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?

He knows, man! HE KNOWS! ...Seriously this is the funniest Sims screenshot I ever took, just wanted to share.

Like most people half the time I only buy expansions for the more minor extra gameplay and content anyway. With Sims 2 I didn’t buy University to send my Sims to college, it was long and tedious and basically gave you two whole neighborhoods to keep track of at once, I got it for the expanded furniture and clothing. I didn’t buy Open for Business to have my Sims run businesses, which was also long and tedious and more trouble than it was worth, I primarily wanted it so I could finally build working restaurants downtown.

The Sims should stay simple. You have a Sim, or Sim family, and you have them live their lives in an exaggerated, cartoony and often hilarious manner. You focus on their interactions with each other, advancing their careers etc. So instead of over-complicating the gameplay like this can’t we just enhance what’s already there? More traits. More objects to interact with. More careers. That’s all we need.

As for Spore, it’s not the expansions so much but the endless retarded spin-offs that no one in their right mind could think would make money. It’s sort of an open secret that Spore was dumbed down from what it was intended to be in order to be more marketable, but even the way they’re trying to market it now is all kinds of stupid. So you destroyed my dreams of a next-gen version of SimEarth so that you could try to turn an amusing but dumbed down game about alien monsters into a franchise empire. Thanks, EA.

Really?

First there was the Spore Comic Book Creator. Even the Spore website is too embarrassed to list this one. What possible use does this have? Oh? Take your Spore screenshots and turn them into comic books? Because you couldn’t possibly do that with a number of other cheap comic book making software or even I dunno, say, Gimp or Photoshop? Why the hell would you want to make a Spore comic book in the first place?

On top of that after the first DS game failed they’re gonna go ahead and make another one anyway, not to mention one for the Wii as well. The Wii one might work out, but I assume alot of these spinoffs are going to be like the PS2 Sims games, they’re just not as good as the PC version.

And even Galactic Adventures didn’t make that much sense as an expansion pack. Like I said, it works for what it is, and it’s cool they clearly took suggestions from the suggestion thread in the Spore forums (though mostly from the “we should have GUNS! Pew pew!” crowd and less from the “here’s how you can make the existing game better” crowd.) Galactic Adventures is more like a separate entity, the main game only serves as a portal to it, but it isn’t part of and doesn’t add anything to the existing gameplay.

And like I said in my Galactic Adventures review, the level building is a great aspect but it’s also extremely cumbersome. I’d rather see them improve on the Creature, Tribal and Civ stages really, add more things to do, add more options than just being kill-everyone-carnivore, hippy-herbivore and buy-your-way-out-of-trouble-omnivore. The Tribal stage especially has the potential to be great, but as it stands right now is the one I always cheat through just to get it over with, mainly because it’s boring.

I hope with Activision as the new big bad of the gaming world and EA learning its lesson as of late now that its sales and customer loyalty have suffered we’ll see expansion packs that are created more out of necessity and creativity than some out-of-touch cynical marketer’s warped idea of what the unwashed masses will blindly rush out to buy. But I’m not holding my breath.

Related posts:

1. Spore Galactic Adventures
2. The Sims 3
3. Dante’s Vs Darksiders

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.

You can use creatures, buildings, a number of props, actual game elements (teleporters, jump pads, power ups etc.) as well as special effects and a large selection of music and sounds to create multi-part missions. You can trigger events, set a number of actions and goals to characters, creatures and objects, and even program some rudimentry AI into the NPCs and creatures on your Adventure planet.

Then other players can download these and they will pop up in normal gameplay. You can tell the old style of missions from the new because the keyword “Adventure” will always pop up. I removed my mods and began to play as a less developed space race I had made and so now when I run into a new empire I tend to dart from planet to planet until one of those bastards gives me an Adventure mission as opposed to one of the old “go here and get this” or “shoot anything glowing yellow” ones.

As I said before, the mission creation is actually pretty sophisticated, however it can be bloody frustrating. At least in something like The Sims everything is on a grid. Not so in Spore. Sure you can place things wherever you want, resize them, set how far off the ground they are, and have several options to sculpt the terrain, but I’ve yet to find a way to rotate the camera. Part of the Mad Morlax mission (first picture in this article) I created takes place inside a makeshift building (you can’t actually enter a single building, you need to create one using buildings that look like individual walls and rooftops) and it was really difficult to see what the hell I was doing when I was trying to place the walls.

However, as part of gameplay these missions are great. Completing them gets you weapon and gear upgrades to help you survive in future Adventures. Of course since they’re made by other players they’re going to be a little hit or miss, but you can rate them when you’re through. Still, I’m amazed at how creative some people get with Galatic Adventures, especially the ones that design buildings to look like other objects (with the resize ability you can make a building look like a chair, a bowl of food, a computer, whatever prop you need and just shrink it down.) I really do want to learn more of the little details of what you can do with it and have already been working on a new, much bigger Adeventure myself.

And although I said the missions are a little hit or miss you can also get around running into crappy missions by subscribing to reputable Adventure sporecasts.

All and all, though it strays from the whole evolution part of the game Galactic Adventures is a good offering, especially for 30 bucks.

You can see me on Spore under MPSai.

Related posts:

1. The Problem With Sims & Spore Expansions
2. Spore
3. de Blob

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.

When you follow a game from 2006 that keeps getting delayed and delayed you start to build up all sorts of crazy expectations about it. Okay, so Spore wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be, and until I got to the Space Stage I’d already found my mind wandering to the possibility of expansion packs. However having come to already own over 20 solar systems and gaining the title of “Omnipotent” in Space as the Great Flomber Empire (admittedly helped along by some money cheats, which amusingly earns you the “Joker” badge) I found myself staring at the “badges” I’ve earned and the ones I haven’t even unlocked yet and realizing there’s still so much to do. But I’ll get back to that in a minute.

It’s eat or be eaten. Or get stepped on.

At first my favorite stages were the Cell and Creature stages, and even now I like starting from the Cell phase to build up a new species. After you unlock Space you can start a new game at any stage you want, however I hoped there would be an ability to skip stages along the way, and if there is one I haven’t found it yet. In the Cell phase you start, naturally, as a tiny cell in a primordial soup seeded by dormant bacteria (I assume) present on a comet that has struck the planet. You choose to be either a Herbivore or a Carnivore at first but can develop in a way that lets you be an Omnivore. Being Omnivorous is particularly useful in the Creature stage I’ve found, but you don’t have to stay on a single path the entire time. You could start as a Herbivore and become a Carnivore, then you could be peaceful when you reach the Tribal phase. Or you can be a Herbivore throughout your entire animal existence and become a vicious vegetarian conqueror once you start developing society, it’s up to you. Whatever you choose gets you a variety of different abilities in the next stage.

These choices will ultimately decide which of 9 personalities you’ll have in Space. However throughout the previous stages you tend to only get the option of being friendly or violent with the only middle ground being balancing the two, although you can check your progress with the history button to see where you currently stand.

The Tribal and Civilization stages are alright (the “Civ Stage” quite a heavy tribute to Sid Meier’s Civ games), they’re very simple Real Time Strategy games which can be kind of boring for hardcore gamers but will certainly engage casuals or children. When I first reached Tribal I considered it the 7th level of Hell, but it’s starting to grow on me. I think the worst part about Tribal is you don’t create or design anything, you just collect food, domesticate animals, and either kill other tribes or play instruments for them. You do get to clothe your creature for the first time, but you don’t design the clothing and the clothing itself is very clunky. You also don’t get to individually color clothing (which is odd because later you get to individually color parts of vehicles and buildings) it just picks up the color of the detail texture layer on your creature, so changing the color of the clothing means changing a color on your creature. Where I understand its hard to come up with a system to clothe creatures in a game where you can make any variety of bizarre body shapes I hope they come up with something better in future expansions.

Here I am communicating with
some primitive peoples

Ultimately, you come to Space, which is an impossibly vast sandbox. How vast? You’ve seen the images of the spinning galaxy in Spore, right? You can put your mouse over a nearby star and hear a radio signal of alien voices crying out, and then go visit it to see who’s there. Some systems are devoid of life but are ripe for terraforming and colonizing, however you do have to build up abilities for both as you go along. At first I noticed a circle around the cluster of stars my solar system was in, and figured I was restrained to this one little area. However as I gained higher levels of interstellar drives I came to realize you can visit every single star in the galaxy. And the galaxy is practically to scale. For reference our galaxy is about 100,000 lightyears in diameter, that’s about 500,000,000,000,000,000 miles. I don’t even know how to pronounce that number. There’s also an achievement for finding the Sol system, the home solar system of Earth, how cool is that? You can also mess around with any of those planets, terraforming them, supersizing creatures, messing with tribal civilizations, leveling intelligent societies to take the planet and system for yourself, turning an entire planet into an animal sanctuary etc. etc. unto infinity, traversing it all with a species you built up from a tiny bug-eyed cell and thus have even a minute emotional investment in.

Forge alliances in Space and you gain a fleet
of ships to aid you in intergalactic dogfights

All the while this galaxy is populated not only by creatures, civilizations, vehicles and buildings that you’ve made, but that other people have made. Each creature you scan, each species you meet you can find information on, and find out who made it. Like their stuff? Add them to your buddy list, all of their creations will automatically be downloaded for use in your game. Each download is only about 20KB. The game is constantly streaming content into your world every time you log on, it is absolutely amazing.

And that’s the thing, games like Spore, which are a little bit more like toys or dollhouses than games, aren’t for everyone. But the technology behind this game should be getting everyone excited. As cute and cartoony and simple as Spore appears the technology behind it really has never been done before. Procedural content generation and procedural animation are mind-blowing concepts, it means the game can actually generate planets, creatures, and even animation on the fly. Generally in a video game animations you see for a character are pre-programmed movesets linked together by player action and reaction to the game’s engine’s physics. Spore is different, the game can just figure out how to make something move, no matter what it is. This means advances in leaps and bounds for the industry, especially if EA is going to shop the technology out to other developers, so even if you never even touch this game it’ll have a great effect on your favorite games in the future.

I can also see this game making people think more about evolution and science, which is always a good thing. Sure some evolutionary biologists and the like complain that Spore persists the warped misconceptions of evolution (it happens instantly, even willingly on an animal’s part, intelligent species just stop evolving when they build a society etc.) but it could very well inspire some young players to study it.

What I’m even more excited about is this game could inspire a further interest in and understanding of outer space. Creator Will Wright was apparently adamant about having space represented in 3D as its often treated as a flat background in games and film, and the effect is spectacular. To me it’s very moving when you zoom out from your planet, all the way out of your solar system, out of your local cluster of stars, all the way out to a view of entire galaxy spinning slowly and serenely to a whimsical little tune, the only indication of your planet left being a tiny sign with a house on it pointing to some indiscriminate blob of nebulae. And then you think, this is how it really is, this is really what we look like from outside of the Milky Way. To me space can be an overwhelming and even scary thing, but to watch that sparkling galaxy coupled with the music just gives one a warm fuzzy feeling inside. In the context of Spore you see infinite potential rather than a bleak abyss occasionally punctuated by cold light, and when you think about the adventure, from a tiny cell to a space-faring empire, you may find yourself musing that it’s not only your creature’s history but our history as well.

You can find me on Spore as MPSai

Related posts:

1. The Problem With Sims & Spore Expansions
2. Spore Galactic Adventures
3. de Blob