Long-awaited game 'Spore' shows first signs of life online

— -- The video game Spore begins its life cycle Tuesday.

For its first baby step, the game's Spore Creature Creator goes live at www.spore.com. The program, for Windows and Macintosh PCs, lets players design creatures using the game's editing tools. Those creations will populate the world — actually, the galaxies — of Spore when the full game launches Sept. 7. In addition to the free trial download, a $10 retail version is also sold in stores (copies sold at Amazon.com and Target have a $5 rebate for the full game).

"We wanted people to kind of get a feel for how simple the tools are going to be to use," says game designer Will Wright, whose previous creations include The Sims and SimCity. "Also, it's really useful for us to get a sense of what people were doing with it, what kind of weird stuff they were making. And, of course, everything they make with this, we'll be able to capture and put on our database so when the game launches we'll have hundreds of thousands of creatures to start pollinating on day one. So, in some sense we are priming the pump on the creativity of the database side."

In development for nearly five years, Spore is an evolutionary simulation game that goes beyond the God game genre. In the full version of Spore, players can begin as a single-cell organism that must make its way out of the mire and onto land. Your critter evolves from a slug-like animal and gets smarter, joins tribes, creates a civilization and ultimately goes into space.

Each of the game's five stages — cell, creature, tribal, civilization and space — has a creative editor for evolving your creature and building structures and vehicles. The Creature Creator's drag-and-drop design tools that let you choose from a palate of body parts (mouth, eyes, legs and claws) and them adjust the malleable body and appendages to your liking.

Players can upload videos of their creatures to YouTube or post pictures of them to Facebook.

Also coming Sept. 7, in addition to the PC and Mac game is Spore Creatures, a game for the Nintendo DS, and Spore Mobile, two methods of evolving your creatures on the go.