Spore, the stratospherically anticipated game from Maxis and Will Wright (and EA), is set for release later this week - Friday the 5th of September. This is then the last opportunity to have a look at some fresh screenshots before you get to play the game for real. If you just can’t wait, you can get a head-start by pre-installing Spore and playing it the second it’s available on the 5th.

Spore has been in varying forms of development for over 7 years, only publicly unveiled at a Game Developers Conference in 2005. Now in 2008, Spore’s level of hype has gone through several stages, from bursting at the seams through to backlash, enthusiast press at times wondering if there was actually anything more to the game than its Creature Creator, the ability to create any creature you can possibly imagine.

Over the last few years, several areas of the game have been revealed, such as the Tidepool Phase, fighting for survival in a Petri dish-like environment, the Creature Phase as your creature begins to evolve, the Tribal Phase where players control an entire tribe of your creatures, the City Phase, building cities and technology, the Civilisation Phase, seeking to dominate an entire planet and lastly, the Space Phase, tasking players with spreading their colony across the galaxy, meeting new and weird creatures along the way.

Now, Spore’s imminent release will reveal just what the people at Maxis have been up to all this time and we’ll get to see if the enormous excitement surrounding the game has been warranted.