NVISION 08: Spore Creature Creator Is Infectious!

While at NVISION on Tuesday afternoon, I was able to watch a few of the Maxis/EA team members demo the Creature Creator with an “inside perspective” as to the infinite possibilities within the game. Wow, that’s all I have to say, Wow. These are some of the best game designers I’ve ever been near. The mere fact that you can create anything you want within the Creature Creator, the Vehicle Creator, Building Creator; it blows my mind. And as the game progresses, the possibilities only get better.

When The Sims originally came out, I was excited, bought it, and enjoyed about a month or two of playing the actual game before I started to lose interest. Then I discovered the treasure trove of upgrades, codes, mods, downloads, mini-apps, packages, skins and a plethora of other little goodies that made the game a bit more interesting. Allowing me to make anything from a Michael Jackson look alike to a replica of the Playboy mansion, I found a new life in the game, aside from the regular game play.

Eventually, the only thing that interested me was entering the Simolean cheat a million times until my character was super rich, and then building the most ridiculously lavish houses, pimped to high heaven with the coolest couches, electronics, infinite rooms, gardens, crazy pools, etc. I wouldn’t even play the game anymore; I would just make sweet houses and populate an entire neighborhood with cool rich people. I kept the game alive inside my spirit, even though the actual game play aspect became repetitive. But no longer!

This brings me to this next evolution of the Maxis/EA universe: Spore. We’ve been waiting very patiently (actually after about 5 years in the making, I’m starting to lose my patience), but the ACTUAL release is definitely upon us in September. With that said, I have to say that Will Wright has really outdone himself, he’s topped every other game he’s ever created. First, we had the original Sim City games (Maxis’ original successful series), as well as his semi-no-names like SimAnt, SimFarm, SimEarth, SimLife, SimTower, and SimIsle. The SimCity line was quite popular, and obviously The Sims line even more so. Now, we have Spore (aka SimEverything), and much like The Sims, the game makers have allowed for infinite upgrade-ability, mod-ability, a fantastic social networking aspect, and complete and utter flexibility in the gamer’s individual in-game world customization.

Directly from the Spore website, you have access to their creature database for the entire world to see. I watched them as they used a modified build of the Creature Creator, which also gave access to the building and vehicle creation applications. I watched as people called out various famous game/TV/movie characters, like Pikachu, Kirby, and the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. These game designers simply searched the character right on the Spore website, pulled up hundreds of user-created “Pikachu” replicas, dragged and dropped from their web browser to the Creature Creator, and got to see these little masterpieces load up directly from the web link. Since the release of the Creature Creator, millions of user-created creatures have been added automatically from the application to the Spore Database, giving way to an absolutely huge populous of cool little creatures, anything from a Mario or Wario, to a “desk chair” creature, creatures that look like little viking ships, and even creatures that appear to be in a “puppet/puppet master” relationship.

The team over at EA/Maxis did the best they could to create some really cool little artistically beautiful creatures with amazing design, body proportions, coloring/skinning, etc. However, since the release of the CC, the game designers have been absolutely astounded by the beautiful and original creatures appearing on their website. They hosted some of their favorite user submitted examples at the NVISION presentation, and I’ve got to say, there are some really talented gamers out there.

Also, I guess they tried to make is so that all creatures have vertical symmetry (e.g., you can’t make the left eye bigger than the right) but somehow, users have already exploited game bugs which allow for floating body parts, asymmetric creatures, and a variety of other possibilities that the creators didn’t intend. Don’t you love that? With the immense popularity of the Creature Creator (which is like a game in itself), I can only imagine the explosion this game will create; it is going to surprise a lot of people, for sure.

Wait until the release on September 7th, and you will not be disappointed!