Pretensions was very tempted to buy a copy of the videogame Spore while at the Gaming Convention last week. She is still holding out (largely because she suspects she won't have time to play and she's heard lots of bad press about the draconian digital rights management), but has been having lots of fun fooling with the free trial of Spore's Creature Creator.

For the uninitiated, Spore is Will Wright's (famous for "The Sims") new game that allows you to create a species and guide its evolution through from the unicellular stage all the way to its first voyage into space. Pretensions first efforts are best described as wyvern-like with dragonfly wings - P calls him Flitter.

Here's a video of Flitter and 2 juniors dancing.

Here's another creature I developed called Treemimic - it has two mouths with multiple mandibles and spends time lying in wait for prey while camouflaged to look like a plant.

There is a huge Spore community uploading their creatures online. Have a look at the weird and wonderful creations here(warning: very memory intensive page).