Quick little post to shout out about something I figured out with Spore that I thought was unique...
When you save your little creatures... check out the character directory, it's filled with PNGs!
And if you notice on their website, when you download a creature, you are downloading a PNG... and they even suggest right clicking on the gallery pictures and doing a "Save As" and it just works... which is cool!
Basically what it means is that they are embedding meta data about the creature (enough to recreate it) right inside of the PNG preview image. Clever! It's really efficient as well, each preview image and character data is just under 30kb... perfect for web galleries and the like...
Really clever actually...