Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

Maxis posts

Filed under: Fun, Games, Windows, Macintosh

Can't wait 'til September for Spore? Creature Creator is out now!

Geeks everywhere are anxiously awaiting the September release of Spore, the species-creation game from SimCity genius Will Wright. Today, everyone is drooling just a little bit more over the release of Spore Creature Creator, the part of the game where you generate the prototype for your new species. Even without the rest of the game, messing around with the creature options is a lot of fun -- it's like the coolest game of dress-up for nerds that we could ever imagine.

Creature Creator is available for PC and Mac as a free demo or a $9.99 full version (with all the creature parts). It hooks up with the Spore website so you can show off your critters to others on SporePedia. You can also take pictures of your creations and e-mail them with friends, and take videos to upload to YouTube -- all from within the game.

It's not just building and coloring, though: test-drive your Spore, making it dance, sit, attack and more. This is just about the smartest marketing decision we could imagine, because we're already sort of attached to our Spores. Now we can't wait until September to see what they can do!

Filed under: Fun, Games, Internet, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware, Time-Wasters

SimCity Classic online - serious Time Waster

Sim City Classic
Watching our friends play SimCity on their Nintendo DSes got so frustrating that we finally went out looking to see if there's a free version that can be downloaded. We didn't get that far, however, because a quick trip to Wikipedia informed us that Maxis - the original publisher of SimCity - offers a version of SimCity Classic that you can play online.

Unfortunately, it looks like this has been up for a really long time, as evidenced by the following error you are greeted with if you visit the site with a Firefox browser:

SimCity Classic Live requires Windows 95/98 or Windows NT with either
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher
or
Netscape Communcator/Navigator 4.0 or higher.


So your choices for popular modern browsers boil down to IE, and well, that's it. Oh, and the other big downside is that to play the game, you have to register giving a username, your first and last name, and a valid email address. And you have to consent to some legal mumbo-jumbo that we didn't read... you should probably read it and let us know if we owe Maxis our first born.

Game play is just as you remembered it - classic and bare-bones, but in full color glory. And it's still really hard.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Livescribe Store
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio