Following years of delays and setbacks, Spore, the latest brainchild from SimCity and The Sims designer Will Wright, has finally gone gold and off to manufacturing - thus confirming what we heard last week. The PC and Mac release is slated to hit U.S. retailers on September 7, but already you can download the creature creator utility to start building your own characters for the much-anticipated evolution game.

A slightly less ambitious version of the game, dubbed Spore Creatures, is arriving for the Nintendo DS on the same day while Spore Origins for the iPhone should launch on September 4. Meanwhile, another high-profile game from publisher Electronic Arts got an official release date today. Crysis Warhead, the standalone follow up to last year's graphical stunner Crysis, is set for release in the U.S. on September 16 and Europe on September 12.