A Series of Tubes

Electronic Arts released the Spore Creature Creator on Tuesday. The Creature Creator serves as a sort of demo for the full Spore game (which is currently marked for a September release), and also as a stand-alone product from Spore, because it is actually really fun. I downloaded the Trial Edition (yes, there is a full version and a trial version of what is basically a glorified Spore demo) on Wednesday, and with the help of a friend, I have created 7 creatures so far. Here are a few examples:

You can see all the creatures I’ve made so far, as well as all the creatures I will make in the future, on my page at the Sporepedia.

Anyway, the trial edition is nice, but it only has 25% of the parts that the full version has, and since the full one is only $9.95, I figured I’d download it. But wait, what’s this? It seems that EA only has the direct download option for PC users. How odd, considering that EA is offering the game for both Mac and PC platforms.

Sure, I can buy the boxed version of the Creature Creator here, for both Mac and PC, but then I’d have to pay (and wait) for shipping, something I don’t want to have to do. That plus my disc drive is broken, so physical media is useless to me. EA, why can’t I have a direct download for the Mac version? This is just stupid. It’s not like Macs can’t download things that PCs can….

After about 10 minutes of googling, I found Game Tree Online, a site devoted to direct downloads of Mac games. They have Spore imagery all over their site, but the Creature Creator download for Mac is listed as ‘coming soon’, with a pre-order available. I don’t really understand why, because if I remember correctly, EA had said that it was going to release Spore for PC and Mac at the same time, and I would tend to assume that that meant the Creautre Creator as well, in a format that’s actually useful. I’ll get it when it comes out, but I’m disappointed, EA.