Spore Creatures (DS)

Spore Creatures‘ closest relative isn’t really Spore at all; it’s a little-known GameCube game called Cubivore. Just like this portable spin-off, Cubivore‘s predecessor was fixated on the food chain: Players mutated a creature across multiple generations, eventually buffing up enough to sink their teeth into the top dog. Spore Creatures is interested in telling a bit more story. Players start as a small fry who sees one of its buddies abducted by an alien meddler who never heard of the Prime Directive, and so begins an accelerated climb up the evolutionary ladder. Hot on the heels of the kidnapper’s UFO, the player runs roughshod over the local wildlife, brawling and befriending as the mood fits. This simple “rescue the princess” plot contains more story than the original Spore ever aimed to tell, but it suits the setting. Spore Creatures could never recreate the sprawling freedom that Spore eventually allows. Although it has its own version of the Creature Creator, it’s but a pale shadow of the incredibly robust tool that PC gamers have been playing with. You don’t so much concoct your own creatures here; like Victor Frankenstein working from Charles Darwin’s notes, you try to cram as many useful, stat-boosting body parts onto the poor thing’s torso as you can, and hope the guy doesn’t come apart at the seams.

CrispyGamer – Spore Creatures Review

Spore Creatures, unable to come close to the scale of its parent game with the limitations of the DS, is instead an action/RPG. Players are cast into the role of a freshly spawned creature which has just emerged from the water to dry land. When the sole other survivor of the evolutionary process is captured by a highly-advanced creature with goals of galactic conquest, the player must embark on a quest to rescue it.

The story does what it needs to in setting an objective, but there is no depth whatsoever. The assorted species you encounter lack distinguishing characteristics beyond appearance and some combat abilities, even amongst the races you have to assist along the way. I was hoping that there would be some sort of lesson at the conclusion about growth and change and the effects that could have on a relationship, but that might have been asking for a bit too much.

Destructoid reviews Spore Creatures DS

The Spore franchise, if we can officially begin calling it such, is based on the idea of evolution. When a Nintendo DS and Wii version were announced it was made clear that they were going to be developed separately from the PC edition. In the full version you’re able to take a single-celled organism and bring it through life, from the process of gaining a brain to intergalactic travel. Along the way there are different hurdles to jump, and the genre of “strategy” is aptly applied to the experience. Spore Creatures tries a similar stunt, but remains in the Creature Phase of Spore, which is a strategy that I can support in terms of game development. The full experience is far too large to scale down to a portable system effectively, and focusing on recreating one aspect of the game strongly is a fine path to take. As it begins, the title’s plot are revealed and you take control of your own creature, preparing for an epic, universe-changing series of events. A strange, alien race is kidnapping and destroying different creatures around the universe involving your friend, and your mission throughout the title’s ten hours involve trying to rescue him.

Spore Creatures takes the idea of evolution and customization and runs with it a little too far with it. Instead of a natural progression that is supposed to take millions of years the game will occasionally give you a new object and demand you equip it immediately to complete an objective. I was shocked when I was told I needed to capture a certain creature to progress, and given a new pair of legs to capture it with. It’s not a terrible gameplay mechanic, but with the name Spore (and, in turn, Will Wright) you would expect there to be some subtlety involved.

Gamervision – Spore Creatures DS review

The game begins with you and a friend arriving on terra firma. As you start to explore this new found land, a mysterious spaceship appears and beams your buddy away for reasons unknown to you. This becomes the overwhelming theme of your experience – visit new planets, evolve by acquiring new limbs and body parts, and also collecting spaceship pieces. As you explore your environment, you come across many other creatures. Befriending these creatures, or even attacking them will allow you to upgrade various parts of your body. New body parts = new skills, and will allow you to explore areas that were previously unexplorable. This makes the game fairly linear, when you get to a point in the game where you have exhausted all of your options and can longer go any further, it generally means there is a body part you are yet to find that will allow you to progress.

ButtonMasher – Spore Creatures review

Spore Creatures sets you in the body of a newly created creature, straight out of the Cell Stage of the PC version, our new creature washes up on the shores of a new island. You and a friend from your species start taking a look around only to be attacked by a space ship, coming to collect creatures and trees in a similar way you do in the Space Stage of the PC title, your friend gets kidnapped and you start on a quest to try and find him.

Its not Spore is it? I mean that’s the whole idea I know, but it just doesn’t really capture the same kind of idea that Spore is known for which is creative freedom to do whatever you like. Either way that’s the scenario and you venture off starting with creating the creature, naming him and choosing its colours. That’s about as far as customization goes throughout the game, don’t expect to be naming planets, creating groups of your species or finding some epic units in this game. It just doesn’t happen.

It’s a shame a lot of the customization of Spore has been taken out of the DS title because that was one of the main draws of the bigger and better PC title. As you progress through the game you have to get over obstacles and fight other creatures sometimes requiring specific parts. This is probably one of the worst ideas in the game as it forces you to create the creature in a way you may not want to. It feels a lot less like Creature Creator and more like ‘Create what we tell you to’ Creator and what’s the point of that?

WiiDS – Spore Creatures DS review

“Evolution” in Spore Creatures is a combination of leveling up and changing body parts. These body parts act like RPG equipment—each arm or leg comes with a corresponding stat that affects the creature’s overall capabilities. Combat is done by slashing the stylus across an enemy, while magic is renamed “bio-powers,” which grant powers like healing or flame breath.

These bio-powers that come with certain limbs are very important because they could mean success or failure in certain missions. As a result, the evolution of the creature feels forced (i.e. linear) because it’s the only way to progress.

Aside from combat, Spore Creatures come with a social element that allows the creature to befriend other critters. This is done by sending out a friendly creature call, which brings up a smiley above the potential friend’s head. After doing a series of dragging and rubbing, a rhythm minigame is initiated. If the player is successful, the target critter becomes a friend. This social element adds a little depth to Spore Creature’s action RPG gameplay.

Daily Nintend0 – Spore Creatures DS review

Although it has the word “Spore” in its title, don’t be misled into thinking that Spore Creatures is just a smaller version of its PC big brother. This is an adventure game with a clear-cut, albeit simple, goal. Your pal Little Oogie is captured by a strange alien craft, and you must rescue him. Your mission takes you to several planets with various terrains ranging from lush jungles to frozen tundras and to burning deserts. These regions are populated by exotic wildlife, which will either be friendly or hostile to you. You have to either befriend or fight the locals in order to survive, and carry out a series of missions to continue to the next region or planet.

While you’re not quite a cellular organism, you start off as a limbless, mouthless animal. You have no means to defend yourself or attack anything (or even eat!), so you need to start moving up the evolutionary ladder as quickly as possible. Collect body parts, which can be obtained by exploring the area, fighting or befriending the animals, or completing various quests. These parts can be equipped at a nest, with each part bearing specific attributes. For example, some mouth parts provide more sustenance from food, while certain types of legs increase your attack strength.

GameShark  – Spore Creatures review

This is the DS version of Electronic Arts’ long-awaited computer game. I haven’t played the computer version yet (odd, since I was counting the days at one point!) but am always looking for fun DS games, so I gave this a try. I’m glad I did – aside from two or three glitches, in which I had to attempt a task a few times or even consult online tips, the game play was entertaining and smooth. The storyline was simple, linear, and moved along at a timely pace.

In Spore for DS, you begin as a little slug-like creature. Your friend Oogie is kidnapped by the super villain of this universe – Gar’skuther. You are forced to leave the comfort of your home planet to go on an Oogie search and rescue mission. There are six planets to explore and complete tasks on; as you complete certain vital tasks on each one, you advance to the next. Some tasks are optional, but since you never know beforehand which is which, my advice is, at least try to complete them all. Once you get the go-ahead to advance it’s up to you whether to take the spaceship outta there or stay a bit and finish up your optional tasks.

BlogCritics – Spore Creatures review

Spore Creatures looks all right for a DS game.  The environments are fully 3-D, but the creatures are put front and center.  To make up for the DS’s deficiencies, they’ve made the creatures in 2-D, like cardboard cutouts.  This means creature customization is easier for the system to handle, and it also gives the creatures a certain lo-fi charm.

Still, you’ll come upon certain creatures and not be sure whether or not you’ve seen them before.  They’ve tried to pack a lot of detail into these creatures, and there just isn’t the space on the screen for it.  You never really develop an attachment to any of the creatures in Spore Creatures because you can’t tell them apart, which is what the original Spore got right.  There’s not enough variety in this animal kingdom to make things look unique.

Most of the sound consists of squeaks and grunts from other creatures, and most of it is fairly forgettable.  For the most part, it doesn’t really detract from the experience.  There is something that really bugged me, however.  Smaller animals will scurry about, and you can eat them if you happen to be a carnivore.  When you eat one, they squeak far too much, and keep squeaking.  It made me uncomfortable.  I know that other animals don’t enjoy being eaten, obviously.  It just seems that for a game aimed mostly at kids, they made it a little too much.  Maybe just one squeak would be fine, but don’t have the animal still squeaking as I’m grinding it in my jaws and swallowing its pulpy remains down my gullet.

Gaming Trend – Spore Creatures DS review

This portable title does a good job of channeling the evolutionary charm of Spore, and it offers a more goal-focused experience than its PC counterpart. But, despite this title’s more limited features, it is still quite exceptional in its own right.

As the game opens, you’ll bear witness to two little pre-evolutionary creatures taking their first steps onto land. Once they become land animals, it will be up to you to determine their evolutionary progression from there. You will learn how to customize your character, but there will be very few options available for you at the start. The game instead functions as an ongoing evolutionary experience where you can unlock more creature characteristics as you go on.

Cheat Code Central – Spore Creatures DS review

If you were hoping that Spore Creatures would be a portable version of the much anticipated PC game Spore, you are out of luck. Spore Creatures is closer to an upgraded version of the Spore Creature Creator than the single-cell organism to world conquering creature game. Being on the handheld of choice for younger gamers, it seems at first glance that Spore Creatures has been developed for that target audience. The colours are vibrant, the characters are cute and they even have that Super Paper Mario 2-dimensional look.

HookedGamers – Spore Creatures review

Creatures presents a version of an early stage of the Spore experience, in which your personal species has evolved its cells together and ambled on shore into the realm of macrobiology. Fighting for life in a world of spiky, spiny, grabby weirdos, your thinglet must evolve to overcome challenges. As it progresses, it’ll be able to add new arms with which to fight, new eyes with which to see the hidden resources of its primordial landscape, new legs with which to navigate the hazards of its environment, new spikes and spines and fins and feathers with which to look totally stylin’. This is all in the service of two overriding goals: survive and thrive.

Or…not? I think that might be the goal in Spore; in Spore Creatures, the goal is to – wait for it – rescue some little slug you hatched from the clutches of some vaguely evil UFO-riding space aliens. As game-narrative motivations go, I’ve seen worse, but this is mighty weak sauce for a game spun off a title that’s supposed to be all about the epic of evolution. What it boils down to is a short series of easy find-fight-fetch missions welded onto an over-thought character-customization system.

The Star – Spore Creatures review

Being such a simple organism works against Oogie, so he will need the power of evolution to become a stronger, faster, and more social creature. As you begin to explore the first planet, you will stumble across other creature parts. Collecting these parts is the key to progressing through the game. There are hundreds of parts in all, and each has its own unique attributes. You will collect eyes, mouths, bodies, legs, arms, tails and more throughout the game. Completing certain objectives and defeating enemies will also award you more body parts. Each creature you encounter in the game is collectible in the sense that you can collect each one of the body parts that makes up that specific creature. Pausing the game and entering the Sporepedia will give you a run down of what creatures you have discovered as well as which parts you have collected. The Sporepedia also offers information on each of the creatures, the different planets in the game, and lots more. It is a useful tool for discovering different aspects of the game. Spore Creatures makes use of an RPG-like system where you level up as you gain more experience points, which is achieved by collecting parts, being social, and completing objectives. As you level up, you will gain more ‘body points’ which allows you to use more body parts on your creature. Each body part has a different number of body points in which it uses up. The amount of points used up by a body part will largely depend on how useful that part is. Some parts increase your attack strength, some increase defence, some increase your social level (making it easier to socialise), whilst others still give you special abilities such as being able to walk on lava or enter deep water.

Vooks – Spore Creatures DS review

And although it’s not as in-depth as the PC version it does nail the basics. What DS owners are going to find out though is that they will spend around 80% of their time in the creature creator mode. The other 20% of the time players will be guiding their little beings into the depths of forests, icy caverns and fiery planets, all whilst battling other creatures and earning more “parts” to add to the creature creator. This is where the game part comes into play as you chase down mysterious spaceships which are kidnapping your animal friends.

On paper the premise of building an animal on the fly to solve environmental puzzles sounds solid. If you need to get over water to attain your objective you need to grow fin-like arms. So you find a chicken-like creature and meet the criteria to ‘earn’ the fin from that animal. This can come from befriending the animal, helping it in some way or fighting it. When you earn this “piece” you then retreat back to your nest, enter the create mode, add it and then repeat. For the rest of the game.

N-Europe – Spore Creatures review

Creatures’ peculiar take on evolution is embodied in the creature creator; a toolbox to form paper-craft organisms. It almost plays like an action RPG but instead of donning new armour or equipping a stronger sword, Creatures grafts a new leg or a sharper razor tail. However, the linearity of the game kills the ambition – when the game gives you thorns, you choose longer legs – when the game gives you hidden objects, you choose sharper vision. This leaves your creature a hideous ogre, a mess of contrasting appendages, yet with the key attributes for survival.

Making a more attractive creature provides no advantage; other Creatures won’t be more likely to make friends and less likely to start fights. There’s no beauty or superficiality in Creatures, so the only reason for making anything other than the fittest, fastest, strongest creature is so you don’t have to stare at the inevitable abomination through the entire game.

BritishGaming – Spore Creatures DS review

The problems lie with the game’s mission-based structure, because it’s this that dictates what your creature needs to be. Fighting enemies? Best strap on those combat claws and thick-skinned legs, otherwise you’ll get slaughtered. Need to befriend a creature? It’s friendly eyes for you then. Deep water or burning hot sand causing problems? Use long gangly limbs, not short stubby ones. Yes, there’s freedom here – you can theoretically make any creature you want with the surprisingly deep creation tools – but when the missions routinely force you to use specific body parts for the tasks ahead, it negates the point of this freedom entirely.

Unfortunately, the gamplay is horribly repetitive too. You’re either fighting enemies by rapidly scratching the stylus across them in the hope that your health lasts longer than theirs, befriending creatures by rubbing them with smiley faces or just generally roaming around collecting new body parts. Initially, this seems fine (although there’s no doubt Spore Creatures throws far too much at the player right from the off, leaving you feeling somewhat confused as you get to grips with it all), but it all gets really rather dull after just a short while.

Official Nintendo Magazine – Spore Creatures review

To expect the same expansive Spore experience on the Nintendo DS is a little crazy. Horsepower and system capabilities aside, it’s clear by the timing of the game that Spore Creatures was developed independently from the original game while it was still being created, so the scope of the project obviously had to be a little more “contained” for DS gamers. That said, it’s pretty cool to see a lot of the same features mirrored in the handheld game, right down to the ability to create crazy lifeforms that can be sent to other systems via online support.

Spore Creatures starts out with a very rigid “adventure” design where you’ll control one creature in a set storyline that involves exploring a planet and protecting one of your critter buddies. Right from the start you’ll learn the ability to “evolve,” or rather the ability to shift around bodyparts that will help out with defeating enemy creatures as well as accessing different parts of the world. Befriending native creatures or kicking their butts in battle will net additional body parts that will upgrade your in-game character’s fighting and environmental abilities. Some parts will enable him to traverse harmful terrain or swim, abilities that become integral to the linear storyline — if you find yourself stuck in a map, there’s clearly a body part that you’ll need to find or have in your inventory that will help you move onto the next portion of the adventure.

IGN – Spore Creatures review

You’re not alone in the world, however, and interaction with the other species is central to the experience. Docile creatures can be befriended by stroking them with smiley face icons, or by triggering a basic rhythm game in which you tap flowers as circular dots pass over them. Once you’ve earned their trust, creatures may give you additional body parts, or send you on further mini-quests. Inevitably, this means conflict with the less-agreeable denizens of the gameworld, and you have to swap strokes for strikes, slashing with the stylus and – later – deploying bio-attacks that you’ve added to your virtual frame.

These two basic types of interaction really do form the core of the whole game, and you can expect to spend most of your playing time alternating between the two. It soon becomes problematic since making friends can become a long-winded chore with no variation, while combat feels fiddly and unsatisfying. Your attacks feel disconnected, and fights usually end up as frantic stylus-mashing affairs, reliant on brute strength rather than tactical decisions. Most areas introduce new enemies who routinely kick your ass, sending you back to respawn at the nearest nest, until you find or earn the new body part that will make you strong enough to defeat them. Once this happens, battles that were once impossible become far too easy.

EuroGamer – Spore Creatures review

Visually, Spore Creatures takes a two-dimensional approach to Spore‘s conflicted worldview, where evolution goes up against intelligent design. Even moreso than the incredibly cute PC game, Spore Creatures will appeal to younger players thanks to its immensely approachable aesthetics. Everything in Spore Creatures has the appearance of being put together by children with construction paper, colored pencils, and a pair of safety scissors. When designing creatures in the creature creator, you’ll lay down flattened cut-outs that represent different body parts, which when applied will come to life. The two-dimensional effect is quite eye-catching when in motion, borrowing from the look of Paper Mario.

GameSpy – Spore Creatures DS reviewed

Spore Creatures is based on the second creature phase of the PC version, as you and your pals start the game as goggle-eyed sea slugs making their first forays onto land. Before you’re even able to hum the first few bars of Also sprach Zarathustra you’re buzzed by a mysterious UFO and your sole remaining sea slug pal is abducted. The rest of the game involves chasing after him as you evolve yourself into ever more complex, U-rated, monsters.

Although a great deal of care and effort has clearly gone into Spore Creatures, few are going to get past the fact that one of the most open-ended and ambitious games of all time has been devolved into a linear and prescriptive DS adventure. There’s only one way to play this game and if you don’t follow the constant signposting you won’t be getting anywhere.

You can access the editor whenever you visit a friendly nest, making use of the new body parts that you find in each level. You can resize and rotate each part, but you can’t mould it in any other way. What’s more irritating is that although the game describes in detail what each part does when you first find it, there’s no way to recall this information when you’re in the editor. So unless you can remember exactly which mouth allowed you to breathe fire you’re going to have to try them all until you find out.

PocketGamer – Spore Creatures DS review

Many of your missions are fun, though, and there are a number of gameplay elements sprinkled in to keep things interesting. You can pick items up and throw them with a flick of the stylus, so at various points you will need to throw rocks at weather machines to break them, fling food at starving creatures, or water plants by throwing liquid-laden flowers at them. These activities are amusing–though not all missions are created equal. One annoying quest initiates a minigame, asking you to fling rocks at thieving creatures by tapping on them as they appear. The vague instructions and picky, pixel-perfect tapping required turns a fun diversion into a frustrating detour. In fact, simply navigating can be problematic: Stylus controls are a little slippery, and the camera has a habit of zooming in and out in various unhelpful ways, often keeping you from getting a helpful view of your surroundings.

Occasionally, you’ll need (or want) to befriend other creatures, a facet that requires you to utilize one of two gameplay elements. To cuddle with other creatures (though we’re not sure why anyone would want to cuddle with a scaled purple lizard), you send out a friendly call, which prompts a series of smiley faces above your prospective buddy’s head. Then, you drag the smileys downward and rub them around on the creature. Or if a flower petal appears over its head, you drag it down to initiate a rhythm minigame reminiscent of Elite Beat Agents. This minigame works just fine (though the accompanying tunes aren’t exactly memorable), and in the last hours of the game it gets surprisingly challenging.

GameSpot – Spore Creatures review

Curiously, the first time we’ve seen Spore Creatures is here with the final build of the game. We’ve barely seen a screenshot before now, let alone any early versions. We think we know why. While the seed of a good idea has been planted, it’s failed to bloom into a decent game. In fact, too many ideas have been planted here and the result is an overgrown tangle, leaving us confused, unsatisfied and rather disappointed.

The game starts out with you, a little wiggling thing, narrowly escaping abduction by a creature in a spaceship. You’ve got a little friend who guides you through the opening section of the game, introducing the central concepts of evolving to meet the demands of the specific environment you find yourself in and making friends with the other creatures who live there. Too much info, related via text, is thrust at you at the start and caused us an initial confusion that took a fair amount of play time to come to terms with.

GamesRadar – Spore Creatures DS review

The DS version of this game is going to be called Spore Creatures, and like most handheld counterparts of console or PC games, it’s going to be a scaled-back experience of the full-fledged PC version. The computer version is incredibly fleshed-out and allows you to guide your character from a microscopic single-celled organism all the way to a complex being and even allows you to creat a society and eventually a civilization of your creatures. It’s rich with strategy and customization and is looking to be a highly revolutionizing strategy experience.

Spore Creatures still focuses on many of the same aspects of its older brother, but it also simplifies many things to make it a much more approachable and less complex experience. Spore Creatures focuses solely on the “creature” aspect of Spore, rather than delving into the many other facets of game that the full version possesses (spaceship building or solar system exploration, for example). You’ll create your microscopic creature, let it evolve, and upgrade it, and eventually create a civilization.

Cheat Code Central – Spore Creatures DS preview

Spore Creatures, one of the three Nintendo DS demos on display at Nintendo’s GDC 2008 booth, promises to offer an experience similar to that of its PC and Mac big brothers. Like the other versions, Spore Creatures is 3D (in a Paper Mario way), and you can dynamically add parts to your creature and have them affect its stats and animations; however, it’s more focused on the creatures themselves rather than its “game of everything” scope on the other platforms. EA is still working on the game in a limited capacity, offering design input to the DS game’s developer, Amaze. In many ways, Spore Creatures promises to be a game that’s the same, but different.

My game started with Spore’s acclaimed Creature builder. I used the DS’ stylus to select, drag, and drop different body, eye, mouth, fin, tail, arm, and leg pieces to create my creature, a poor soul who went by the game’s default name of “Oogie” and whose legs were so short that his larger and more impressive arms probably gave him more locomotive potential. Each body part adds to your stats, like social, attack, or energy regeneration. I could also change the base colors of my creature, or apply different patterns to him in an approximation of the PC version’s procedural texturing.

Nintendo World Report – Spore Creatures impressions 1

The game’s premise is straightforward enough. You play as a newly-hatched slug creature named Oogie, who can be augmented with a variety of mouths, arms, legs, and other appendages using a simplified version of the creature creator. Attaching parts allows you to attack, increase your defense or mobility, or improve your social abilities. Your creature can be altered at any nest (save point). In the full game you collect better parts as you progress, but the E3 demo provided many parts to fool around with. I played through the tutorial, designed to familiarize players with the many menu options and icons found in the game. Your sister slug, who acts as your guide during this sequence, is suddenly abducted by an evil alien flying in a UFO, providing the game’s plot. Oogie eventually explores a variety of planets in his adventure.

The game gives off a vaguely Paper Mario look-and-feel, with wafer-thin characters in a fully 3-D world. The vibrant color palette further invokes thoughts of Nintendo’s adventure/RPG series. The creature creator takes on a scrap-book look as parts with jagged edges are clumsily attached to your simple body. The result is comical, with Oogie at best looking awkward and at worst resembling a junkyard heap. Adjusting the size of parts in the creator goes a long way towards making an aesthetically pleasing hodgepodge, but as far as I could tell, there’s little practical value in doing so. You can save and load several different creature configurations, which essentially are multiple sets of equipment.

Nintendo World Report – Spore Creatures impressions 2

Spore Creatures is an action adventure game that features similar customization to that of the PC game. The difference is, obviously, in how the creatures can be customized since the Nintendo DS doesn’t really have the same processing power as the current generation of gaming PCs. But what Amaze/Griptonite has done with the DS version is rather impressive: instead of manipulating 3D models, you’re creating creatures by piecing together paper-thin body parts. These parts can be stretched big or squished small and slid around on the body to make seemingly infinite variations of creatures.

For example, you can create a creature with tiny eyes, an enormous muzzle, and two chicken-like legs that are as far back on the torso as possible. The parts can be textured with pre-defined patterns and colored with different shades. And this creature can be enhanced with additional bodyparts found later in the adventure. And even though these creatures are made from 2D parts, they interact within a 3D world. They move around in an effect that’s similar to Paper Mario, but a little more 3D since the parts are layered on top of each other.

IGN – E3 2008 Spore Creatures hands on

Instead of taking a creature from the primeval soup all the way to the stars, Spore Creatures give players control over one character in a linear journey across a single planet. Much like the corresponding mode in the full fat version, gameplay centres around forming partnerships with some species and taking down more hostile species. The DS deals with this in its own distinctive fashion – blows are administered to foes with a slash on the touch screen, while befriending other animals occurs through a rhythm-based mini-game.

The action plays out much like an action RPG – starting small and humble, over time and through the completion of tasks new abilities and body parts are unlocked that can be implemented in the Creature Editor screen. Again, don’t expect all the bells and whistles of the PC’s procedural animation system – however, in it’s place there is a more than competent suite of options. Body parts can be dragged to the desired location, and there is more than enough room for a little creativity and subsequently scope for a whole world of character.

IGN – Spore Creatures preview

Out in the world, you’re exploring simple, slightly stylised 3D islands with plain textures and geometry, but your little creature, his friends and some of the foliage are 2D sprites that rotate sweetly depending on the position of the third-person camera. Getting around is easy thanks to stylus controls, although if you prefer buttons you can fall back on those for a mixture. A map on the top-screen points out items of interest and mission objectives, while the ever-ready Sporepedia tops up your knowledge and alerts you to incomplete objectives.

It’s not long before you start getting into scraps, and combat turns out to be a mixture of basic attacks – performed by making slashing motions with the stylus – and special abilities linked to your choice of body parts. An early example replenishes your health. Once dispatched, enemies often drop extra body parts for you to sew onto your warped but merry-looking charge.

EuroGamer – Spore Creatures hands on

Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that not all games are about guns or cars or zombies. It’s refreshing when a producer doesn’t bang on and on about the number of weapons or the individual polygon count of the hero’s eyelashes or why the enemies have machetes for limbs. It’s good when they say things like, “I mean, playing as a carrot is not ideal. But you can do it if you want.”

That’s coming from Jason Haber, producer on the DS version of Spore. It’s being developed specially for the handheld by Maxis, and they’re not pretending it’ll have anything like the scope of the EA game. “We knew that trying to take the entirety of the gameplay might have been a little too difficult for the DS, and we wanted to nail one part of the game,” explains Haber.

“We were trying to hit the key tenets of what we feel Spore is, which is creativity, connectivity and exploration… We focused just on the creature phase of the game, because we felt it really worked well for the DS platform.”

So you won’t be evolving an entire civilisation from a single cell like in the PC game. Spore Creatures, as it’s aptly titled, is all about designing your own unique creature and collecting extra parts with which to enhance their abilities.

EuroGamer – Spore Creatures first impressions

To start the game, you and a few friends hatch in the ocean and swim to shore. The game’s graphics are very Phantom Hourglass-esque; presumably, EA and Nintendo came to a similar conclusion about how to make a good-looking game on the DS. You and your crawling, armless and legless brethren find yourselves assaulted by a spaceship, which sucks up and kidnaps all but you and a single friend. Determined to escape the fate of your nest-mates, you (“Oogie”) and your new friend (“Little Oogie”) head off to not get kidnapped. It’s a noble goal.

The gameplay seems to revolve around finding other animals and befriending them so that you can pick up quests and new body parts. We encountered a friendly animal and attempted to charm it from friendly to downright helpful; a pair of mini-games let us first sing and then dance our new accomplice into working alongside us. In addition to helping in combat and offering up missions, animal friends can offer you new body parts. We don’t want to spoil the opening adventure of the game, so we’re not going to talk too much about what you spend the first hour or so of your character’s life doing. But we will note that the early game’s tropical island setting looks charming in Creatures‘ art style and graphics engine.

GameSpy – Spore Creatures preview

The concept of Spore is all about how the very, very small can have a profound effect on the much, much larger. As such, the four Spore Creatures demo pods, assigned to a tiny section of EA’s enormous booth, which prompted the longest queues for any handheld game at GC 2008 aptly personified Spore Creatures’ core mechanic.

Upon laying our hands on an available demo stall, the first thing we heard was not the dependable chime of the DS on switch, but the delighted squeal of a girl standing next to us. It’s fair to say, that we’re not the only ones excited about this game.

Rather than opt for a slightly pared down version of the PC/Mac game, Foundation 9 has reworked the Spore universe into a unique standalone handheld effort for DS. Don’t worry, the creature creator is still very much present and correct.

PocketGamer – Spore Creatures DS preview

How exactly the game would work on handheld platforms wasn’t explained, though. So until we got hands on with Spore Creatures on DS this week, we were in the dark as to how such a massive title – which starts you off as a microbe at the very beginning of life and culminates in a galactic phase that has you pinging about space in a UFO – would work on Nintendo’s handheld.

In turns out that Spore Creatures is to Spore a little like Maxis’ MySims is to The Sims 2. It’s a more linear experience to MySims, but it does have a similarly cute art style – with colourful 3D worlds and flat 2D characters – and more streamlined gameplay. The evolution theme remains and you begin the game as a fairly unappealing blob (ours was called Oogie) but with a goal to collect new body parts and evolve in order to increase your life skills and, depending on what you’d prefer, give yourself a prettier or uglier face and body.

PocketGamer – hands on with Spore Creatures

In our time with the game, we were tasked with defeating a hostile creature that was blocking our path, and did battle with it by drawing “slash” marks over it repeatedly with the stylus. Correctly slashing at an enemy will briefly draw a thick, red paint stroke over it–and apparently, the quickest path to victory is slashing enemies repeatedly and as quickly as possible until they’re dead. Once we defeated our foe, which was blocking our progress through a wooded area, we were treated to a brief cinematic sequence that showed a thick tree, which had been blocking our path, bursting open.

We then switched over to the creature creator, which will apparently be nearly as extensive as that of the original computer versions of the game, featuring more than 200 different body parts, including eyes, fins, mouths, legs, arms, tails, and other features. Like in the computer versions, different body parts cost points to purchase, and they’ll confer various bonuses to your creatures’ abilities, such as making it more effective in combat or making it run faster. Evolving your creature is as simple as using your stylus to drag body parts onto and off of your critter. You’ll also apparently be able to use the DS’s Wi-Fi capabilities to swap creatures with your friends, such that your created creatures may end up in your buddy’s game as an ambient critter, and vice versa.

GameSpot – Spore Creatures hands-on at E3 2008

Nintendo showed off several upcoming DS games at its E3 2008 press conference, though we were treated only to quick glimpses of most of them. One of the ones that has us most intrigued is the handheld version of Spore, developer Maxis’ upcoming simulation games that will let you create your own creature and set it loose in the gameworld. Developer Lucy Bradshaw walked the audience through some of the basic features of Spore for the DS, and we’re happy to see that it’s on track for a 2008 release.

Unsurprisingly, Spore on the DS will focus more on the creature-creation aspect than will its PC counterpart. Bradshaw stated that the game will focus on two important core elements: creativity and sharing. To this end, players will be able to create their own unique creature by customizing many different physical characteristics, and can then share their creations with friends. Not only will your friends’ creatures appear in an in-game zoo, but they’ll also populate in the game proper. Bradshaw also stated that the stylus controls will make Spore on the DS a unique experience, and that the platform allowed Maxis to open up its design philosophy.

GameSpot – E3 2008 Spore Creatures quick impressions

The first thing you’ll notice about Spore Creatures is that it’s a close graphical cousin to its PC relative. Although the models are obviously less detailed on the DS, the art design is very similar. Unfortunately, the full gamut of the PC experience won’t be coming to Spore Creatures. The PC version of Spore will feature five evolutionary phases, from tiny bacteria to spacefaring civilizations, but Spore Creatures will focus specifically on the creature phase of the game, where you take control of a dinosaurlike creature as you make your way through a storyline and attempt to evolve yourself into something fiercer and better capable of defeating your foes.

We hopped into a saved game that put us in command of an early and relatively unevolved creature who didn’t have very many distinguishing features. After navigating along a path, however, we picked up a mouth, which we were then able to tack onto our creature via the creature editor, which is accessible any time your creature is visiting a nest, which acts as something like a home base.

GameSpot – Spore Creatures first look

Creatures are mostly 2D cutouts animated into a 3D world. And they look good, with smooth animation and lots of details. But the bright, saccharine world was another clue that this isn’t going to hit quite the same audience as the PC version of Spore.

The creature modification, however, kept me from dozing off. Sure, it’s scaled down from numerous PC options, but it’s similar. Using parts that you find, and DNA points that you earn through eating and survival, you’ll enter the creature editor. And just like the PC game, you’ll choose from dozens of body parts with attributes oriented for attack, defense, social interaction, and more. Players can adjust part position, size, and other characteristics. Creatures can even earn “bio-powers” to breath fire or otherwise embellish on life as we know it.

Spore Creatures lets players save up to ten different creations, including those from friends over a local, peer-to-peer connection. Those creatures propagate into the game in a similar way as the PC version, letting your friends’ creations take on their own lives. Gamers can also trade creatures over Nintendo’s WiFi network using friend codes. Spore even allows you to meet strangers’ creatures by opting out of the friend-code requirement and registering through an EA website. (Yes, I give my permission not to enter sets of 12-digit numbers.)

Joystiq’s impressions on Spore Creatures

The DS version of Spore won’t be processing the massive universe of content to be included in its PC counterpart. You won’t evolve your creature from a single-celled state, challenge other tribes in the real-time strategy segment, develop a flourishing society, or conquer alien cultures as you explore planets spread across a near infinite galaxy.

Instead of following the epic journey of a microscopic organism that evolves into a race of space-faring aliens, Spore: Creatures on the DS will focus on crafting the perfect pet. A typical story, which sends your UFO crashing onto an alien planet with a younger sibling – who gets captured and needs rescuing before you can blink an eye – sets the premise.

GamesRadar – Spore Creatures to infect DS

Spore Creatures, as the name makes clear, focuses entirely on the PC version’s “creature phase” — in which you create a primitive creature from scratch (or, if you’re lame, use one of the premade ones), and watch how it evolves and survives. Characters are 2D and are more simplified than on the PC (the mouth and head are one unit, for example), but still lend themselves to creative inspiration. You’ll initially have 20 points to spend, which you can use any way you like amongst the different categories — body, arms, legs, mouth, eyes and tail — and then adjust and rotate as you please. Parts will have different values associated with them — such as high defense for a long tail — and as your creature levels up, you’ll get more points which will let you buy ever more powerful parts. You’ll have 10 save slots for creatures you create or that you’ve traded with friends or with folks over Nintendo’s Wi-Fi network.

Oh yeah, there’s a story, too, which goes something like this: You and your good pal Oogie are two primordial creatures who, at the game’s start, climb out of the ooze for the first time — only to have your friend abducted by a spaceship. You must follow the debris that the spaceship keeps dropping, over 12 different levels and six planets, in order to rescue your friend. That’s the plot, but one of the cool things about Spore Creatures is that it’s up to you whether to follow it or not. You can choose instead to do side quests, do mini-games to unlock skills, collect the 280 or so different parts, or work on earning the game’s 60 badges, which you can use to do such things as buy body parts you don’t feel like hunting down, or unlock cheat codes. Do we want this? Maybe not as much as the PC game. But it’s Spore for the road. So, yeah. We played. We liked. We want.

1UP previews Spore Creatures DS

DSF: Many of your games are also multi-platform releases, but don’t have the base differences of Spore versus Spore Creatures. How do you try to make portable games, which are often the bastard siblings of multi-platform games, stand out against such stiff competition?

Conners: Griptonite’s philosophy is to make sure that every game works on its own level. For example, just because a console game might focus on a great stealth mechanic using a dynamic lighting system, if that doesn’t work on handheld, we won’t force it into the game. The DS is such a radically different platform compared to others … our teams have learned to respect and embrace those differences. Fortunately, we get a lot of support from our publishing partners in this area. Most publishers are smart enough to know that you can’t just “port’ a console experience to a handheld and expect great results.

Joystiq – interview with Spore Creature’s developer J.C. Conners

Pocket Gamer: Was it difficult for Maxis to decide which phase from the PC game to focus on for DS? Why did you decide on the creature phase?

Jason Haber: We of course wanted to bring the full ‘powers of ten’ gameplay to the DS, but when we sat down and looked at what would make the biggest impact we knew that we needed to focus our efforts on building a unique Creature Creator.

Our first step in developing Spore Creatures was to think about how we wanted to approach a Creature Creator that was based around the touchscreen interface of the Nintendo DS. We then began to design the core aspects of the game that reinforced the key features of Spore: creativity, exploration, sharing and collecting.

An avatar based creature design lined up perfectly with these aspects of the game and seemed most appropriate for the DS audience. We decided to focus the design around the evolution of a creature at the planet level with a story that would help drive the goals for the players and their custom creatures.

PocketGamer – interview with Spore Creatures producer Jason Haber

How do the features and gameplay in the Nintendo DS version of Spore differ from those of the PC and Mac versions? Will the DS version have any unique content?

Spore for the Nintendo DS is an entirely unique design. We focused on delivering the core features of Spore: creativity, exploration, sharing and collecting, while taking full advantage the unique aspects of the DS platform such as the stylus and connectivity. The result is a completely specialized version of the creature phase of the game complete with a Nintendo DS unique creature creator that we are calling Spore Creatures. Players will create their own creature in the Creature Creator and then evolve this creature by making friends, defeating enemies and exploring the galaxy on a quest to find new evolutionary paths and save their home world. Along the way, they can record all the species they’ve encountered using the Spore Species Guide, trade and collect custom created creatures and earn badges for accomplishing a variety of tasks.

We even decided to go with a custom look for Spore Creatures so the content is entirely unique to the DS. Our artistic inspiration came from Japanese flat rod puppets and shadow box art. The look feels great and lends to a more intuitive editing experience allowing for a huge amount of flexibility in the creatures a player can create. The greater simplicity enables the player to focus on the gameplay and their unique creations. We’ve also made unique abilities for the creatures of Spore Creatures. As you evolve your creation, you’ll find special biopowers that can help you fight or socialize in order to succeed on your quest.

Newsweek – interview with Lucy Bradshaw on Spore Creatures

EA AND MAXIS ANNOUNCE THAT SPORE HAS GONE GOLD
Long-Anticipated Game from Gaming Luminary, Will Wright, is Complete and in Production; Hits Store Shelves September 7

Redwood City, CA – August 14, 2008 –The wait is almost over! Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) and Maxis today announced that Spore™ the most anticipated video game of the year from the creator of The SimsTM, has gone gold and will be available for the Mac and PC at retailers September 5 in Europe and September 7 in North America and Asia Pacific. Spore™ Creatures for Nintendo DS™ and Spore™ Origins for mobile phones will also be available globally September 7.

Players who preorder Spore or Spore Galactic Edition from participating retailers will receive a coupon good for $10 off their next purchase of custom merchandise at www.zazzle.com/sporestore. For the ultimate Spore fan, the limited Galactic Edition will contain the ‘Making of Spore’ DVD, ‘How to Build a Better Being’ DVD (a 50 minute National Geographic Channel documentary DVD hosted by Spore mastermind, Will Wright), ‘The Art of Spore’ hardback book, an exclusive Spore poster, and a premium 100-page Galactic Handbook.

“We are so excited to finally get Spore into the hands of fans and players,” said Lucy Bradshaw, executive producer of Spore at Maxis. “The Maxis studio has had an absolute blast creating Spore, but the fun is just beginning. The most engaging stories are truly the ones people create themselves, and we can’t wait to see how players not only craft and explore the Spore universe, but hear what stories they have to tell as a result.”

Spore gives players their own personal universe in a box, allowing fans to create and evolve life, establish tribes, build civilizations, sculpt entire worlds and explore a universe created by other gamers. Spore gives players a wealth of creative tools to customize nearly every aspect of their universe: creatures, vehicles, buildings, and even spaceships. Players can then seamlessly share their creations with the world via the Sporepedia™ and explore infinite new galaxies created by other gamers*.

For all the latest Spore news, screens, videos community content, and to try out the trial version of the hugely popular Spore Creature Creator, visit www.spore.com.

*Internet connection required.

EA AND MAXIS TO SHIP SPORE IN SEPTEMBER

Chertsey, UK – February 12, 2008 – Get ready for the next Big Bang this fall! Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) and Maxis today announced that Spore™, the highly anticipated game from the creators of The Sims™, will be available at retailers worldwide the weekend of September 7. Spore will be available for the PC, Macintosh, Nintendo DS™, and mobile phones.

“The wait is almost over,” said Maxis Chief Designer Will Wright. “We’re in our final stages of testing and polish with Spore, and the team at Maxis can’t wait to see the cosmos of content created by the community later this year.”

Spore gives players their own personal universe in a box. Create and evolve life, establish tribes, build civilizations, sculpt entire worlds and explore a universe created by other gamers. Spore gives players a wealth of creative tools to customize nearly every aspect of their universe: creatures, vehicles, buildings, and even UFOs. Players can then seamlessly share their creations with the world or explore infinite new galaxies created by other gamers.

Consumers can visit www.spore.com to sign up for the Spore newsletter or check out all-new screenshots and video of the game. Members of the media can visit EA’s press site at www.info.ea.com for information about all of EA’s games.

Guides for Spore Creatures for DS from GameFAQS

• Spore Creatures FAQ/Walkthrough by Mykas0

Unlock Replay Mode
To unlock replay mode, you have to beat the whole game(defeat Gar’skuther). Replay mode deletes all the progress you made on a planet and lets you play it again. You get to keep all of the parts you found so far and won’t reset your creature.

Unlockable Badges
You can unlock badges by doing certain things in the game. The badges are lke the ones in the PC version of Spore.

• The Graduate —– Complete all of the instructional goals.
• Oh the Sporemanity! —– Fail to save the planet Flubit from desruction.
• Planet Tapti Complete —– Complete all of the continents on planet Tapti.
• Planet Pangu Complete —– Complete all of the continents on planet Pangu.
• Planet Baysee Complete —– Complete all of the continents on planet Baysee.
• Planet Flubit Complete —– Complete all of the continents on planet Flubit.
• Planet Zencrie Complete —– Complete all of the continents on planet Zencrie.
• Planet Freezle Complete —– Complete all of the continents on planet Freezle.
• Gar’skuther Vanquished —– Defeat Gar’skuther through combat.
• Snack Master —– Eat lots of food.(200)
• Sporelivore —– Eat lots of sporelings.(25)
• Bio-Powerful —– Attatch all of the Bio-Powers.
• Loner —– Win combat alone many times.(60)
• Not the Face! —– Receive tons of damage from other creatures.(1500)
• Troublemaker —– Deal tons of damage to other creatures.(10,000)
• Nest Sweet Nest —– Gain access to many nests.(20)
• Biology Student —– Chase many small critters away.(200)
• Risk Taker —– Take a lot of damage from hazardous terrain.(100)
• Fire-Walker —– Prevent damage from hazardous terrain.(150)
• Disinfector —– Cure many nests.(9)
• The Pangu Collection —– Find all of the planet tokens on planet Pangu.(10)
• Goals Badge Master —– Earn all the badges from the goals catagory.(11)
• Gar’skuther Served —– Defeat Gar’skuther through dance.
• Savior of Flubit —– Save the planet Flubit from destruction.
• Creature Badge Master —– Earn all the badges from the creatture catagory.(11)
• Part Master —– Find most of the parts.(200)
• Species Spotter —– Fill 100% of the Species Guide.(31)
• Reckless —– Defeated many times in combat.(50)
• Careless Consumer —– Get sick many times.(15)
• Welcome Wagon —– Befriend many creatures gained through pollination.(20)
• King of the Planet —– Defeat many creatures gained through pollination.(20)
• Creature Collector —– Receive many creatures from other players.(10)
• Species Spreader —– Send many creatures to other players.(50)
• Combat Badge Master —– Earn all of the badges from the combat catagory.(11)
• Big Bully —– Defeat one member of each species in combat.(31)
• Tag Team Partner —– Win combat with 1 friend many times.(30)
• Battle Rumble —– Win combat with 2 friends many times.(60)
• Duck and Cover —– Retreat from combat many times.(30)
• True Friend —– Allow many friends to flee from combat.(20)
• Combat Chanmion —– Defeat many creatures in combat.(200)
• Dr. Meepers, M.D. —– Heal many life points.(1500)
• Loose Cannon —– Pick a fight with many friends.(15)
• Social Badge Master —– Earn all of the badges from the social catagory.(10)
• Pied Piper —– Return many sporelings to their home nests.(30)
• Dance Master —– Dance with many creatures.(75)
• Two Left Paws —– Fail Many Dances.(25)
• Social Butterfly —– Befriend many creatures.(100)
• Cuddle Up —– Successfully cuddle with many creatures.(200)
• Twinkle Toes —– Win many dances.(50)
• Hoarse Throated —– Social call many times.(300)
• Social Reject —– Fail to socialize many times.(5)
• World Badge Master —– Earn all the badges from the world catagory.(18)
• Sporeling Fun Factory —– Throw lots of sporelings.(35)
• Rock Jockey —– Throw lots of rocks.(150)
• Smash Master —– Break many things with rocks.(60)
• Shrub Shaker —– Run through many bushes.(500)
• Lumberjack —– Shake lots of trees.(80)
• A Series of Tubes —– Open many “?” pages.(100)
• Holey Moley —– Dig many times.(125)
• The Tapti Collection —– Find all planet tokens on planet Tapti.(10)
• The Baysee Collection —– Find all planet tokens on planet Baysee.(10)
• The Flubit Collection —– Find all planet tokens on planet Flubit.(10)
• The Zencrie Collection —– Find all planet tokens on planet Zencrie.(10)
• The Freezle Collection —– Find all planet tokens on planet Freezle.(10)
• Shortcutter —– Burrow to the nest many times.(40)

Cheat Shop Items
By earning Badge Points, you can purchase various cheats at the Cheat Shop in the Sporepedia. Your Badge Points must be earned by completing challenges in your Sporepedia. You won’t be able to purchase these until you reach the fifth planet and unlock replay mode.

• Invincibility: Cannot be hurt.
• Big Eyes: Have huge eyes
• Big Mouth: Have big mouth
• Giant Throw Rocks: Makes the throw rocks gigantic
• Giant Butterflies: Butterflies are huge
• Butterfly Exploding: Butterflies will rise from your explosions.
• Paintball: Throw rocks at walls to make paintball marks.
• Giant Sporelings: Makes Sporelings huge
• Scaling/Spinning Parts: Your body parts will scale and spin.
• Alt Food: Food has alternate appearance.
• Random Color: All creatures (except Gar’skuther’s body parts) will have a random color when a level starts or after the Sporepedia is used.
• Meat Trees Banana Beasts: Enemies will drop fruits instead of meat, and trees will drop meat instead of fruit.
• All NPC’s are meepers
• Exploding Sporelings: Sporeling will explode when thrown and does not hit its own nest.
• Always hard dance
• Alt and Real Creatures: Creatures have alternate appearance, but still give same parts.
• Auto Play Dance: Automatically hit a “Perfect” on each note in the dancing mini-game to get a creature’s happiness to the maximum.
• Ignore Body Points: Allows you to build your creature with no body point restrictions.
• Ignore Poison Terrain: Immune to damage from harmful terrain.
• Super Attack: Always do highest damage.
• Super Vision: Maximum vision; can see all dirt mounds.
• Terraform: Allows you to alter the appearance of a level to resemble the design of another level.

Getting the parts to become Gar’skuther
When you first defeat Gar’skuther, you will receive his legs. Select Replay mode, and choose the planet you were first on. Then, go to the Sporepedia, and select “Badges”. Go to Park Shop. When you go down, you will see the other parts. Purchase them. You can easily afford them when you complete the game. Go to the Creature Creator. Add the body, and remove the other parts to create Gar’skuther. He may be one of the weakest and easiest to get, but he has a lot of abilities that work nicely.

Outdancing Gar’skuther
First beat him in combat. Then, buy the always easy dance cheat at the cheat shop. Now he’s easy to beat.

Oogie island on Tapti
Defeat Gar’Skuther, then replay the Tapti planet. There is an island you can reach with the water walk ability. Go to Fryse, which is the first region. Near the place where you exit intothe cave to go to the next continent, look in the water on the top screen map . Notice that the water is dark blue and crossable. Go southeast until you get to an island. On this island should be a Skuther, two Oogies, and a pollinated creature. These two Oogies are from the other eggs that yours was with at the beginning.

Species Guide Entries
Each time you discover a creature, its info will be added to the Species Guide, including a biography and stats.