A walking eggplant? A bunch of grapes with a duck head? A demented and potentially rabid pink unicorn? Oh brave new world…
With the actual release of Spore still looming on the September horizon, now is the time to ogle at–and be appropriately horrified by–the various creatures that could potentially inhabit Will Wright’s little universes (i.e. evolutionary freak shows). While Spore‘s “creature creator” doesn’t go public until next week, would-be gods can wait out their shot at fucking with nature by browsing the “Sporepedia”–a catalog of the hundreds of pseudo animals already thought up in the minds of the creatively perverse.
Though most of the creatures are straight-up goofy, an alarming number have been intelligently designed (sorry, had to do it) to look like food. The description of one limbless Maxis’ creation, aptly named “Peary,” reads “Ripen him in a bag for a few days and he’ll be delicious.” Um… Still, you’ve got to give credit to a game that can produce, as Kotaku pointed out, ready-made Bosch monsters.
Oh, and that mentally deranged unicorn with mittens for hands? Her name is apparently Beatrice. May she haunt your video game nightmares.
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex, technology, and video games journalist who contributes regularly to publications like The Economist, Forbes, and The Village Voice. By day she's also a comparative literature PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she studies French, English, gender, sexuality, surrealism and perversion. You can reach her at [her first name and last name, all one big word] AT gmail DOT com.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:20 am
I must admit, as excited as I am for this game, a lot of the creature in the Sporepedia look very similar to each other. There are a few nuggets of creative brilliance, but the majority of those featured at the moment (which were designed either by Maxis internally or by journalists) just don’t look that different from one another.
I guess we’ll have to see what absurd bastards of creation come out of the woodwork next week.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
It’s true, a lot of them look similar. I imagine it’ll be like Miis, where certain dedicated and creative users can come up with outstanding little guys–but most people’s creations will look strikingly similar. Except that, you know, they’ll be a lot more feet and legs and mouths.
June 12th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
And a lot less Jesuses, perhaps?
(How do you pluralize Jesus, anyway?)