So, Jess and I are INCREDIBLY excited for a game called Spore.  If you haven’t heard of it yet, perhaps you need to crawl out from the primordial soup and evolve a pair of ocular sacs.  

Why the geek-talk?  Spore is a game where you start by controlling a single-celled organism in a pacman-esque game of eat and run, with the added depth of evolution and of course, graphics.  You evolve different weapons and modes of transportation until, eventually, you make landfall and grow legs.

After that, you’re on a predator/prey mission.  The game is balanced so that you’re never really at the top, but never at the bottom either.  Other creatures are created using content from other users.  You’re not actively playing against other players, but the game uses their content, so you still get to see some of what other people are doing, which is pretty cool.

From there the evolution continues, but on a more macro-scale of limbs and organs.  Once your creature reaches the "Technology" stage, the game morphs to more of a sim-city or civilization feel.  From there your evolve your technology until you eventually travel the universe in search of new worlds to populate!

Currently, Maxis has only released the creature creator, which allows you to mess with some of the possible combinations of your higher-level life forms.  The results can range from humorous to mundane, to downright deranged.  Needless to say, it’s provided us with plenty of mindless entertainment.

I’d post a few of my creatures up here, but I can’t find where the files are stored!  But one cool feature I’ve read, but haven’t tried, is that you can import someone else’s creature, but the creatures are just saved as a normal PNG file, and the layers store all the data…  I’m not big on file formats, so I don’t know as much about is as I should, but it’s an awesome way to do it.

Anyways, our little macbook will barely run Spore, but we’re still going to buy it when it comes out in September.  We’ll have to download it from the states, though, since buying it here in Poland might not work the way we’d want it to.