One of the most highly anticipated PC games of all time, Will Wright’s Spore, will be released in Europe on September 5th – and the shock news is that the DS incarnation will arrive alongside the PC and Mac releases.

Also surprising is the fact that European gamers will be able to get their hands on the game two days earlier than their North American cousins, according to Eurogamer.

Will Wright said of the news: "We're in our final stages of testing and polish with Spore, and the team at Maxis can't wait to see the cosmos of content created by the community later this year.”

Spore is a game about, well, everything really. Starting out shaping the development of a few cells, gamers see their life forms grow to become land-dwellers, then civilisations and then eventually galaxy-conquerors.

Though not a fully-fledged MMO, the game will draw upon game data from other players to populate the in-game universe for each user.