The Spore hype machine has officially started chugging as EA releases the first taste of the new life simulation game from the creator of the best-selling Sims series. The Spore Creature Creator lets you create a critter from scratch, take them on a test drive and share them with the world on YouTube and on the game's official site, Spore.com. There's a free demo, containing about one-quarter of the content of the full Creature Creator, which can be purchased for $9.99.

Spore executive producer Lucy Bradshaw says they decided to release the full version of the Creature Creator because the fans asked for it.

"We wanted to give players a sense of what Spore was all about. All you've been hearing about is player creativity, but most people can't imagine how that would really work," Bradshaw says.

While the free version of the app doesn't have all the same options found in the full version, you can still create a critter, take pictures of them to share with friends or record videos of them dancing and moving around the test drive arena -- then upload it to YouTube. We tried our hand at the upload, and it was a relatively simple process, especially if you have a preexisting YouTube account.

"You can also share these things to our Web site (Spore.com) and that's where we have this encyclopedia of creature creations called the Sporepedia. The biggest difference is the amount of content you get to play with," says Bradshaw.

The creature-building interface is reasonably easy to use, allowing you to resize your creature's body parts using a combination of pointing and dragging or using the mouse's scroll wheel. We can imagine even young or inexperienced computer users getting the hang of it fairly quickly.

"We weren't worried about [the Creature Creator's accessibility], but we wanted people to really believe that it was going to be a fun, easy thing to work with," Bradshaw says. "I've given it to 5 year olds, and I taught my 70-year-old Mom to use it. Getting her to hold down the mouse button was quite a challenge so once she got that, she was off and going."

Bradsaw says you probably won't need it, but there is a little handholding with the demo. One of the game's designers recorded himself making a creature piece by piece. You can also download other people's creations from the Spore.com Web site and makes changes to the that creation by using the application. The demo also ships with pre-made creatures that you can load and alter if you're not up for making up something from scratch.

"You can't do anything wrong. You can have two heads or eight arms -- there's very little you can get wrong, which is nice to say about a creative tool like this," Bradshaw says.

While some have balked about paying the $9.99 price tag for something that's essentially a demo for the full game coming out in September, Bradshaw says they're giving players their money's worth.

"Well, look at the features that it's got. I honestly think that people sell stuff like this for even more... this has to be able to build a creature that looks cool and to be able to play around with it and share that with other people -- you get a MySpore page and all this online functionality ... I honestly think it's a steal... [some at EA were] suggesting that it be priced higher."

Will Spore be this year's end-all, be-all social networking game? You can't say Maxis isn't putting in the effort from strategic partnerships with YouTube for uploading character videos, to working with other partners to allow users to take pics of their creatures and putting them on coffee mugs, shirts and stickers.

"We also have the Spore Comic Book Creator, which will be coming later this summer," says Bradshaw.

The demo has been released for both PC and Mac -- both versions are the identical and Bradshaw says a creature made in a Mac version can be easily pulled into the PC version. She also says creatures made now will be easy to port into the full version of the game, set to hit shelves September 7.