Today I tried out the Spore Creature Creator. It's a whole lot of fun constructing beasties and colouring them in. I can't wait till they release the game component itself. If you're interested in any kind of artificial life, cute creatures and social networks, you're going to absolutely love this game.

For now, here's a little video of the second creature I created, lovingly named "Eatingus Monsterous A" (I've decided to go with virus variant naming convention, but I couldn't do full stops in the name, so spaces will do).  Note also the Spore Creature Creator comes with built in tools for making animated gif avatars, YouTube video uploads and postcards, making it seriously easy to spread the fun. A truly viral success is about to hit planet earth. If anything, it's going to make our extraterrestrial visitors look positively normal (part of a bigger plan, I'm sure of it). ;)

Update2: Just made these spiders!

"Q: My game crashes after seeing the EA logo when the EA download manager is running.

A: To resolve this issue, you'll need to update the EADM DMCmdPortalClient.dll file.

1. Double click on My Computer. 2. Double click on your local drive (C:). 3. Double click on Program Files. 4. Double click on Electronic Arts. 5. Double click on Spore. 6. Double click on Sporebin 7. There should be a file named DMCmdPortalClient.dll right click on this file and choose Cut. 8. Replace this file with the updated version found here. Note: If you do not replace this file, your Spore Creature Creator won't be able to patch itself. 9. Try starting the Creature Creator again.

Note: If you've already uninstalled EADM, you can reinstall it by clicking here. Then, follow the steps above to replace DMCmdPortalClient.dll with the updated version. Without the EADM, your game won't be able to patch itself. Even if you do not choose to run EADM regularly, you'll need to run it when an important patch becomes available."