We have been paid a visit by MaxisCactus, and as always he or she had some nice bits of news for us all:

Hey Everyone,

We’ve been keeping an eye on your fansites and the creature concept art many of you feature in forums and galleries has pretty much floored us.  The ingenuity of these creations is astounding.  We’ve had a lot of fun discussing your art and members of our development team have recreated a few fan concepts in our creature editor.  Renders of these have been uploaded to the site, as well as developer commentary.  We even sent off these creature concepts to NASA for evaluation from their Astrobiology Institute. 

It’s all up here: http://www.spore.com/screenshots.php

Also, we’ve been receiving more and more questions about the game, and have updated our FAQ section.

http://www.spore.com/faq.php

Finally, we have a couple new movies for you to check out.  See the developers discuss procedural animation or the new Yuri’s Night movie here:

http://www.spore.com/screenshots.php

Check back to Spore.com this week for more updates.

I definitely urge all of you to go over to the Spore site and check out the concepts and resulting Spore Creatures. The resemblance between the concept art and resulting creatures is a testament to the Creature Editor’s versatility.

As announced yesterday on our forums the Creature Editor is now available for pre-order for North Americans at the EA Store.