Product Description

Guide and nurture your creature on an epic quest to save its galaxy. Start as a humble, simple creature then meet other creatures and fight or befriend them to progress through your grand adventure. As your creature's story unfolds, grow and add to its abilities by collecting and adding parts and adding personalised colours and patterns in the easy and intuitive Creature Editor. Eventually uncover the mystery of your planet's trouble, and work to set things right!

While enjoying Spore Creatures' enthralling single-player gameplay, you'll also be able to share your creatures via Nintendo Wi-Fi with other DS players, and store your favourite creatures on your DS. You can also track your achievements with a fun badge system. Spore Creatures for the DS is a unique game, custom-made for the DS platform to take full advantage of the popular stylus and Touch Screen features.

• Create your very own custom creatures
• Explore environments on a quest to evolve your creature, save the planet, and eventually blast off into outer space!
• Collect creatures, parts, and Bio-Powers that help you specialise and advance on your epic journey
• Connect to share, show-off, and compete head-to-head with other Spore Creatures players

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3624 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts
• Released on: 2008-09-05
• Platform: Nintendo DS

Manufacturer's Description
Guide and nurture your creature on an epic quest to save its galaxy. Start as a humble, simple creature then meet other creatures and fight or befriend them to progress through your grand adventure. As your creature's story unfolds, grow and add to its abilities by collecting and adding parts and adding personalized colors and patterns in the easy and intuitive Creature Editor. Eventually uncover the mystery of your planet's trouble, and work to set things right!

While enjoying Spore's enthralling single-player gameplay, you'll also be able to share your creatures via Nintendo Wi-Fi with other DS players, and store your favorite creatures on your DS. You can also track your achievements with a fun badge system. Spore for the DS is a unique game, custom-made for the DS platform to take full advantage of the popular stylus and Touch Screen features.

Customer Reviews

A fun ds game but nothing more.
I am new to the whole Spore thing - don't play games on PC. I didn't have any expectations for this game really.

I have only had it 2 days but have been pretty absorbed in it and wracked up quite a few hours play. As I have seen written in other reviews, I would agree that the gameplay is pretty linear - you don't get any feeling that you can do anything original other than what your creature looks like as the game is full of goals that you have to complete before you can move on.

You start off with a little creature with no arms or legs called Oogie who is stranded on a planet and trying to get off to save his friend. You are then taken to the nest where you can create your creature into anything you want by adding arms and legs and tails, changing colour etc. You can go back to the nest at any point in the game and change your creature. He moves around the planet in the same way as animal crossing, you drag the stylus across the screen, moving him where you want to. Each item or creature you meet gives you various options of what you can do with them. Some creatures you can make friends with by playing simple mini games and some you have to fight - the fighting does not really need any skill, although until you have collected various fighting body parts which you can then add to your creature, you do tend to run out of energy before you can defeat anything.

You basically have free run of the island which is a nice size and you have a list of goals to complete before you can move on in the game. There is always something to do tho and new creatures popping up for you to be friend. I feel I am only at the very beginning of the game, there is the promise of finding the right pair of legs that will allow me to go into deep water and lots of exits blocked - presumably to be unblocked when I finally manage to win a race against a meeper. Can't wait to get back to it and have the same sort of feeling about it as I did when I was playing animal crossing.

If your expectations are too high and you are expecting a game with the depth of sims on pc then you will be disappointed but if you are looking for a fun ds game to fiddle around with that should have a lot of replay value then I would definitely recommend it.

Better than the PC version
First of all, I've played both "Spore" for PC, and "Spore Creatures" for DS. Spore Creatures wins hands down. Without even taking into account the whole DRM thing, this is much more enjoyable.
It plays similar to any RPG - complete goals, retain health, improve yourself through collecting and improving - but has quite a nice story to go with it, your creature's friend has been kidnapped by an alien and you need to find him. The animations are pretty cute, there are buyable cheats through game points, and it's generally good, clean fun. Anyone from the age of 8 should get on with this just fine, although the fighting isn't explained very well to begin with.
The playtime is also fairly long as well, I've spent more time on this than Spore for PC and I've pretty much finished the latter.#
Buy this if you want a nice, straightforward game for your DS and don't already have Pokemon.

An excellent game in it's own right, not a good substitue for the PC game
If you're thinking of buying this, as I did initially, as a substitute for the Spore PC game (which my computer can't run) don't. There is almost no relation between the two and you will probably be disappointed.

Having said that this is a very enjoyable game in it's own right and should appeal to the majority of DS fans (the 'care for a cute little thingy crowd and the RPG/puzzle game crowd especially). It's essentially an RPG - you control a single character and play through a set storyline, completing goals and challenges and exploring new areas, earning experience points and upgrades as you go.

The difference between Spore Creatures and most RPG's is that instead of finding new weapons, armour and items which upgrade automatically or are all carried with you to be used as needed you find new body parts which have to be added manually. Each will have their own attributes to add to your creature (higher defence, attack, sociability, ect. or special powers like flame breath) which limits your creativity somewhat as you really need to pick the strongest parts you can afford (you're restricted by your 'body points' which increase with each level) in order to progress. However with a little extra time and planning there is room for creativity - legs with a poor defence stat can be offset by arms with a high attack stat for example.

The one thing I don't like about this aspect of the game is I sometimes feel it's a little too easy to "cheat" as there is no restriction on how often you can redesign your creature. It's possible to add the lava walking legs only to cross a lava river, complete the goal on the other side and then swap them back for ones with better defence ready to fight an enemy. If it was more limited the game would feel more challenging.

The storyline is very linear but in a style that should be familiar to fans of other RPG's. New areas have to be 'unlocked' before they can be visited and old ones can't be returned to until the main storyline is completed and main goals have to be completed in order. However there is some flexibility in play style. With the right stats it is possible to befriend enemy creatures, or kill friendly ones so you can choose to be totally aggressive, totally passive or a mix of the two. It won't change the order of events or the ending but should offer some re-play value. (I'd like to try befriending everything next time around.)

One thing I really like is that the game makes excellent use of the touch screen, the buttons can be used but the only thing you have to use them for is hitting start to save. Everything else can be done by touch.
One thing I don't like is that there's no manual camera control, which leaves me walking in circles sometimes trying to get it facing the right way.

In conclusion: It's not perfect but it's a fun game (and isn't that the point?), if you like playing around with weird creatures or DS RPG's I'd recommend it.