Last week, months after the Fruitfucker I created with the Creature Creator got lots of attention and love (including from those inside Maxis and EA), I decided to upload the little beastie, sorta forgetting to change its name.

The result was this email:

Hello ,

Your Electronic Arts account has been suspended for 7 days for violating the Electronic Arts Inc Terms of Service. We believe that the violation or behavior is serious enough to suspend your access to the service.

Violation: Inappropriate Profile text or Avatar image Violation type: Inappropriate Language
Asset Name: Fruitfucker
Asset Creation Date :09.16.2008

Understanding the EA Terms of Service is extremely important, should you have any general questions or concerns please review the Terms of Service here: http://legal.ea.com/legal/legal.jsp?language=en. Should you then need additional assistance, or wish to appeal a violation, you can contact us here: http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=17.

Sincerely,
Customer Support
Electronic Arts, Inc.

EA.com Customer Relations

Whoops.

Forgive the bad audio and video in this clip, I was by myself and using a handheld camera.

Update: Sorry about the video mix-up. It should be fixed now.

If you're hankering for some Spore fruit fucker action right now, you can always grab the demo, which leaked early. It contains 1/4 the content, but that's 1/4 more than you're getting right now.

Well, a file purporting to be that demo is on Megaupload as we speak. Now, 191 MB is a huge file just to be bogus malware, but still, we assume no responsibility if this isn't what it says it is or turns out to be something worse.

Spore releases for PC and Mac on Sept. 8, 2008, with a version for the DS on Sept. 7 and another TBA for the Wii.

Spore Creature Creator Demo (.exe) [MegaUpload, thanks Null Void]

Where the fuck were we? Oh yes, our originals coverage. Here it is. Another big week in Kotakopolis. Enjoy.

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Want to buy Metal Gear Solid 4? Head to Kuwait.

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!

I spent a few minutes talking to Adam Allessandrini at the Penny Arcade Expo last week.

Allessandrini is the guy who created the Fruit Fucker case mode for the show. He's also the one who did the Anarchy case mod last year.

"Last year I came and made the Anarchy case mod because I thought it would be simple and easy to do," he said. "I had to out do myself this year, so I though the best possible thing to do would be the Fruit Fucker."

The mod took his team about three months to put together and it wasn't easy, but it was, of course, well worth it. The case itself cost about $500 in parts.

Initially the plan was to install an actual juicer inside the FF casemod and have it spew out the pulpy remains of the fuckified fruit into a glass, but that turned out to be a bit unachievable.

Besides, as Allessandrini points out, the Fruit Fucker is a juicer, it doesn't have one inside it.

So instead they installed a vat that can hold the juice. Allessandrini said they used water-cooling equipment to circulate the juice from vat to cup in a warm, frothy stream.

Allessandrini said the Hot Head Studios guys were talking about buying the case, which is about 5-feet tall, from them, but that he might end up giving it to Penny Arcade instead. He hinted that he was hoping for them to perhaps include him in a strip in exchange for the mod.

He ended up handing over the powercord to the FF computer to the guys during their second comic panel.

My money is on the guys auctioning it off during their annual Child's Play dinner. That could raise some serious cash for kids.

I did forget to ask Allessandrini what it was like when he first got the thing working. In my imaginings it was like something out of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but with way more oranges. Brian Crecente

Behold the Fruit Fucker case mod in all of its glory. And yes, it dispenses pulpy orange goodness from its frontal orifice. I hear Jerry and Mike plan to imbibe in front of an audience later on today.