Shun, I summon you!

You can now get your Spore Creatures as figurines, and however silly and however disappointing that game was, I feel a slight tug at my heart at the thought of getting a tiny Shun to guard my desktop.

I wonder what having a figurine done costs, generally? Wouldn't it be awesome to make the roleplaying characters one has played for a while? Or make them before starting, so they can be used as "tabletops" for those annoying situations where it matters if you stand to the right or the left of the shooter. If I was filthy rich, this is one of those ridiculous, environmental-destroying things I would do, I imagine.

I also read an interview with a scientist, who, shockingly, unveiled that scientists do not believe Spore to be very scientifically correct, while on the other hand horribly fundamental catholics have been known to protest against it (not to be confused with the impressive amount of intelligent fundamental catholics who don't believe a stupid, fluffy game to be insult enough to their religion to raise their voices). What surprised me, however, was how the interview revealed that EA actually had made claims before its realease with hopes that it would be a "tool among the scientific community". What? The lady scientist said that the prototypes that had been released earlier were much more likely to ever be used in a serious setting.

So like many, many others, I wonder; what the hell happened to this game? Halfway towards a groundbreaking, mindblowing game about evolution, about the very cornerstones of intelligent life, Maxis suddenly decided, screw this, let's make this based on five-year-olds, yet illogical and boring enough to make sure no five-year-olds ever play it. The question on everybody's lips is (or were, when they released it, I'm just slow) when did they turn into Microsoft?