Maxis veteran Thomas Vu sat down with Play to answer a few questions about Spore. We seem to get a definite answer regarding what platform versions are planned; PC, Apple Macintosh, Nintendo DS, and Mobile Cell phones. Furthermore here’s what he has to say about the ending:

This may surprise Maxis fans, but Spore does have an ending, though it is probably not what you’d expect. Players can continue playing past the end if they choose to and continue to explore the hundreds of thousands of planets that populate the Spore galaxy. We are not ready to announce what the end of the game will be, but trust that it will take a dedicated player some time to complete the game.

Don’t forget to stop by our YouTube Channel now and then. There are some more videos there apart from what we delivered earlier this week.

According to EA rep. Patrick Buechner the Creature Creator is coming in June! There will be two versions - a free one which will have 25% of the available creature parts, and a retail version with all available parts. The free editor will be available at spore.com and included in the new SimCity Box coming also in June. The Creature Creator will function exactly as in the full game and you will be able to take snapshots and make movies in it. Furthermore all creatures that you create will function in Spore when it ships!

Since the SimCity Box is planned for release on the 26th we can expect the editor to be released around that date. The price is not known for certain at this time, but Amazon.com did have it listed at $9.99 before taking it down.

Thanks to Robin for the news tip.

As expected - but now definitely confirmed in a community day with Maxis in Madrid, Spain - there will be no water or air creatures in Spore; though the game will feature a glide capability with the right body parts. Furthermore we learn that there will be no moons, the game will run well on a mid-range PC, and you might get engaged in mass battles. There’s a bunch of other questions answered too so check it out! Thanks to spore.es for translating this to english.

Watch Will Wright talk about his first computer experiences and his love for Care Bears.

In two interviews over at IGN Maxis’ Lucy Bradshaw, Morgan Roarty and Will Wright answered numerous questions regarding many different topics, including the release date and the ongoing fine-tuning of Spore.

IGN: We’ve seen a lot of pseudo-release dates pop up here and there, was the game ever seriously going to release before this September?

Lucy Bradshaw: This is really our first real public announcement about release dates, this is our formal, this is when we’re definitely going public with it. This is a lot. So September 7th, 2008.

Oh, and you can actually do your own national anthem. How cool is that!

According to the British edition of CVG, which in turn reports from BBC’s Radio Five who interviewed Will Wright on the subject, Spore is still scheduled for a spring 2008 release. All seems to be going well and the game is in full playable form.

“We have the game fully playable at this point and it’s in final testing”, Wright said yesterday in an interview with Radio 5 Live.

Furthermore Will explained that Spore has undergone thourough testing to ensure it’s accessible to most tastes so it doesn’t become a hardcore experience.

GGL Wire got together with Darren Montgomery, Product Manager of Spore, for a short interview at GC.

We’ve just uploaded 12 new images of Spore creatures to our gallery to add to the 12 in-game screenshots added a few days ago.

Will Wright has previewed Spore in a presentation yet again, this time at TED.com TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and every year brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers in an effort to spread ideas. This particular 18 minute speech won’t reveal too much that we don’t already know although Will does show some yet unseen Spore game footage. He also takes time to focus on planetary environmental controls providing a small taste of the numerous dynamic elements we can expect to ship with Spore.

Check it out!

As if that weren’t enough, at this years SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego, a series of Spore related talks will be delivered detailing different areas of development from player-driven procedural texturing to procedural content generation to object distribution, etc. Although this is targeted at developers and those in the industry, often these presentations turn out to be very interesting and highly educational.

Spore is looking brighter, cooler and more polished with the latest information released. IGN got together with Maxis VP of Marketing Patrick Buechner to ask him a bunch of interesting questions. Among them we get to learn that a version is coming to the Nintendo DS, the release date stands firm (early Q2 2008) and that the game has hit alpha stage; which means the game is fully playable, now it’s just the gruesome task of game balancing and bug squatting left.

Right now the game is at its Alpha stage of development, which for us means that you can play the game through from your humble beginnings as a little blob of eyeballs all the way out though your species exploration and colonization and conquest of space.

Note that Spore isn’t being showcased at this year’s E3. Instead it’s going to be shown for the media at Leipzig in August.

In a recent interview with Wired, Brian Eno, the artist who will be providing the sonic landscape for Spore, commented on the soundtrack for the upcoming game.

WN: How does the audio element of 77 Million Paintings relate to the audio work you’re doing for Spore?

Eno: The Spore work is also generative, which is to say that you won’t have the same musical experience in a particular part of the game at any moment. Some of the parts of the game are more fixed than others. For example, when you first open the game — and this is the way we’re thinking about it at the moment, anyway — there will be a sort of signature that you’ll recognize and it will happen pretty much identically each time. But as you go into the game and start to explore different parts of it, your choices will make a difference to what plays in quite a lot of ways. The landscape of the places that you’re in will affect what’s playing. So you will not hear exactly the same thing over and over. Most game music is based on loops effectively. Well, this isn’t, really.

Read the full interview here