Spore.

[swestrup]

I've been playing with the Spore Creature Creator trial that was just released. So far, I think I give it a B- in terms of making what I want. It seems okay for making vertebrates with limbs. Other than that, not so hot. Some general impressions:

• You can put a mouth at the end of an arm. That's good. You can also combine a mouth and a hand. That is also good, and better than expected.
• You MUST have eyes. I hate that. No bat-creatures? No creatures with hunting radar? No creatures that burrow underground and hunt by vibration?
• There are no other senses but eyes, as far as I can tell. They have a bunch of axillary things that resemble sense organs that give you a 'sneaking' bonus. I think this is an attempt to model secondary senses. If so, I'm not favourably impressed.
• One backbone per creature, and backbone must be linear (although you can control the curve of said backbone, and the size of the vertebra and overlaying tissue.)
• A creature with hands and no legs can just float around. I sure hope thats deliberate, because otherwise its a dumb mistake.
• You can NOT combine hands and feet. You can't even attach an arm to a knee.
• They do not appear to have a tentacle option at all. You can't even do an elephant without!
• There's lots of blank slots for body parts for the trial, so maybe some of these things will be fixed in the final version.
• No Asymmetry. I couldn't put a crab claw on the end of only ONE hand. They have to come in pairs. Similarly, you must have even numbers of arms and legs.
• There doesn't seem any way to make something flat and manta-like. The backbone insists on supporting only globular tissue arrangements.
• Although the trial thingy talks about smarts, there doesn't seem to be any way to control how smart/dumb your creature is.