Spore Galactic Adventures (PC)

6/23/2009 10:59 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

So let me explain:

Galactic Adventures is really a complete game on its own, built on top of the Spore engine and editors. If you never played Spore before, you could happily install the original and the expansion and get to playing the GA content without ever opening up a standard Spore game. And even if you did click into the original Spore cosmos, you'd notice very little different. Galactic Adventures and Spore share the same DNA, but this evolutionary step gets you thinking about a whole new species of Spore-life in development.

What GA adds is a nifty little scripting engine that allows you take your spacefaring creatures and play through missions that roll out like a best-of of 3-D gaming genres -- racing, combat, real-time strategy, puzzle-solving and even a little platformer play. But like the rest of the Spore universe, none of these genres is particularly deep. These basic game mechanics provide a prop to the main event, which remains the charm in seeing your Spore freak run, fight, or puzzle-solve.

This being Spore though, the secret sauce is found in the building tools, which now include adventure-building tools. With similar ease to making a creature, constructing a town, or crafting a spaceship, players can create scenarios -- call them adventures -- and upload them for others to play.

Perhaps sensing that this was all going to be a little hard to swallow, Maxis teamed up with the mad toy scientists at Robot Chicken, and let them loose with the tools. Now you can download adventures uploaded by that nerdy Spore fan down the block, or some pro content like Robot Chicken's "Shake It Up," which is -- well, let me quote the press materials:

"You are trapped inside a snowglobe filled with snowball bombs, kamikaze penguins, evil two-headed snowmen, enraged yeti and skiing unicorns."

In other words, the whole idea of Spore being some sort of science lab for the 21st-century future pretty much went out the window with, let's just say, those flying unicorns.

Spore attempts to rein all this back into the main game by having the intergalactic creatures in the game, who routinely dispatch you on missions, now occasionally invite you planetside to complete Galactic Adventures. So because these strange adventure scenarios tie into the main game on a content level, it is possible to consider GA a proper expansion pack -- like buying hats or holiday stuff in The Sims. But at its weird little alien heart, this "expansion" is another expression of Spore's core idea -- that user-created content driven by a massive procedural system under the hood and shared online can create endless types of entertainment. Under the microscope, Galactic Adventures is just more strange, Spore fun. From the cosmic view, this is another piece of the ever-expanding imaginative insanity the original game only ever hinted at.

Here, cue Captain Fierce Ice, as the gator man does a jig for joy with the happy bunny people on some planet, in some galaxy, in some star system on some computer, somewhere in time and space.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.