Well, we’ve all had plenty of time to play with the Spore Creature Creator and determine that it is, as expected, completely brilliant.

Of course, there’s a limit to how long you can sit there making cute little critters when there’s no actual game to shove them into, before you get a bit bored.

But rest easy, there’s not long to go now until the thing’s finally out (5th of September, says Eurogamer) and we can start manipulating our creatures from primordial goo to galactic civilisation.

The trouble is, there’s always a danger that when you anticipate something too much, that it ends up being a smidge of a disappointment - after all, there’s no way that a game can possibly live up to fans’ wild speculations… or can it?

After all, Will Wright is not without a track record of pulling something completely amazing out of the bag. And he seems awfully nice too!

Anyhow, it would appear that Eurogamer can confirm that the game’s going to be a little bit special in their Hands On preview. And, more importantly, they confirm that Will Wright is lovely.

What a marvellous plan - release the creature editor now, so that by the time the full version of Spore is released there’s already an enormous library of creatures to populate the worlds with!

And blimey - what a joy the editor is to play with - if only all 3D packages were as effortless and intuitive as this. Draw the shape of the spine, and then tweak by dragging the verterbrae around. Scale various body sections by rolling the mouse wheel on each bone (although this is actually quite cumbersome because of my rubbish sticky mouse wheel).

And after literally minutes of not at all laborious fiddling you end up with something like my amazing Eleplump!

Although there’s not a lot you can do with your creatures once you’ve made them (aside from upload them and make YouTube videos of them dancing), it’s well worth the measly £5 they’re asking for it.

It’s just astounding (or maybe not, I suppose) how many people are making willies with it.

Get it here!

Aside from having an utterly specacular intro (produced by the awesome Blur Studios), Dawn of War was a pretty fabby RTS.

Now, four years on, Relic Entertainment have announced the sequel set for release in 2009 featuring, amongst other things, a rather nifty sounding co-operative multi-player campaign. Wooo, indeed! And quite frankly, when the screenshots look like this:

…it all looks set to be rather special.

Check out the latest screenshots on Eurogamer.

It’s called “The Lord of the Rings: Conquest”, and it’s basically a new Star Wars: Battlefront game with all the Star Wars-y bits taken out, orcs and elves thrown in, and the name changed. Sound exciting? No? That’s probably because I’ve made it sound a bit naff whereas IGN made it sound really really cool.

Woo! Looks nice!

Apparently you’ll be able to choose to play any battle from the books and films (as well as some completely made up ones) and fight as pretty much any role. So be an elf archer defending Helm’s Deep, for example. Sweet, eh? Still no? Oh heck, I’ll just quote a bit of what Eurogamer said instead, and then you can pop over to IGN and read all about it properly.

The best bit about The Lord of the Rings: Conquest is that it lets you be almost everyone from Middle-Earth, including the baddies. You can expect to be Cave-trolls, Oliphaunts, Ents, Balrogs, and even the Witch King, Saruman and Sauron himself.

There is an entire evil campaign waiting to be unlocked after you finish the good story, and it begins with you as a Ringwraith capturing Frodo and delivering the Ring to Sauron.

You can play both campaigns with up to four friends online or in split-screen, or just hop into eight-player competitive battles.

Oh, and it’s for PC, PS3, and XBox360.

Proper article at IGN.

Version 1.5 of S2Engine, Profenix Studio’s PC game and virtual reality engine, is now available. Priced at €135 for the ‘Basic’ edition with the ‘Pro’ and ‘Full’ versions available soon, this latest version features (amongst other things):

• • OPENGL 2.0 support
• • New shaders for water, detail bumpmaps, reflections, alpha blending, texture coords animation, etc.
• • New easy Script language syntax
• • Improved support for GUI
• • Terrain editing/painting/sculpting/rendering support
• • Hidden Surface Removal system revisited for next-gen games
• • Mesh with more than one material support
• • COLLADA file support for static meshes with multimaterials
• • Mesh Instancing and hierarchical mesh grouping

Looks nice, doesn’t it?

For a complete list of features, pop over to Profenix’s webpage here.