Product Details
 | Spore Galactic Adventures |
| List Price: | $29.99 |
| Price: | $25.46 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
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Product Description
Beam Down to New Adventures. In Spore, you evolved your creature from tidepool blob to galactic traveler. For the first time ever, get out of your starship, bring your closest allies with you, and explore all-new adventure-packed worlds. Complete quests, collect the rewards, then create and share your own missions.Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2134 in Video Games
- Brand: Electronic Arts
- Model: 014633153545
- Released on: 2009-06-23
- ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+
- Number of discs: 1
- Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X
- Format: DVD-ROM
- Dimensions: .55" h x 5.31" w x 7.48" l, .26 pounds
Features
- Terraform planets and for the first time place buildings, creatures, vehicles.
- Play Maxis-created missions all over the galaxy, featuring puzzle, combative, racing, and social gameplay styles.
- Level up your space captain and ans be rewarded by earning more than 30 powerful new accessories including Energy Blade, Acrobat Dance, Hover, Stunning Charm, Jump Jet.
- Create your own missions with the all-new Adventure Creator and then share then online.
- Play and rank an endless supply of adventures when you join the vibrant SPORE community.
Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Customer Reviews
The Creature stage meets the Space stage.
That sums it up for you.
Ill
get it out of the way and say YES this does, no surprise, have DRM but i
bought this to support maxis, not EA.
If your not happy with
working to get your game to work then stop reading and remove this from
your cart. First it updates to v1.04, which i couldn't start because of a
run time error. That was fixed when i found a fix on the forums though.
Then it wanted my DVD or it would not start, I have no idea why though.
I put it in ther,e fiddled with some stuff and finally by the grace of
God it started.
On to the game itself. The mission creating is
fairly powerful, and yes you can make some really neat stuff. Then again
all of spores user created content has great editors. Getting a basic
mission working is easy. However making it actually good takes time.
Settings unit paths, placing trees and objects is all done one at a
time.
Should you wish to play some maxis created levels, most
require you to use one of their characters and nothing else. Now it does
suck but they want the match to be fair and challenging.
If you
want to play a Community created level (which so far they suck, but a
good one will take time) dont get used to the luxury of dragging them
from the website to your folder (if you do that). You MUST go through GA
to do this.
One last thing i must mention is this uses a
different file to start with. If you start from your basic spore.exe and
dont see anything, there is another icon you should use.
Overall
Good expansion with DRM and terrible problems.
Why "Galactic Adventures" fails.
Let me start with singling
out the most useful feature of "Galactic Adventures". The rate of
eco-disasters drops from approx 1/min (with 5 disasters occurring
simultaneously at a time) to 1/4 hours. This is truly a great tweak that
allows you to explore the galaxy without having to worry about your
empire dying out as soon as you leave your home world. However, this
should be is a tiny patch, not an expansion pack. I doubt it was
intended, but you need to buy this product to make Spore vanilla
playable.
Now, let's look at the main shtick of "Galactic
Adventures" - the RPG missions in the Spore universe. The idea is good,
may be even great: your creature from the "Creature" stage beams down to
the planet and interacts (woos/kills) other creatures. Completed
adventures give you experience points, and when you level up, you get a
choice to buy a new accessory (death ray/special pretty pose) for your
avatar. When I first saw this I was stunned - that was exactly what had
been needed to bring Spore to life.
Then, the disappointment set
in. Maxis created just over a dozen of adventures; the rest was left to
users. The reasoning was: users create great
creatures/vehicles/buildings, let's rely on them creating adventures
themselves too. Here's why this doesn't work: when you design a new
critter or a spaceship, you only choose its looks since the stats system
is rudimentary in creatures and nonexistent in ships. With adventure
design, on the other hand, you create gameplay. And, as Maxis should
have known, users are bad level designers. Little Big Planet had a few
gems in oceans of garbage; "Galactic Adventures" seems to follow the
same tendencies. Users just don't contribute enough effort into creating
good levels; that's what Maxis employees are supposed to be doing.
To
make it worse, Maxis adventures award you with 100xp each; while user
generated ones only give you 10xp. So, to get that new death ray, you
will be stuck doing one mess of an adventure after another, after
another (it may go into the hundreds for higher levels).
Maxis
planned to work on creating more adventures after the release, but their
Sporepedia page is virtually empty, save for one imposter who figured
out that he can get his adventures into it by calling himself "the
Maxis".
To sum it up - "Galactic Adventure" doesn't have many
worthwhile adventures in it. The only reason to buy it is to get some
tweaks for the Spore vanilla game, but this can, probably, be done just
by messing with the config files.
Useless
Good, but not fully integrated
Galactic Adventures is a good
expansion, it jolts another spark of life into Spore, which, though
fun, can get old. Thanks to Galactic Adventures, I'm playing Spore for
the first time in months. But it doesn't feel like it. And that's the
problem.
When I play, I don't think, "Oh, I feel like playing
Spore," I think, "Oh, I feel like playing GA." They feel like two
different entities, tied together by a loose connection: creativity.
Galactic adventures is very creative, and gives you as much, if not
more, creative freedom as Spore. But, this expansion not only covers
only the space stage, but it doesn't even do much for the space stage.
When you play adventures in space stage, it feels like you switched from
playing Spore to playing GA, which you have. Once you finish, Space
stage is no different.
There were many other expansions that
would've been more immersed in the core game. Fans have for a long time
waited for water creatures and water civilizations to be added back into
the game. Allowing creatures to choose to stay underwater would affect
most of the game, no?
Or just more scientific accuracy. So often
the game feels shallow and oversimplified, adding just a few more
scientific elements could change that.
Galactic Adventures is
worth buying, yes. But it certainly isn't the best that EA/Maxis
could've done and is hopefully not the direction they're headed with
further expansions.
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