IGN: Spore Galactic Adventures video review

6/29/09 – Spore Galactic Adventures User Upload Challenge

You seen the video, now create your own Captain!  Maxis is encouraging users to create their own Captain and to submit a video to their YouTube page for other fans to see how awesome your Captain is!  Details below:

You’ve watched the Maxis Space Captain go from zero to Galactic Hero and now we’d like to see what your captain can do! Does your captain command a starship, have a peg leg, or appear on cereal boxes?

Once you have created your Captain in Spore Galactic Adventures, make a video showing what your Captain is capable of. Then post it as a video response so the entire galaxy can see how cool your Captain is!

And stay tuned for next weeks YouTube video challenge….

Helpful Technical Information:

• To participate in our challenge enter your video as a video response to this one. Here’s how to create a video file to upload manually.
• To capture video in Spore Galactic Adventures, click V to begin video capture and V to end video capture
• Your video will be posted in the “Movies” folder which is located in your “My Spore Creations” directory
• Post your finished video as a video response to this video by clicking “Post a Video Response” in the video response section to the left

Apple features ‘Spore Galactic Adventures

A brief paragraph from Apple’s writeup:

“Bloody Sundae” is just one of many missions that await you in Galactic Adventures, which extends SPORE’s space stage with new stories created by you and your fellow gamers. Just as you can build and share creatures, buildings, vehicles, flora, and music, now you can terraform planets, design adventures set on them, and let everyone enjoy the fruits of your labor through the SPOREpedia.

article here

Own an iPhone? Try Creature Cam

I found this the other day thanks to a certain friend on Facebook.  It’s an application for your iPhone that you can add random Spore Creatures directly on top of your images!  It’s not free though – priced at $1.99 but for two bucks, I can get my enjoyment out of that.

Creature Cam
Source: iTunes
Copyright: SftwrFactory

Creature Cam allows you to add Spore Creatures directly into your pictures and images using your iPhone and iPod Touch!

Features:

• Add one or many creatures into your pictures from literally thousands of different creatures.*
• Use any image from your photo album or built in camera.**
• Save images to your photo album for later viewing or sharing by email.
• Place creatures at any location in your picture.
• Grow and shrink creature sizes.
• Duplicate creatures.

TrueGameHeadz – E3 ‘09: Spore Hero Developer Interview

A little late but the site ‘True Game Headz‘ conducted an interview with one of the EA producers to speak to you about Spore Galactic Adventures:

Creation of the Day – Spore Mario Kart

This is insane! The talented Fotosynthesis literally created a Mario Kart race track using Spore Galactic Adventures! You too can enjoy the fun and excitement – download it here!

Technically with Ballightning taking off for two weeks, I’m going to label this as ‘Creation of the Day’. This downright rocks!

Spore Galactic Adventures Review – Game.co.uk

Here is Game‘s review of Galactic Adventures.

If you haven’t already entered the brilliant Spore metaverse, this brilliant expansion pack provides an excellent opportunity to get with the plan. Spore’s creator, Will Wright, is a gaming legend who first made his mark in 1989 with Sim City, a game in which players were asked to build and look after a fully-functioning metropolis. Not content with city-building, Will went on to simulate the entire globe with the release of Sim Earth in 1990, then began to focus on people rather than property and planets, creating the most successful computer game of all time, The Sims.

Not a bad run of success, then. But rather than rest on his laurels, Will forged ahead and created Spore, a game that takes players further back along the evolutionary chain and enables them to create whole new species from scratch. Spore lets you take single-celled organisms and grow them into intelligent creatures that form societies and civilisations which not only live and work together on solid ground but, ultimately, head off into space, to conquer other galaxies.

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Spore Galactic Adventures Review – GameDaily

GameDaily on their review of Galactic Adventures gave it a score of 7 out of 10.

Although it took a while to reach the depths of space, Spore players know the wait was worth it. The first mission expansion pack, Spore: Galactic Adventures, includes more action, missions and a new title for your favorite creature — Space Captain.

While players of the original Spore were tasked with journeying to neighboring galaxies that showed signs of intelligent life, creating trade routes, buying goods, performing missions or just conquering the next galaxy, Galactic Adventures finally lets them beam down to take on missions on terraformed planets.

Yet, Galactic Adventures takes the safe route. Puzzles, protecting holy people, aiding allies against invasions, breaking into a spy facility and working to stop a war that retells Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (all the speeches in the mission are done in rhyme too — nice touch), the planet bound missions stick closely to original game’s vibe. Essentially, they’re similar to the missions performed during the Civilization Stage, only on other planets.

Spore’s always been a learn by doing (or learn by asking other Spore players) affair and Galactic Adventures shows that while it wants to be an open-world game that’s fun and engaging, players will occasionally find themselves in missions that appear impossible to complete since their Captain needs to level up or obtain new accessories or power-ups before beating them. As always, clearing a mission results in the always gratifying pose, song or dance from your mission giver and more badges to help advance to Captain.

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Spore Mods update on Galactic Adventures + patch 1.04

Hello fellow spore lovers. Sadly I have moved on from this game. However you can still follow my work over at youtube! I currently am focused on Minecraft, and in particular, Minecraft Cinematics.

 

Check it this video, and if you enjoy, please subscribe!

 

 

Whenever there is a new patch for spore, it always throws the modding community of its perch as we have to change all our mods. And yesterday with the release of the latest patch 1.04, in addition to the release of the spore expansion, Galactic Adventures, it seems that our current mods are doomed.

But good investigative work from the members over at sporemods.org have found that once you install Galactic Adventures, all you need to do to make the mods work is to move them to the folder as directed below.

C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\SPORE_EP1\Data

There is no known fix currently for people who have installed the patch but do not get the expansion.

As we learn more, we’ll post it up, also remember to visit the How to Install Spore Mods page for more.

How the Complexity Score in GA is calculated

MaxisCactus has posted on the official forums in relation to how complexity is calculated in Galactic Adventures.

Understanding the Complexity Score in GA
The complexity limit in Galactic Adventures is fairly generous in allowing players to add a bunch of creations to their Adventures. Still, many of you have requested a breakdown in just how the complexity score in GA is calculated.

Q: How many creations can I add to my adventure?
A: You can add up to 1,000 simple models. Unique models are limited to the number of slots in the panel, or when the complexity limit is reached. You can add up to 500 simple terrain brushes.

Q: Do some kinds of creations count against my total complexity more than others? Am I saving myself complexity points by using two of the same model rather than two different ones?
A: For models, the model count is weighted by count and uniqueness. Using multiple instances of a model uses less complexity than using several models.

Q: Exactly how to terrain brushes factor into the complexity score?
A: For terrain brushes, each brush is weighted based on its complexity.
• A very complex brush counts as 6 of a smaller.
• Global/larger brushes count more.
• Decals like the roads count more since they are more costly to render.
• The lava pit also has a particle effect for the smoke plume and counts more.

Q: Does density of creation placement on the planet effect the complexity score?
A: Not currently, but we advise creators to spread models out to support players with slower machines.

Q: Is it more complex if two creature slots have different behaviors than if they are identical?
A: These will be considered unique even though the model is the same.

Q: How many unique creation slots are available for an adventure?
A: 75 per palette.

I know you have feedback and more questions about complexity, so feel free to post about them. Also, if you’re not sure if something will work, don’t be afraid to get in the game and try it out for yourself!

ProTip: Dragging an item in the game and tapping the alt button will quickly create multiple instances of it. Play around with this and see how the complexity score is affected.

2 new Galactic Adventures Tutorial Movies

Intermediate Mission Creation Narrated by Designer Stone Librande

Designer Stone Librande walks through intermediate Adventure editing techniques in Spore Galactic Adventures.
Find out how to control the behavior of the cast and get info on keyboard shortcuts using intermediate editing techniques.

Advanced Mission Creation Narrated by Designer Stone Librande

Designer Stone Librande dives into some of the more advanced Adventure editing features in Spore Galactic Adventures.
Find out how to shape a story using acts and goals with advanced editing techniques.

Maxis: What to do before installing the spore patch 1.04

Due to the amount of people who are experiencing issues with the new patch, MaxisCactus has posted some recommendations for people to follow before installing the patch.

Please reset your graphic and capture settings to the default settings before installing patch 4. This is a precautionary step to avoid the run time error that some players are experiencing after getting the patch.

Please post here if you do take these steps before installing, but still get the error after you get patch 4.

Important: Starting the game for the first time after installing patch 4 may take considerably longer than usual. Do not quit out during this process, as early termination may be associated with the run time errors some users are experiencing.

If you have already got run time errors when loading your game, please see this thread for a fix:
http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/31242.page

-MaxisCactus

Galactic Adventures Gameplay FAQ

MaxisCactus has posted up a FAQ about the gameplay invovled with Galactic Adventures. This thread is being updated constantly, so except more over at the official forums in the future.

Gameplay FAQ

Captains
Q: Are the spots on the creature where the captain parts are placed fixed?
A: Captain parts can be added to creatures anywhere in the same way that accessory are. One small new change is that you can additionally pin captain parts to each other.

Q: How can I change the pitch of my captains voice?
A: You can change the pitch by adjusting the size of your captain. Select your captain by clicking on it on the planet, hold shift, and scroll the mouse wheel up or down. Smaller captains have squeaky voices while larger ones have booming voices. This also works on other characters.

Q: How can I place my captain? I see a message that says “You have to have a Captain and place the Captain in a valid area”
A: You can find the captain in the lower right hand corner of the screen in Edit mode. Left click on the captain and drag him/her into the world. If your captain is legally placed you’ll see it appear on the planet with a green star around it.

Q: How can I unlock more parts for my captain?
A: Unlocks are awarded based on the number of points your captain has. Play more adventures to gain more captain points.

Adventure Creation

Cast
Q: How can I quickly view all instances of a cast member in my adventure?
A: Hold control and right click on the cast member image in the palette to move your camera to that creation in the adventure. Subsequent clicks move the camera to additional instances.

Q: How exactly does the complexity score work?
A: The complexity score calculations are pretty complicated. Hit this thread for a detailed breakdown.

Q: How can I equip crew members?
1. In edit mode, click the + button next to “Crew” on the right
2. Click the square Crew button to open Sporepedia and choose a crew member.
3. Click the check to exit. Your crew member icon should show up in the crew square, and you can check to verify that they appear by entering play mode.

Behavior
Q: How can I edit the behavior of as cast member in just one act?
A: Open the cast member behavior palette, then click on the link icon to break the link. When the link is broken, your behavior changes are applied only to the act you’re in.

Q: When you set the behavior for a creature (wander radius, peaceful/aggressive, chatter text, etc) does it universally apply to all instances of that creature, or can you set individuals to behave differently?
Depends what you want.
1. If you want to make a bunch of creatures that look the same with different behaviors, use multiple slots on the cast palette.
2. If you want to make a bunch of creatures that look the same with the same behavior, use just one slot on the cast palette, but drag multiple instances of the creature into your world. Edits made to the behavior of one will be applied to all.

Q: Can my creatures ride in vehicles?
A: No.

Q: How do you make different directions of path for the patrol movement?
1. Open the behavior palette on a cast member.
2. Click the movement button and select Patrol.
3. Hold ALT and drag the patrol marker away. This create a new one.
4. Repeat step 3 for added directions. You can optionally close the circuit to make your patroller move in a loop.
This movie walks through the steps. Fast forward to 8:23 to skip to the part about setting patrol directions.

Q: Can you make a character say different things in different acts?
A: Yes.
1. Open the cast behavior palette for the character.
2. Verify that the correct act you want to edit is selected at the top of the behavior palette, and that you’ve clicked the link button to break the link and turn the bar blue.
3. Click Speech/Captions and enter the text in the order you’d like it to appear.
4. Click the Change Act button to switch to another act
5. Enter totally new text!
Important: Don’t forget that the link between acts is now broken, so changes you make to one act will not automatically be applied to other acts. To form the link again, simply click the link button from step 2 again.

Advanced AI
Q: How can I edit the advanced AI?
A: To ‘promote’ a creature to be using Advanced AI you have to ctrl-click on one of the standard behaviors (shown as buttons along the top of the behavior palette). That behavior will be expanded as Advanced AI. At any time you can reset over your advanced ai by ctrl clicking one of the other behaviors. After a creature has an adv behavior then you can use the yin/yang button. We hope to post more details about advanced behavior editing soon!

Acts
Q: How can I add an act?
A: Click the “+” button at the bottom of the acts section to add an act.

Q: How many acts can you have?
A: 8

Goals

Q: How do you bring things? For instance, I set up a mission where the goal is to bring a creature to move to something else.
A: Bring is a goal that only applies to NPCs (non-playable characters) and handheld objects. You can bring an NPC or handheld object to any fixed object, building, vehicle, or creature (other than itself).
Steps to set a bring goal:
1. Drag the goal marker over the NPC or handheld object you want to “bring” and release it when it turns green. Select “Bring.”
2. You’ll notice that the goal has 2 slots, rather than 1. The first is filled with a thumbnail of the NPC. The second is blank. Both markers in the goal are red.
3. Add another fixed object, building, vehicle, or creature to the world that you want to set as your bring target. Drag the second marker to this new item and release it when it turns green.
Both slots should now be filled in and both markers will be green.

To complete the goal, you’ll have to find a way to move the first item to the second. For handheld objects, you can pick them up and carry them over.

For NPCs, you can set the NPC’s behavior to follow your captain by clicking it’s behavior palette, clicking movement, clicking follow.

A spinning a yellow marker appears below the movement style button. Drag this marker to the captain and release it. The NPC will follow your captain after your captain enters its awareness radius.

Text
This section will be fleshed out when players have asked more questions about Text

Adventure Play
This section will be fleshed out when players have asked more questions about Adventure Play

Web
This section will be fleshed out when players have asked more questions about Web features

Integration with Space and the rest of Spore
Q: Can players who don’t have Creepy & Cute still play adventures made using the parts pack?
A: Players who don’t have C&C will still be able to download adventures by players who do have the parts pack. Those creations that use C&C parts will be swapped out, and no points are awarded to the playing captain.

Post your gameplay questions here. We’ll try to get you answers to the most commonly asked gameplay questions.

Spore Galactic Adventures Review – Crsipy Gamer

As the snaggletoothed humanoid gator gawks from the monitor, eager for his next space adventure, I wonder how I’m supposed to take this seriously. Sure, I’ve raised old Gatoroid from the planet Gatorade since he was nothing but a planarian — from Petri dish to galactic conqueror. But that wasn’t good enough, apparently. Spore wants more of my time, and Spore Galactic Adventures tries to give the most open-ended game ever more purpose.

So I suit up old Captain Fierce Ice and hit my newly expanded gaming universe. Prepare for blastoff; things are about to get weird.

To start with, the whole idea of reviewing an expansion pack is a little too much like going into a restaurant and ordering a meal just so you can critique the dessert. For most of us, the assumption is, if you liked your dinner, then a slice of pie to finish things off always goes down well. If you enjoyed Spore, then you’ll buy Galactic Adventures, right?\

But with the game industry growing more and more pirate-leery — and ever-so-slightly starting to freak out about the used-game market — expansions, add-ons and downloadable content have turned into something all their own. A few years ago Fallout 3 would have been fine as a standalone game. Now that title seems determined to have players download the entire post-apocalyptic U.S., one city at a time (presumably ending, we can hope, withNiagara Falls Out 3 — hoo hoo!). And the World of Warcraft is, arguably, nothing more than one giant piece of never-ending add-on content. Games have gone all postmodern with their endlessly iterating stories and big bang of possibility. Expansion just doesn’t seem the right word anymore.

With the release of Galactic Adventures, we can at once admire how well EA has handled the subject of expanding (or growing or reproducing or exploding or cloning) the seeming infinity of the original Spore, and wonder if that game was just a Trojan horse designed to sneak the Will Wright master plan for world domination onto the unsuspecting hard drives of gamers everywhere — like some sort of fun virus you just can’t shake.

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Spore Galactic Adventures Review – Gamespot

Gamepost gave Galactic Adventures a score of 8 out of 10 for Galactic Adventures.

Some expansion packs offer more of the same, but Spore Galactic Adventures is not one of them. In fact, it adds an entirely new facet of gameplay to the original game’s space stage: adventures that beam your captain onto a planetary surface and send you on a short series of quests. The expansion comes with plenty of such adventures, and there are already developer-commissioned adventures ready to download for free. However, if you enjoyed making your own creatures and buildings in the original Spore, you’ll probably also get into the expansion’s adventure creation capabilities, which offer imaginative players a set of fantastic tools to express their creativity. Like all of Spore’s creation tools, the adventure creator is robust, though learning its intricacies takes some time. There are some nagging issues scattered throughout this otherwise excellent package. However, the new adventures and tools bring the charms of the creature stage into the space stage, and a leveling-up mechanic for your captain results in a welcome sense of progression.

The new adventures are accessible on their own via an in-game menu, but they work better when integrated into Spore’s space phase. Adventure missions are available along with other mission types, and when you take one, you fly to the target planet and beam onto its surface. Adventures are somewhat akin to Spore’s creature phase: You maneuver your space captain about and have access to movement, social, and attack abilities as you do in the earlier phase. However, adventures are generally short and focus on role-playing-game-like tasks. These include talking to other creatures, fetching them items, attacking and befriending them, protecting them from harm, and so on. You can also take a crewmember (or two or three), whom you can recruit from your allies in the space stage. It may be simple, but it’s also charming and engaging, thanks to the hysterical sound effects and appealing visual style. The game’s best built-in adventures have you accomplishing tasks from learning how bills become laws in a cuteSchoolhouse Rock! spoof to getting a band back together just in time for its big concert. Some of them aren’t quite as good, and a few are a little buggy, such as a Godzilla-themed adventure in which pathfinding issues may force you to exit. However, adventures give the space stage welcome charisma and variety, which are qualities the game needed more of in that portion.

If you were into Spore’s crafting elements, you now have a new, extensive, and incredibly robust toolset at your disposal: the adventure creator. Warning: There’s a much bigger learning curve here than in any of Spore’s other creation tools. However, if you take the time to experiment with it, you’ll find that this exciting toolset offers incredible possibilities to players with an imagination. The ways you can customize the planet alone are astounding. Using the extensive terraforming and atmospheric options, you can mold the environments as you see fit. Populate the world with creatures of your own or download what you need from other players; create themed villages and drop in any building you can find or make; throw in special effects, music, and objects. Then, use behavioral buttons and sliders to make them act and interact as you like and give them dialogue. Drag and drop goals onto each, separate the adventure into acts, and soon you’ll have an adventure to call your own. Before, you got to play as God and architect; now, you get to play as game designer too.

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