As Electronic Arts Inc. continues to work on its highly anticipated Spore game, scheduled to hit stores on September 7, the company thought it would be nice to show its eager fans a little something of what’s ahead. Today, EA released the free and paid versions of its Spore Creature Creator. The toolset goes for £4.99 in the UK and costs $10 in the US.

The Creature Creator will give users the chance to upload videos of their work on YouTube and create custom avatars for several social networking sites.

Spore is a game that will offer creative individuals the opportunity to peek inside the depths of their own personal galaxy. A "personal universe in a box," Spore allows players to create entire worlds, going through different stages of evolution, creating tribes and building civilizations.

The game is rather ingenious as it was designed to take players through five phases, each corresponding to a stage of evolution: cell, creature, tribe, civilization and space. While going through each phase, gamers will have to face various challenges and reach a series of goals.

Spore’s development was initially expected to be finished in 2007; although the game has been worked on since 2005, problems have kept on appearing and thus the project has been delayed. Now, the video game’s fans at least know that they only have about three more months to wait for the innovative title, which will be available for Nintendo DS, Mac and PC, as well as for certain cell phones.