the last 24 hours (that's probably in part because the tool leaked a day or two early).

After rolling a few creatures, contorting vertebrae into bizarre configurations, and slapping claws on appendages grafted to places that'd probably make Darwinians balk, I can say it's definitely showing potential. Every choice you make has physical and statistical repercussions. Pick one kind of leg to boost speed, another kind of mandible to increase your bite, toothy versus gummy to dictate whether you're into meat or veggies or both. The theoretical micro-to-macro complexity (in the final version, you'll have to chaperone your Franken-critter through tribal, civilization, and space phases) practically boggles the mind.

Visit the Sporepedia and you can even download someone else's daft little stab at a critter. Unfortunately you can't sync your creations without manually downloading them from EA if you accidentally wipe them out. (Or if, like me, you've been switching between the PC and Mac versions.)

Good news: The trial version runs super-smooth on a Macbook Pro with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB in either OSX or Boot Camp (Vista) mode. But then all you can really do here is test drive your creature in a tiny cylindrical arena, so no promises the final version's not going to hammer the dickens out of your CPU and GPU. For the record, the system requirements for the Creature Creator are identical to the ones EA debuted for Spore a week ago.

If you want the full-featured Creator Creator, which should have all the blank spots populated with hundreds of additional body parts and who knows what other wacky miscellany, you'll have to pay EA $10 when it goes live tomorrow.

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