So apparently Spore was released today. Somehow, despite the months of hype, I never caught the actual release date. Plus, according to Wikipedia, Australia and Europe got it a couple days ago, and are probably bragging about it to all the other continents.

I don’t have the game yet, and may not get it at all, but I downloaded the free Creature Creator back when they announced it. Using only the free features offered in the trial version, I managed to put together a fairly cool little creature. Earlier today, I took some snapshots.

What’s that? Three eyes, three legs, and giant flailing arms would be impractical in nature? Not if I have anything to say about it!

The links above will tell you more than enough about the gameplay, but I still feel compelled to point out how cool the concept is. I mean, you get to take a bunch of random parts, distort and arrange them however you want, and assemble them into a creature. Nothing special, at least until you see it walking around the screen, perfectly animated, as though it had been made that way by the designers, and not just slapped together on your computer five minutes earlier.

Geeks will understand why this is awesome. Everyone else thinks computers are powered by magic, and are just surprised that no one thought to do this before. The reason they didn’t do it is because it was impossible. Sure, you could make a few minor changes to a character’s appearance, or its clothing (see basically every MMORPG ever made), but you couldn’t just slap on a third arm or decide its knees should bend the other way. I mean, you could, I guess, but it would have required you to go back and make the entire game over again.

I did not program it to point and go, “Heyyy!” as you see above. Some beautiful, god-like programmer figured out a way to make all the creatures to do that, regardless of what crazy-ass parts players decided to give them. Tentacles? Claws? Nothing? Doesn’t matter! It’ll find a way to point, or dance, or do a backflip.

Oh, and also there’s an entire game to go along with this stuff, but that would just get in the way of my nerding-out over the magic programming.