Oct/0918
The Problem With Sims & Spore Expansions
Ever since I saw the first expansion pack for Sims 3 this has been bothering me. What the hell is wrong with EA today? They keep creating expansions and spin-offs for Sims 3 and Spore alike that make no goddamn sense. Sure Spore Galactic Adventures worked out for what it was, but that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to essentially take that same game and apply it to The Sims.
Yeah! The first Sims 3 expansion is basically Vacation meets Galactic Adventures. Send your Sims to Egypt or some other exotic locale and then proceed to fill it with fog, make booby traps and then direct your clearly ethnocentric Sim to rob a foreign country of its ancient artifacts. WHY? The Sims is not built for this kind of malarky. I could perhaps see this as a 5th or 15th expansion pack (you know when they’ve run out of ideas) but how about we start with the ability to build businesses and actually go inside of them, EA?
Jul/097
Spore Galactic Adventures
I’m something of a Spore Whore (as I like to call it.) Although Spore is admittedly not the game I hoped it would be, that being a next-gen Sim Earth with at least some science and more variety behind it, I still enjoy it quite a bit.
The first full expansion pack (Creepy and Cute was more of an item pack) is well… interesting.
In keeping with the customization, web 2.0, “let the players make our content” tradition Galactic Adventures focuses on expanding the final sandbox Space portion of the Spore gameplay by allowing players to create their own levels/mission.
Sep/0817
Spore

Before I begin writing about the game that has temporarily taken over my life I want to point out that yes I’m aware of EA’s SecuROM DRM and how it’s completely useless since the game was cracked and torrented the day it first came out in Australia, and I should be mad its a rootkit install that prevents me from installing the game more than 3 times and only allows one account per copy of the game despite the manual saying otherwise and people are all pissed off about it and showing their anger by downloading it illegally and rating it a “1″ on Amazon.com. I’d also like to point out my computer is pretty old and even with Spore’s low specs it can only run the game at the lowest quality without suffering terrible lag so please forgive the Playstation 1 level of the graphics in the screenshots as I’d rather paint my post with glimpses of my own game experience as it’s truly unique to each player.
That all out of the way? Good. Spore is awesome.

