If you pre-orded Will Wright's upcoming opus Spore from the Electronic Arts Store you can hit up EA today to pre-load the game.

Once pre-ordered you can use the EA Download Manager to download 99 percent of the game to your computer. That's the good news. The bad news is that that last 1 percent of Spore is going to take you 30 minutes to an hour to download and install on on Sept. 7 when the game hits North America.

Own a Mac? Then you're out of luck until the game ships.

I just popped over to the Sporepedia to see how creature creating was moving along. It looks like gamers have now crafted more than 3 million critters, including one from Will Wright himself. That's right he finally got around to creating his creature for the Sporelebirty contest. The three-eyed beastie is called Tricolps. (I'm stilling clinging to the number five position in the contest.)

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