Linking back to what I said earlier, where this is interesting is that it takes what was creation-for-creation's-sake and turns it into creation-for-a-reason.

After you play each mission, you get a chance to rate it, and that feeds back into who gets to play the mission some more - as well as showing a leaderboard for the mission. These are, like Spore's other content, shared with everyone else who's playing the game. As well as a mass of Maxis-created missions, the game ships with an actual adventure creator, so players can make their own. But where it heads into more interesting terrain is how it integrates into the create-and-share bits of Spore's design. The Adventure creator creating an adventure. As you do so, you can level up, gaining more and better equipment. Basically, you do the Captain Kirk thing, going to a planet with some manner of problem, beaming down, solving it and heading off. As well as a spaceship, you play a character - a captain - who is able to beam down to planet's surfaces to complete missions. Spore Galactic Adventures primarily expands the space stage of Spore. Which sounds grandiose, but what I mean is it gives the building stuff a purpose. It has the potential to be the sort of expansion pack that extends the thinking implicit in the original game's design and turns it into a complete entity. Of the pair, Spore Galactic Adventures may be onto something. The other will only annoy those previously annoyed even more. And after seeing them both in action, I get the feeling one of them may actually do something about that particular issue. The newcomers are the Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack for the PC, and Spore Hero for the Wii and DS.

So, with all that going around my head, we come to the first real returns to Spore's universe - as I don't think anyone is going to count the Creepy & Cute Parts Pack for the mother game as anything serious. And a lot of people just shrugged and wondered, 'why the hell should I bother making anything then?' There was no point. Fundamentally, it's a game of plasticine rather than a game of Robot Wars. Rather than make a game where the design of your creature and equipment was explicitly judged, maxis made a game where you could pretty much make what you wanted and go ahead and still play it. People just interested in the final third are going to be annoyed.Įqually, the priorities for the first part were much more about just building stuff.

The team has been quoted as saying that the Spore experience is one third building, one third sharing stuff you've built and one third actually playing. However, more than any game of last year, it managed to alienate a lot of core gamers having other priorities other than just being entertaining. Not in the league of The Sims, but enough that commercial necessity demands Maxis work out ways to - hnngh - expand the franchise.

Spore galactic adventures missions