"Bop it!  Twist it!  Pull it!"  Oh yes, you squirm your paws 'round the skeletal prisoner with nothing but a hiss and a giggle to offer their demise-on-a-pedestal.  Well, perhaps playing with a deity's gift of oppression and omnipotence doesn't quite take such a maniacal form, but truly, one cannot deny the squirming chirps of jarring bone and pinching flesh that perfect a lullaby.  Take this here Michelin, rubber roast of a torso, if you will.  It first offers a "Toodle-pip!" hello your way with a neighborly greeting, yet its blubberous mass only jiggles tantalizingly.  It goads you to skewer it.  If you can taste this galactic grasp of power, pry apart morality to apply fanciful finish to your masterpiece, and adore the subject's flabbergastedness at the lot, you, dear creator, are ready for Spore.  Only through the boundless reaches of alien sculpting may you become the grand architect of this age...

          Dramatic entrances aside, the demo event of Spore's released Creature Creator is definitely a hoot you need to holler and tune your ear to.  This latest installment introduces an AA member to an addict and carts them to a delivery room.  Now anyone can spew out whatever their heart desires from their digital womb.  The creatures you can create range from your everyday feline to Yoda’s cousin.  Yes, we have "Wangdoodles and Hornswogglers and Snozzwangers and rotten Vermicious Knids," oh yes sonny Jim.  With this imaginative indulgence you have Stretch Armstrong's power of versatility -- squeezing appendages, swatting eyes on and off of bellies, piling stalks onto heads, and even putting a stopper in death...  Now before we get into exclamatory anatomies, gameplay mechanisms, and the Spore curriculum guaranteeing flushed cheeks of joy, I must make a probably foreseen comment.  The Spore Creature Creator offers possibly the most grandiose amount of freedom witnessed in a game to date.  I could flatter it with unnecessary remarks such as: "It's extraordinary array of genius is superfluous, yet riveting!," "Bother not with the drab slack of game commonalities, this is superb!,"  or simply "It's a lovely demo."  However, the CC speaks for itself.  I stumbled across my own social failings when I realized I spent nearly three consecutive hours fiddling, picking, and strumming with the Creature Creator's options.  The enormity of tools made available is astounding, to say the least.  If you've paused your life for neither revelation nor epiphanic standards lately, please bait yourself a gameplay feed and snag a line.  You'll find yourself in envy of the Spore-virgin hosts getting down to business.  Despair not, however, for the Creature Creator is not a one-host woman -- it delights with its popularity and 'round the block passes.  If you can get your hands on it (keep 'em to the hips...), go take the girl for some two-stepping and come home with a grin.  But enough with general praise, let us dine on real meats.

          Spore's Creature Creator proposes two kinds of love that a man needs for satisfaction: creativity and ease of use.  Let us address the former.  The player ker-plunks his tail into evolution’s ring with a pre-formed alien torso to mold.  When I say mold, I mean we're back to toddie go-getter enthusiasm, here, imposing upon thyself no limitations.  The CC excites our inner claymation fascination with a child’s Holy Grail gift -- virtual Play-Doh.  Our creature’s torso hovers there with patience, waiting to be promiscuous and be handled by whichever turtle dove longs to caress it.  With this form, the player can elongate the spine (clicking and dragging on two arrows), beef up or thin any vertebrae's portion by mouse-wheeling, or reposition the skeleton by click-'n-hold dragging bones.  This offers limitless support of size and scaling (from Andre the Giant to Jack Skelington ).  Because any part of this "torso" can be inflated or liposuctioned, any vision of love handles, chins, rolls, and sags is achievable.  This torso may become many favorable inclusions if pulled, warped, or punched right, including: a neck, a tail, a tentacle, a trunk, or anything that'd tickle your inhumane fancy at the creature's demise.  Now add the choice of tall, grande, or venti, ask if you'd like fries, soup, or salad with that, and jack a toy into that carpetbag of a Happy Meal.  A whole toolbox of parts can be slung onto your creature.  Masses of mouths, arms, legs, hands, feet, eyes, stingers, and sensory doo-hickies all fight affirmative action cases for inclusion.  Though the demo lends a mere handful of Mr. Potato Head collectibles to the player, one can effectively demonstrate his Michael Jackson practices by rearranging all these facial and bodily toys on his alien.  It feels like playing Pin the Tail on Poor Nervous E.T.  

          A selection of roughly a dozen or so aesthetic gizmos per body function is included in the demo.  This means not every aspiring Picasso may quite grasp his or her claim to fame with the given spotty tools, but rest assured, at least quadruple this amount is featured in the full release.  Now that the player is supplied with an art cabinet that puts Bob Ross’ to shame, they are prompted to whip, wisk, wack, and wipe these components onto the featureless clay stock he or she has crafted.  With the ability to, as stated, bop, twist, and pull any bodily component they add in any direction, your Mona Lisa becomes achievable!  Before long a platter of Will Smith's ears, Owen Wilson's nose, Jack Nicholson's forehead, and Janet Jackson's keester shall be emerging from your animal.  No characteristic escapes the Creature Creator's aspirations and no potential for bodily quirks are left unturned.  Nearly every addition is able to be rotated, stretched, squished, bent, swelled, shrunk, multiplied, and when it comes to limbs, fused, split, and impressively elongated.  This stuff if better than Silly Putty!

          Now we may cross the great divide from composition to color.  The second form of alteration takes place in a texturing Paint Shop Pro swap meet of patterns and hue.  The player gets to select the skin of their personal Elvis (read: Perfect Dark) with a plethora of pre-rendered defaults and customizable outfits.  This natural tailor equips the player first with a choice between the creature's skin texture (accommodates feathers, fur, scales, stone, etc. with textures, not modeling).  Once this is chosen one can proceed to a base pattern and pattern color, secondary pattern and color, and final pattern and color.  A trick for those of you who haven't Houdinied their blessed, infallible color from the Creator's rainbow Crockpot: click and hold the mouse over the color that matches your desired one closest and you'll adorn an armory of swatches.  Multitudes of color variations derivative of the one you select are made available in this manner.  Needless to say a daunting amount of combinations tickle the player's fingers and electrocute his/her preferences with a tease, tempting the host to fly on each mixture they can.  However, this feature doesn't inspire quite the "Awe!" that the previous customizing cohort does -- rather, I found myself bothered by my inability to fit a texture realistically to my creature.  This may purely be a perfectionist's plight, however.

          This brings us to... *appropriate bass notes*... the shortcomings.  Yes, it is true; you can trip on Heaven's clouds and Rudolf's splendorous wattage just doesn't quite reach into all cracks and corners.  Similarly, Spore's Creature Creator butterfingers a few shells onto a civilian town.  The most abrasively discontent comes from the game forcing a bowel movement.  It careens the artist into an immobile stasis, makes him or her perspire from intense concentration, lightens them when they've swabbed the next museum-worthy piece from their innards, and even ships their Last Supper into a wide, expansive world of others' collected beauties.  Only one flaw lies in their fame -- it's modern art!  As the toilet grub looks like it’s been beaten with an Seuss stick, so does the extraterrestrial.  Realism doesn’t make a fashionable entrance.  The player is unable to fork over a believable bite of biology at the end of the day, only animalia with "gadgets and gizmos aplenty," boasting "whozits and whatzits galore."  They want thingamabobs?  It's got twenty!  A grounding fixation on logical, biological physics does not exist, and frankly I wouldn't mind being able to hit the given piñata of Wonka-wonderful content to make something natural looking.  Give me the head of a humanoid.  Give me breast of a horse.  Give me a "spine" that has multiple branches.  Give me components that LOOK like they would add charm, sneak, or attack attribute points.  Or just for Pete's sake let my Chitty Chitty Bang Bang meatbag FLY with his wings instead of requiring legs.  These are just a few interjectory, verbal spits from the occasional frown.  However, these perhaps weightless moans only go *piff!* before our CC's empirical creativity, its golden lode seducing game prospectors.  Only those of stout heart shan't endear the childish, whimsical glee our CC permeates and ploughs simulated innovation with.  So dear readers, yes, 'tis true that joy is available free of charge and of pirating espionage.  You needn't wave your swords and pitchforks at the dearie download for it to flower and germinate, populating fields of avid Adams with creature-naming delight.  The internet has provided you with a free trial of the Book of Genesis.  Embark, mateys, follow your bliss!