Been seeing all of the funny creatures that people have been creating lately? Well now you can have your own try FOR FREE.

EA today released its spore creature creator in 2 versions

A free trial version with limited tools.
And a $9.99 retail version that includes four times as many design items.

Enjoy creating your critters!

Spore Creature Creator — available for both Mac OS X and Windows — enables users to create creatures using design tools taken from Spore, a virtual life game created by Will Wright, designer of Sim City and The Sims. Spore takes the Sim City and The Sims concepts to an extreme, where you create a life form from its first stirrings in primordial ooze all the way up to an intelligent, spacefaring civilization.


Spore Creature Creator lets you assemble hundreds of parts into a creature of your own imagining.

Spore Creature Creator is one small part of that game — a design tool that lets you craft your own critter, paint it, apply textures to it, and even take it out for a spin, so to speak. Using the built-in tools, users can shape, paint and play with their creatures, take snapshots, record movies that can be uploaded to YouTube, and then share them with others through their “Sporepedia,” which connects to the Spore Web site.

Spore Creature Creator comes in two versions — a free trial version, now available for download, with a limited toolset, and a $9.99 retail version that includes four times as many design items.

In addition to YouTube, EA has set up a partnership with Zazzle to enable Spore Creature Creator makers to print out their custom creature designs on coffee mugs, t-shirts, magnets, stickers and other items.

System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.5.3 or later, Intel processor, 1GB RAM, 345MB hard disk space, ATI X1600 or Nvidia 7300GT with 128MB RAM or Intel GMA X3100 (older GMA 950 chipsets, and PowerPC-based Macs not supported).

Slumpy monkey via macworld.com »