Winners

Let’s get to the down & dirty.

1st Place: Tri’Eye by WORMSS

I think from the first second I saw this creation I fell in love — it’s just completely awesome. Nevermind the sick 3d rendering, the ideation behind it is awesome. WORMSS: Congrats!

2nd Place: Mousefant by actruncale

Not only is the Mousefant just leaking all kinds of character, he’s an awesome creation all in all. You can’t help but smile when seeing the Mousefant!

3rd Place: LA-TS (Low Altitude Transport Shuttle) by GeoSpore

First off: Legos are awesome. Secondly, I love this thing! Seriously though, I didn’t even think I’d be picking a non-creature creation, but the results from the community were awesome! We had tons of great vehicles, and GeoSpore’s LA-TS deserves mention.

Prizes

I’ll be contacting the winners soon via private messaging.

More to come

The turnout for the first TS contest was absolutely amazing. I’d like to thank our kick-ass community for putting out everything they have so far. Don’t worry — there’s even more to our creature gallery coming soon!

Go and get you some!

• Over 100 creations submitted
• Over 350 drawings uploaded
• Over 250 comments
• Over 250 ratings

All I can say is: our community rocks! Thanks for making this such a success everyone. Remember, this is just the tip of the iceberg for what we’re ramping up Total Spore to be. Also remember that there’s still a whole week to submit your creations for our inaugural contest. The deadline is midnight PST this Saturday.

Game info finally updated

I’ll be the first to admit that Total Spore’s Game Information section has needed some love for a long time. Well the whole section has now been revamped, complete with updated screenshots from the latest build of Spore. The updates came with a large portion of help from ParachuteFish, Jdog2360 and sporegamer from the forums — thanks guys!

To celebrate this event, I’ve kicked off Total Spore’s first contest. Join in today by uploading your first creation at a chance to win Spore and Spore’s Creature Creator!

So can you confirm the Spore Creature Creator will be in the SimCity Box when it ships in June?

A trial version of the Spore Creature creator will be available for free through a variety of sources including as a download from Spore.com and in The SimCity Box. There will also be a version of the Creature Creator available at retail. The free Creature Creator has about 25-percent of the creature making parts from Spore. The retail version will have 100-percent. It’s up to the players to choose which version they want, but they’ll all be available at approximately the same time.

It’s been almost two years since I first talked about EA releasing an early creature editor. Crazy! If you do remember, I made a promise then:

When EA releases said content editor, Total Spore will have the very first contest for your creations. I can’t give any specifics since I don’t know how much of the editor they’ll release (duh!), but once it comes out — keep your eyes peeled on Total Spore.

I fully plan to keep to that promise and have been working on ways to make this happen in some kind of coordinated fashion. Only a few more months to wait!

Can’t wait for the ultimate time waster!

Sooooo stoked!

(Thanks to the folks over at viddler for hosting the video above!)

View video on spore.com

Luckily today during the much-anticipated MacWorld expo in San Francisco, EA announced that they’ll be releasing Spore on OS X and Windows simultaneously.

This is a huge win for me (an avid Mac user) and a smart move by EA. It’s also a great sign that they’re starting to talk about Spore again — I’m anticipating the EA hype machine should start revving it’s engine in the coming weeks in anticipation for an early Spring release.

Good to have something worth talking about again!

What’s new?

• Brand new design
• Fully re-skinned forums
• Private messaging
• Much better spam protection
• A useful homepage for forum-goers
• Useful user-profile page (well, more useful). It’ll get better soon hopefully.
• Live chat (register to the forums to get a real nickname)

Hope you guys enjoy — and don’t forget to stop into the chat every now and then!

Total Spore is a community where I will not allow people to insult others. I don’t believe there is any benefit in trashing other sites or specific people. Unfortunately there are a few Spore communities that feel otherwise. Over the past two days I’ve gotten hate mail, squads of people trying to destroy our forums, and insults against my personal character. All over a few extra visitors.

Questions & Answers

I’m here to answer the questions as they are laid down. Total Spore is and will continue to be a positive community that serves simply to talk about Spore: because that’s all we really care about.

OMFG You lied, stole, and killed my grandma to get on digg

No, I didn’t. I posted the exact information as it was available to me.

But Amazon.com isn’t Official!!!!$!$@!!@@$

Official is a bit of a hazy word. To me, it was official. It was the first time we’ve even come close to having a reliable release date. Previous dates on pre-orders were dates like “March, 2007″ — hardly anything specific like “March 3, 2008.” This is the first time to date that EA has released a date to it’s suppliers (to my knowledge).

Furthermore, Amazon.com is a reliable source of pre-ordering items. Stores like GameStop will take pre-orders without knowing the price or release date. For example, Gamestop has been known to take pre-orders for games for consoles that didn’t exist yet. Hell, they’ve even taken pre-orders for Duke Nukem Forever! A date released by Gamestop cannot be compared to a date released by Amazon.

Maybe your definition of “official” is different than mine. I don’t really care to be honest. Official just means it’s from a sanctioned source. That’s the date I’m using for now. Is it a final date? No. Official does not mean final.

Still, you totally lied

The post that I put up had the information, where the information came from, and even a link to the source. There was no misinformation whatsoever. You’re free to disagree with the information, that’s your right. But there were no lies.

You totally paid people to digg the story

I didn’t even submit the story (my username on digg is kneath). Hell, the listing crashed the server (totally my fault) because I had temporarily disabled some caching. Would I do that if I was expecting to get to the front page? Digg is a democratic community that choses the stories to promote themselves. They chose to promote this story.

Conclusion

Total Spore is not a huge evil corporation attempting to extort it’s users. I have purposefully put almost no ads on this site. I have enough to pay the server bills, but that’s about it. I will never claim that all of the information on this site is 100% factual: any other sites out there that do the same are just lying. I post information that I believe is relevant, and I always include sources. So you’re free to see how I reached my conclusion.

Total Spore also embraces the other Spore communities on the web. I think it’s great there’s so many fan sites for a game that’s not even out yet. A lot of them even have thriving communities attached. However, we do not tolerate any bashing of other sites on our forums. We remove anyone from our forums who continually insults other people. This is the reason a number of users were removed yesterday: no other reason.

As an aside, I’ve been working on some thing for Total Spore that I think are going to be really fun. Stick around for the next few months, hopefully you’ll see something new! Let’s get back to talking about Spore, eh?