E3 2008: Spore Creatures Updated Hands-On - Creature Creation and Combat

GameSpot was on hand to commemorate the first day of E3 2008 by playing the Nintendo DS version of Spore, which seems more or less complete at this point. The kid-friendly game lets you control a single creature as you explore the universe, making new friends, fighting mean monsters, and constantly changing and evolving. In the campaign, you play as a plain-looking critter looking to fight, live, love, and evolve as you explore individual planets, taking on brief quests that are logged in a journal in the upper-left corner of the top screen. These quests may involve fighting an enemy, making a friend (by performing a socially attractive dance while controlling your critter with the stylus), or exploring a new area.

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.

Being much more task-based and having a bright, pastel-color look, Spore Creatures is clearly intended for younger audiences, but still seems to offer a lot of the variety from the computer versions of the game. It's scheduled to ship on September 7, the same day that the other versions of Spore will launch.