Spore that is. When a game goes gold it means that the final version is complete and has entered production. So there’s no turning back now for the developers (except countless of patches - knock on wood), nor for us fans.

Expect copies to be found in stores Sep. 5 in Europe and two days later in North America and Asia/Pacific.

Also, don’t miss GameSpot’s wrap-up from Will Wrights on-stage appearance from E3 2008.

Both IGN and GameSpot got some juicy previews up before the start of E3. Both focus on the civilization stage and mentions things like your agenda, strategy and starting materials.

You start with a single city and a single vehicle, which you can design in the vehicle editor or download from the entire universe of Spore content, both Maxis and user made.

There’s also a new lengthy video showing stuff from all stages in the game:

In case you missed (I know I did!), here’s Spore’s official box art, and most likely the final version. Looks good!

Maxis has put up one of their prototypes used when designing Spore. This particular prototype is called ParticleMan and was used to study such gravitational dynamics as orbits, nebula formation, star formation and particle streams from sources like pulsars and black holes and simulates gravitational attraction between particles in a cloud. It features a wide arrange of controls and mechanisms you can play with.

Thanks to pictoboy for the news tip.

Spore was demo’ed at the San Francisco Apple Store the other day, and a Spore fan was there to report what was going on. We’ve picked out some of the goodies.

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Q. Will creating buildings in the Tribal phase be free form like the Civ phase?
A. No, that was a feature we would have like to included but did not have enough time/resources to devote to it. Things like that will hopefully come later in the games lifespan, things like the Flora editor which we hope to have out sometime after release.

Q. Can you direct your vehicles in civ stage ?
A. Yes, Land/Air/Water vehicles are you ‘units’ in the civ phase. you no longer control your creature directly.

Q. Is the macro management of trading routes (like you could see in the overview video) also possible in space phase ? (like you zoom out in interstellar level and you can see all these routes that your alliance can take)
A. I don’t know if there will be trade ‘routes’ so to speak but Will did mention that one of the metagames in the space phase you could task yourself with was being a space trader.

Oh! and one other thing, he demoed flying, and it is awesome. I didn’t see a fatigue bar of any type at all and he seemed to stay airborne by just clicking a key of some kind repeatedly.

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Videos from this event can be found here and here.

The EA store has been updated with a new Spore product called Galactic Edition. Priced at $69.95 this baby will include some extra goodies such as a DVD (Making of Spore), Premium Manual, Spore Card, Poster and a Concepts Art Book.

Considering the fact that roughly one hundred thousand creatures gets uploaded every 24 hours and the total count is now at approximately nine hundred thousand the Sporepedia should reach 1 million very very soon. Maxis commented earlier on this in GamesIndustry.biz:

The creativity and passion that the community is putting into their creatures is spectacular. The development team has spent the last 24 hours checking out the amazing creations racing in from all corners of the globe - with peak volume hitting more than 1,000 creatures being shared a minute.

(!)

GameSpot UK got in touch with Spore executive producer and Maxis veteran Lucy Bradshaw to ask her some questions about the release of the Creature Creator.

GS UK: How does the anticipation of Spore affect its development? Are you feeling the pressure?

LB: We definitely feel it. It’s exciting to be [working on] one of the most anticipated games–we can’t wait to see what players create and see how much they enjoy playing Spore.

Writing this there’s already close to half a million uploaded creatures to spore.com. HALF A MILLION! That’s insane ladies and gentlemen, and absolutely amazing. This is going to be fun.

Watch Theresa Duringer of Maxis take us through all the cool stuff in the Creature Creator while creating a praying mantis.