Aqua blue, four-legged penis monsters

Creature Creator reminds me a lot of those little keychain Tamagotchis that were all the rage back in fifth grade. Only now, instead of waiting for your digital critter to “hatch” or spending agonizing hours feeding it, you just get to create it and then watch it go. It’s like being on the god side of the digital beast universe. Which is, obviously, effing sweet.

You start with a shapeless blob of matter that you can then stretch into almost countless shapes, curving and strengthening or weakening the spine at any point on the body. Then, from the toolbox, you can add on mouths, eyes, hands, feet and all manner of extra bits as you see fit.

While that seems to be pretty straightforward, the game gives your beastie workshop a distinctly mammalian twist: your creatures, from the very start of the building process, are alive and responding to your actions.

Give them some eyes, they will immediately start blinking and looking around. Give them a muzzle, they’ll grunt a little bit to test out their new vocal chords. Give them spikes or feather adornments, and they will sometimes nod their heads emphatically, happy with your selection for them.

No matter how monstrously hideous you make your creature, it’s still pretty cute to hear their serrated mandible-thingies clicking with joy over your decision to give them a spiky tail.

Once you’ve got your creature built, colored and named, you can then test it out in enclosed environments. Have it run for you to see if those seven legs you gave it are all aligned properly, order a demonstration of its triple-claw attack or even watch how it interacts with baby versions of its kind, a feature which can be fairly disturbing to watch, depending on exactly what kind of being you have designed to unleash upon the world.

The game has only been on store shelves for two weeks and already it has launched a new word into gamers’ vocabularies: spornography. That is to say, creatures designed to look like naughty bits, or designed to look like two creatures in the middle of sharing said naughty bits.

Prior to browsing user galleries online, I had never seen so many variations on a set of cock-and-balls, with or without legs. Give human beings unlimited powers of creation, and this is what they’ll populate the land with: an army of aqua blue, four-legged penis monsters.

But, as testament to Spore’s design capabilities, there are also ample non-sexual examples of the cute, cuddly, fierce, beautiful, wondrous or just plain bizarre critters the game can produce. Within a week of the game’s release, Maxis studios announced the millionth unique creature had been created and shared online through Creature Creator.

While this is only a small piece of what’s to come when the full Spore game is released early this September, Creature Creator is itself an engaging, shareable jaunt that will keep you up far later than it probably should while you try to see just how many mouths you can fit down the back of your Escarbodontisaurus, or whatever the hell it is you’re making.

Spore Creature CreatorElectronic Arts/Maxis Studios$9.95 Windows/MAC

For more examples of wondrous critters check out our blog.