Spore Creatures That Look Like Stuff

So I was all excited to download the free Spore Creature Creator, until I was coldly informed by the installer that my Powerbook isn't up to scratch. I'm humiliated. All I can do is longingly cruise the Sporepedia, looking for Spores That Look Like Stuff. Geeky stuff, mostly, like the Trogspore above. That looks really good.

Spore Trek, Spore Wars, and of course Pokespore, after the jump...

STAR WARS

This Mon Calamari is right on, but the nudity upsets me. I don't want to see Admiral Ackbar naked. As a 18th Century Dandy, yes. Naked, that's too far.

This X-Wing is from Fark's Spore thread, though I couldn't find it on the Sporepedia. There were lots of imitators, if you search "x-wing", nothing quite as good as this.

Great looking TIE fighter, elegant in it's simplicity.

Shockingly accurate Watto.

Painful looking AT-ST, giving new meaning to the term "Chicken Walker".

And now, my two favorite characters from the Prequels...

General Grievous, with particularly good attention to coloring.

This could be Selbulba's ILM character model.

POKEMON

All of the original three starter Pokemon are really popular. There are tons of them, here are the most accurate ones.
Charmeleon.
My main man Bulbasaur Ivysaur Venusaur. Never mind, he's nobody's main man. In retrospect, I got this wrong because every other entry for Bulbasaur is just painful to look at.


A sickly Blastoise.Some sort of horrible bird Pikachu...I'll be seeing that in my nightmares, thank you internet.


I'm a Team Rocket fan 4 life, so I had to look for Koffing. What I found was...wow. Just wow. So close, and yet so far.

VIDEO GAMES

Most of these are via Kotaku and MTV Multiplayer...

An XBox 360 controller! Pretty terrifying. What are those joysticks supposed to be? Suckers? Nipples? Crazy.

Our old friend Purple Tentacle back from the LucasArts adventure gaming dead.
Mario Mario of the Mario Brothers. This looks like some crazy junkie muppet.Boo! Literally. Not really as cute as the real character, but good nonetheless.


A bomb, possibly a bob-omb.

Wierd old Mr. Saturn, quite well captured.

Goomba! This is deeply upsetting to me. They went way too far in making him look like a real mushroom, with that gross fungal texturing on the underside of his head.
Pretty great Yoshi.
Wobbly legged Mega Man.

An amazingly accurate Master Chief.

Pretty good Sonic, albeit with webbed hands.

OTHER NERDY STUFF

Now ZOIDBERG is the spore! In full mating season glory. There are lots of other Futurama creatures on the Sporepedia, including many many Nibblers. I couldn't find one that actually looked like him though, if someone wants to make one.

There were quite a few hulks, but this was my fave.

This is the best Batman so far. Humanoids are apparently hard to get right. Why the bare pecks, I wonder? Even better than this design is creator insertinear's species description: "THE BATMAN SPECIES HE IS THE DARKEST OF KNIGHTS WHO SOLVE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES."

The earth with a little mouth and eyes and one foot. Thaaats good.
Now we're talkin! The USS Enterprise. I don't even want to try to figure out how this is a organism. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is the best one I saw, but there are some really shockingly bad ones in the Sporepedia.

Here's a car. Little over complicated, but pretty neat nonetheless.
WHERE MY PEEPS AT. This is great. Even the texture is right.

A scary candy cane.

A plane - found this one on the Fark thread too.
Cool motorcycle.

Albert Einstein's head. This is like something you'd see on the ground in Dante's inferno. I think we've had enough.

Macs and Games No Longer Mutually Exclusive?

We here at Geekanerd have long been anticipating the release of Spore, Will Wright's revolution of the Sim genre. The game holds the promise of creating new lifeforms that go from spores to spacemen in a manner not unlike the Tub of Life episode of The Simpsons. Today at Mac World, in an exciting twist that completely justifies the lack of a release date, EA Games announced plans to simultaneously release Spore on both Mac and PC platforms. For those of us who kissed our computer games goodbye when we switched to Mac, this is very exciting news.

Or is it?

As every gamer with a newer Mac knows, you can get all the PC gaming you want with a quick reboot into Windows using Boot Camp. Was I planning on sitting Spore out because I don't have a PC anymore? Hell no. The only people that should be excited about this news are the people who haven't even heard of Spore because they don't read video game blogs. That's right, our good friend The Casual Gamer. Spore has the potential to cross over into the mainstream in much the same way that The Sims did, and soccer moms don't want to be bothered with Boot Camp. So that makes this particular case a smart business move, but hoping that we're seeing the beginning of some grand alliance between Macs and game developers is reaching too far. You won't ever play Crysis in OSX because any Mac user who has an interest in "hardcore" games no doubt already has a Windows installation, and it's easier (and cheaper!) for the user to boot up a different OS than it is for the developer to recode and repackage their game.

And just because this news made me watch it for the hundredth time, the greatest video game demonstration of all time (wait for it...):

New Spore Trailer Doesn't Blow Minds as Much as It Should

My favorite game that seems like it'll never come out has a new trailer to tease me with. If you're aren't in the know, Spore is a game by Will Wright (the fella behind Sim City, The Sims, yadda yadda) which has you starting as a single-celled organism and evolving all the way to a planet-hopping super race. Along the way you are in complete control of how your creature develops and what sort of architecture and vehicles your society creates. Oh, and once you design spaceships and visit other planets (and take them over or befriend them or DESTROY THEM) they will be populated by creatures and societies that other players of Spore have created (it uploads your game data to some central server automatically). Pretty wild, yeah? My description doesn't do it near enough justice, and neither does this trailer.

For an in-depth glimpse of why Spore will blow your mind, hit the jump and prepare to be awed.