We had trouble deciding, so here’s creepy...

Spore is packed to the gills with ways to customize creatures. But if the built-in menagerie of animal limbs doesn’t quite add up to the exact critter you want, the Creepy & Cute Parts Pack add-on mixes in a few dozen alternatives. It requires the full Spore game ($49.95) or the paid Creature Creator ($9.95), updating the creature-editing tool. While this booster pack also includes new animations, paint patterns, and backgrounds, its fun is short-lived. We wanted a full ecosystem of updates, but the Creepy & Cute pack gives us inert brine shrimp and calls them Sea Monkeys.

The expansion pack fulfills its most basic promise; you get 60 new body parts, 48 more paint patterns, and 24 extra animations. The parts and patterns fit the theme of the title, full of doe eyes, razor claws, rag doll stitching, and bloody-organ skin. And the new movements animate your creature in expressive ways, from new dances and gymnastics flips, to being struck by lightning or chased by bees. A couple extra backgrounds allow photos and videos in front of a rainbow-laden world or wasteland scene.

...and cute.

But while those numbers seem like a lot, they’re miserly when you get down to playing. The body parts are rationed across categories: 12 parts each to eyes, mouths, hands/feet, arms/legs, and decorations. And you get no new weapons, such as horns. We enjoyed building creatures with these new parts, but we wanted twice as many to justify the effort of installing the new software. And the new animations are entertaining, but we got tired of them in just a few minutes.

Other areas of the game remain untouched by this expansion pack. We wanted new building parts and new vehicle parts too, but those are absent. Worse, no new costume parts that decorate tribal, civilized, and other stages of creatures are added. And other than the creatures being compatible with the rest of the full Spore game, the expansion ignores that playground.

This expansion pack adds moderate variety for obsessive creature creators. But with such limited extras, you could go through everything in a half-hour.

COMPANY: Electronic Arts
CONTACT: www.ea.com
PRICE: $19.95
REQUIREMENTS: Intel Core Duo processor; Mac OS 10.5.3 or later; ATI X1600 or Nvidia 7300GT with 128MB VRAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100; full version of Spore or Spore Creature Creator
Adds 108 new parts and paint jobs. Two-dozen new animations bring creatures to life within the editor.
Large-sounding number of new parts feels thin in the game. No new weapon parts. No new costumes. Doesn’t improve Spore beyond creature editing.