But scrolling through the database — past the three-legged sea horse, past the seven-eyed wildebeest and the half-motorcycle-half-pig — revealed something many users didn't expect. Buried among the more wholesome attempts were two-legged dancing testicles, a "giant breast monster" and a four-legged, "phallic fornication machine," for starters.

You can almost hear the concerned-sounding voice of your nightly news anchor during a commercial teasing a full investigative report on how Spore is raping our children's minds.

The CNN report covers all of the angles. First the get the word from the Spore development team.

"Whether it's modeling clay, dolls or crayons, a small number of people can be counted on to use it for something vulgar," Lucy Bradshaw, "Spore's" executive producer, told CNN.

Modeling clay, dolls, crayons, mashed potatoes, doughnuts, small pieces of plastic you find on the floor...all of these have been used (by me) to simulate sexual acts in the past. Am I in league with the spornographers? Should I be campaigning for freedom of virtual penis like the 37-year-old web developer who calls himself "The Spornmaster?"

"It was a totally ridiculous overreaction," the 37-year-old Web developer said. "I admit it is silly and juvenile, but I don't think there's anything perverted, vile or awful about it. If people find it offensive, they can simply not search for it online. No one is forcing anyone to see this content."

Or perhaps I should side with the more morally upright but sadly ignorant segment of the population who wants to see such creations banned?

"I consider this very similar to child pornography, at least to the extent of distributing the material to children," 18-year-old Michael James from Calgary, Alberta, told CNN.

Just an FYI here James, giving pornography to a child, while reprehensible, isn't child pornography. It's giving porn to a child. Comparing a Spore penis monster to child pornography is like comparing a school shooting to the holocaust - it's stupid, and people tend to get angry at you when you do it. Or use it as an example.

No, I think I shall side with the more moderately against, like University of Georgia student Miles Moffit, who reacted with the characteristic grace and poise we Georgians have come to expect from a UGA attendee. "

My initial reaction to discovering it in my final game would be to ban it so it wouldn't show up again and then blow it to pieces for the sheer satisfaction of it," Moffit said. "Go ahead, create a walking phallus. See how long it lasts in the databases and galaxies of Spore."

Ahh yes, the sheer satisfaction of blowing up a giant penis monster. Yeah. Moving on.

Now EA of course will allow players to choose whether they want to see everyone's creations, only their friends, or none whatsoever, so parents really need not worry about their children being exposed to sex through EA's Spore.

Just...you know, everywhere else.

Video game's user content spawns naughty Web 'Sporn' [CNN Technology via Game Politics]

The winner of this little Sporelebrity contest would have $15,000 donated to the charity of his or her choice. Going up against such truly famous people as Carlos Santana, Emeril Lagasse, Richard Branson and Stan Lee, I know I don't stand a snowballs chance in hell of winning. But if by some bizarre twist of fate people selected my TickleMeKotaku creature (which has a prehensile Tickleme Elmo tail) then $10,000 would be donated to Child's Play and the remaining $5,000 would be donated to Jennifer Ann's Group.

Since most of my competitors are absolutely crushing me I have no problem urging you to vote and vote often, really often, for TMK. They announce the winner on July 18, I'm told.

Spore Vote

The full Spore, as we've talked about in detail before, is broken down into five phases which allow you to take a single-cell organism and run it all the way up the evolutionary ladder to a space-exploring civilization.

My concern, after watching the Spore demonstration in Leipzig last year, was that the game wouldn't live up to the spectacular creation tools that are so integral to Spore. I worried that it may be more of a series of toys strung together than a full-blown game.

My time with the game managed to ease some of those concerns.

I decided to start Spore as you should, at the cellular level, controlling an organism floating aimlessly in a sea of life.

This stage of the game, which took me about 20 minutes to play through, felt an awful lot like flow. In it I moved my organism around avoiding larger critters and eating smaller ones. I also tried to find bits of meteorites to gobble up which would give me evolutionary abilities.

After enough attacks or gathering enough bits of rock I earned the DNA I needed to add on new bits to me creature. Initially I gave him a set of pincers for attacking, later I added a bulb that produced poison when he was attacked and extra limbs for faster swimming.

The game, like flow, took place among layers of a 2D environment in an almost through-the-microscope point of view. As I grew I floated up the layers towards the surface of the pool. Eventually, I was able to evolve and make it to land.

This initially cell level, while short, was quite fun to play.

Once I made it to land, I was asked to modify my creature with a set of legs. Oblivious to the placement of his mouth, which pointed straight down, and his eyes, which pointed straight out, I accidentally misplaced my unfortunate creature's legs. When he took to land, I saw that his mouth jutted out straight down from his rounded torso. Imagine my surprise when my little mistake attacked his first creature with a series of short, angry squats... That's right, my new lifeform had to teabag people to kill them. Oh the humanity.

After getting over the initial shock of what I had just created, I spent an inordinate amount of time running around teabagging other unsuspecting creatures to death. You'd be surprised just how much time you can burn playing a game that allows you to kill things in that particular manner. I tried my best to get Wright's attention, to show him my creature, but I suspect he wanted nothing to do with it.

In this second phase you spend most of you time hunting for smaller creatures to complete quests of a sort and earn DNA and body parts. Again, fun to play, though a bit short lived.

The next stage, which I didn't test out, is the Tribe stage which has you controlling an entire tribe of your creatures, issuing commands to them and evolving their technology. It's in this stage that you can create some pretty amazing buildings. I saw a collection of them and was blown away with what you can do. For instance, a factory made to look like a turn-of-the-century detective in an alley with trashcans nearby, the building's smoke coming out of the detective's pipe. Or a city building made to look like a young couple sitting on a park bench. It was pretty spectacular stuff.

The game's final phase is space exploration, which I managed to tinker with for a few minutes. Long enough, at least, to see that space ships can also take any form, like a jumping Mario.

My time with the game was painfully shorty, enough to tantalize and perhaps put some fears to rest. Is it worth the price, likely, will it be the next Sims? Too early to tell.

Earlier in the day Wright told us that Spore was a way for him to "convey interesting concepts in fun ways" a game of an entire universe, something that makes a game editor a toy and becomes a "creativity amplifier."

With more than 1 million creatures already created with Spore's Creature Creator, and Wright expecting the number of creatures to exceed the population of Earth by launch time, I think it's fair to say Wright nailed what he was going for.

The stand-alone creator is a pretty straight-forward game. Launching it up brings you to a screen that lets you either create or load your own critters.

Once you drop into the creation mode you're presented with a floating blob of flesh, elongated at either end with stumpy tail-like or neck-like appendages. When you hover your cursor over the blob it becomes slightly transparent, exposing the vertebrae buried inside. An arrow appears over either stump as well. To shape your creature's body you tug on the arrows to stretch out the skin along an ever-extending backbone. You can also tug at the vertebrae to try and curve the spine and shape of the body.

Once you've shaped your body you can drop on arms, legs, mouths, eyes, noses, ears, hands, feet and other little appendages, like wings. Each of these can be twisted, stretched and moved about on the fly.

Initially the need for a backbone and the pre-set selection of body parts feels very limiting, but over time I found that I can create lots of things with a little creativity including spiders, snakes, cats, I even tried to create a Fruit Fucker... and almost succeeded. The one thing I can't seem to create is a human, I think the biggest issue there is that you can't add a separate head and instead have to rely on planing mouth, eyes, ears and such on the top of a knobby outgrowth of the spinal column. That's not a deal break at all though for me.

As you create your creature different icons give you a break down of its special abilities, like attacks and speed. Another button shows how complicated your critter is. If it gets too complicated you can't add any more parts. So no 100 mouthed balls of flesh.

Once completed you can paint the creature by either selecting among three pages of pre-set paint jobs or by painting the creature in three phases, still using pre-set stencils. The fact that you can choose just about any color and that you can control three different overlays of color makes customization pretty easy, though doing something really specific, like a black band over Fruit Fucker's eyes, is impossible.

Is it worth $10? Maybe, it is tons of fun to play around with, but I'm not sure if I'd want to shell out cash to get early hands-on time with something that will come built-in to a game I'm planning on buying. Then again it's only $10 and it's TONS of fun. Actually a little addictive.

Oh and the rough draft of that organic Fruit Fucker up there, I suspect that's what FF might look like in meat space. I also suspect this particular Fruit Fucker would be just as happy to have his way with human chest cavities as the odd orange.

Update: I just checked in with EA on the whole price thing. Here's the deal. You can get a trial version of the Creature Creator, which contains about a quarter of the creature parts, for free. If you do buy the creator for $10 you get a $5 rebate toward the full Spore game good at Target and Amazon.

Update 2: See him in motion!

The publisher handed out 50 or so copies of the Spore Creature Creator to a bunch of celebrities (and me) and asked them to create a single, marvelous creature. This eclectic selection of creatures will then be posted on an Electronic Arts site for people to vote on next week. The winner gets $15,000 donated to the charity of his or her choice.

I've been able to cobble together a short list of some of the folks I'm competing against:

Stan Lee
Richard Branson
David Lynch
Ellijah Wood
Kevin Rose
Mark Cuban
Curt Schilling
Kent Nichols
Robert Scoble
Veronica Belmont
Carlos Santana
Bijou Phillips
Flight of the Conchords

Good thing none of these people are rich, powerful or creative... man I'm screwed. Maybe I should take the low road and create a giant penis creature? Neah, it's too much fun making abominations to God.

The software itself will allow you to create unlimited models, share these models and export wallpapers and videos of said models. Creature animations can also be tested in a dull, lifeless environment. It's a neat idea from Maxis, but just give the full version away free with pre-orders or something. The more I hear about this tiny piece of Spore, the more I see it getting set up to disappoint people who pay for it.

More Spore Creature Creator Details [IGN via Joystiq]