TWEET FOR SHOP: spore

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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.
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Technical Details

- 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.
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Customer Buzz

"Like a new game over and over" 2009-12-08
By S. Potter (Los Angeles)
My 8 year old plays this over and over...loves it. Loves getting greation ideas from the community and expanding on them for himself. Made a Mario Bros. game and Snow Village game. Made a scavenger hunt game that looked just like our neighborhood. Very cool. Great value.

Customer Buzz

"Fails to clear an already low bar" 2009-11-28
By Impulse (Mobile, USA)
While I was not pleased with the DRM issues of the original Spore, I did install and play the game and found it to be a decent time killer that was good for sporadic play sessions. I "completed" the game with a couple of different creations and would occasionally hop on to expand my empires further. Figuring that most of the annoyances of DRM issues were tied to the core product, I decided I might as well grab the expansion. Unfortunately upon installing Galactic Adventures, I was immediately annoyed. One of the few positives of the original Spore's protections was that the CD wasn't required to be in the drive to play it. So of course, installing GA causes Spore to now require a CD to run. Minor annoyance to be sure, but still, a negative.

The expansion itself can best be described as disappointing. The missions are very simplistic, and the gameplay for them is essentially the same thing as the creature stage. You might have to pick up an item and bring it to someone else, kill some enemies, or talk to some npcs, but it adds very little to the gameplay. I has hoped that the expansion would add a little more depth to the game, but the Maxis designed missions are all pretty basic. And you'll go through the small amount of them quickly, and be left to user designed missions, which as others have noted, are seldom worth playing. They're mostly either designed as jokes, or just poorly designed. Gaining experience is a time tested way to keep people playing repetitive content, but it quickly lost its luster in GA for me. The small amount you can get from user designed adventures doesn't help.

Unfortunately, I haven't found the expansion to add anything of value to the game, and at best is a poor use of money. For me, it's actually kept me from playing Spore at all, as I never feel like digging up the CD to play. The lackluster nature of the expansion has also tempered my interest in the core game. Unfortunately, I doubt you can remove GA without deleting and reinstalling spore (and using up one those installations!), and playing through again just doesn't have much appeal.

Customer Buzz

"Mac Users Beware" 2009-11-06
By R. Sauchuck (Baltimore, MD United States)
My sons love the original Spore. I was hoping this expansion pack would bring the fun of the Creature and Tribal stages to the latter part of the game (since Civilization and Space are frankly boring)

I installed GA on my PowerMac and right away I knew there was going to be trouble. Error messages about installer scripts not working properly began to show up. The installer seemed to finish successfully though. Then the kids tried to play the game. It seemed to work in the Captain outfitter stage but as soon as they went on to an adventure CRASH! Over and over. I checked the EA site and it appears there is a patch ... for PC only. I was invited to enter my name on there mailing list so when they eventually decide to get around to fixing this buggy POS (piece of software) they will let me know. Others have had similar issues as noted in the EA forums.

What was supposed to be fun for my kids was instead disappointing and frustrating. My 10 year old even offered to pay ME back for my wasted money because he felt so bad about it. Thanks EA for once again punishing your customers.

Customer Buzz

"Amazing Expansion Pack" 2009-10-18
By
I'll start with the technical subjects. Firstly, installing this game took a very long time. My dad and I had to re-install the original game, install Galactic Adventures, then get 4 updates, each of which loaded slowly, but things went in general smoothly after that. Although occasionally the game crashes, erasing all progress I haven't yet saved.

Not uncommonly, while playing an adventure, I'll accidently walk my avatar into a something, like a wall, and get stuck. Once you get stuck it's nearly impossible to get out. This glitch is very annoying, because it means the player has got to start the adventure all over again. However, there are lots of good things about this game, too. Making your very own adventures is lots of fun. You can make adventures based on real events! And, of course, you get to play adventures, too! Sometimes adventure's can be quite complicated. Some adventures are super fun. Maxis should make more adventures, though. Since Maxis adventures give your captain 100 points, while non-Maxis one usually give much less. Your captain needs these points to gain new accessories (weapons etc.)

I really like all the great new accessories. You get a wide variety of cool weapons for your captain and some of the friendly accessories are quite fun. Also Galactic Adventures lets you put exo-skeleton limbs on your creatures.

All in all Spore Galactic Adventures is an awesome expansion pack to the original game.

Customer Buzz

"Why "Galactic Adventures" fails." 2009-09-17
By Alexander Landa (Livermore, CA United States)
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

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Review Spore

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From the creators of The Sims comes Spore, where you evolve a single-celled organism into a galactic god whose personality and abilities are completely up to you. Then interact with other players' creatures-including ones made by celebrities! EA Games. PC/MAC, NDS.
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Technical Details

- Epic journey from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and outer space exploration
- Play any way you choose in the five evolutionary phases of Spore: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space
- Grow, evolve, interact with and battle other cultures, and conquer the planet
- Visit literally millions of planets full of other player's creations
- Single-player game provides unlimited worlds to explore and play
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Customer Buzz

"Great game...Check your hardware first!" 2009-11-29
By A. Weld (Madison WI)
My son asked for Spore after playing it at a friend's house. We ordered it and the adventure began. Our one year old computer needed more memory, a graphics card and a new power supply to power the graphics card. The hardware upgrades came to about $200. Now he has a great gaming machine. We really enjoy playing the game. Just check out the hardware requirements first. We went with the BFG 9800 GT and a BFG GS 550 watt power supply. Both were effortless installations.

Customer Buzz

"DO NOT INSTALL! Permanent RootKit from SecuROM!" 2009-11-27
By MIT Grad
Hi,

Based on having the Spore game simply stop working a few months after installation and then trying to fix it, this MIT graduate can give you a few hints:

1. This installation leaves behind a rootkit that cannot be easily removed. To remove it you have to go into Windows "RegEdit" function. If you make an error while using regedit, you could end up having to re-install your operating system.

2. EA's online help info in this area is pretty useless.

3. Kids do like the game, but it is simply not worth your time or the risk to your PC. There are reasonably credible reports on the web indicating damage to the operating system in some machines from the rootkit.

4. My family will no longer purchase ANY PC games from EA, or any other vendor, with this form of Digital Rights Management (DRM). We suggest you do the same and let EA and the others know about your decision.

Customer Buzz

"Hard to load, but my 11 yo nephew liked it" 2009-11-25
By Potpie55 (Everett, WA. 98204)
Ok, so I have not played this game as I bought it for my nephew and this seems to be the target audience. My nephew has played this allot since I bought it for him. The concept seems fun as you walk a creature through evolutionary steps. He is always laughing and showing off his creations. If my rating was based strictly on how much fun he is having with it I would give it a 5 star.

However, since I bought it for him, I was the one that had to load it, and that was not fun. I am not a computer programmer, but I can usually load a new piece of software on a PC. This took my sister and I an hour to get it to load. We had to go to youtube to figure out how to load it. That is why I gave it a 3 star. So other than the loading issue, I got a good price on Amazon and it shipped in plenty of time for his birthday. So if you are buying this for a kid I would recommend it.

Customer Buzz

"Meh not worth it, save your cash." 2009-11-23
By Mercenary84
I remember hearing the hype about this game and even wanted to get it once it dropped down in price. Then Yahtzee, of Zero Punctuation fame, did a review of it. That pretty much dampered down any residual excitement. Dont get me wrong I still wanted to play it but wasnt sure that I wouldn't get buyer's remorse. The Cell stage wasnt actually too bad if you can get over the serious Computer cheating. Seriously? A creature surrounded with spikes?! How am I supposed to get that part that it is carrying? Keep in mind that you, the player, cant do this as you are limited to how many parts you can stick onto your creature. Actually I take that back a little, you can but your creature will have no eyes, mouth, or way of movement.

Then the creature stage. you staple on a few legs, doesnt matter what kind they do the same level of speed and then your creature roams onto land. Of course, in the promo vids you would think that this world would be thriving with roaming creatures for you to befriend or kill. Instead you have this strange world where all the creatures would just hang around their nests with "Epic" or "Rogue" versions of themselves in the world where if you dont immediately try to befriend them will try and kill you. And they will kill you. The Epic versions I speak of are 10-100x the size of the normal brethren. Also pathfinding in the game is a little screwy. Your creature, if you click on the minimap to make him go there, will take the shortest path there. Even if that path is through an impassable mountain. It will keep walking into it until you manually control him to get him around the mountain.

The Tribal stage is laughable you either kill everyone bye selecting your entire village, grabbing some weapons and just zerg rush the victim. Befriending everyone is a little harder but not my much your only change now is that you need to give them a gift, have your entire tribe playing at least 3 different instruments and time your button presses correctly. Presto civilization stage.

Now the Civilization stage wasnt too bad, you design your buildings and vehicles with your fliers and ships. However once you get a few resources coming in, you can A. Build a crap load of military vehicles and gank Victim no. 6746. B. Conquer a military city and start churning out trade vehicles to eventually simply BUY the other city. Or C. Simply convert the other city to your religion. However one caveat is that to get the economic and religious options you have to go with A. Twice. In other to actually get those options you have to conquer the city and hope that it is one of the two. Either that or you have to something other than carnivore. Which would have been nice if the game told you that. But this game for all of its hints and tutorials has a nasty habit of not telling you crap. "What are those little things in my minimap?" The game has no answer other than you can click on the minimap to go there.

Once you killed/bought/converted everyone you finally begin the last stage of the game, Space. Now this is where the game comes into its own finally, the controls are great and designing a space ship is intuitive and fun. The missions are also really straightforward and you can find everything just find.

Which is what I would say if the game was a great big pile of <$&(@&*&(%@!!#%> and fries. Your spaceship will either be a goofy little thing or it will no engines because it is IMPOSSIBLE to place those things on the back facing BACK not UP or DOWN I JUST WANT IT TO FACE BACKWARDS.

The Missions given to you will inevitably tell you to go to this star system A, planet B, and scan/kill/capture creature/plant/artifact C or give said C to D. D being some destination or something Again the nasty habit of this game pops up and doesnt TELL you where this system A is at. Or who D is. I was playing through the space stage and I got a mission saying that I was to pick up 3 ancient artifacts and go drop them to Janthon. Who or what Janthon was, was never explained to me. "Just pick them up and give them to Janthon" the game cried at me.

It was at this point that I rage-quit to the desktop and started up EVE online because EVE was easier to understand and play. And for all of you who know what EVE online is, that is how bad this game is.

AND ONE MORE THING: AUTOSAVE. I thought we perfected this by now, with the majority of users using windows and many of them being younger, who dont know that the pop up ad " YOU ARE INFECTED" is in fact a scam and spyware, this game inevitably will crash. This being a game where simulation is going on while you are doing stuff means your CPU time will get eaten up. So if memory leaks or Windows says FU IMMA CRASH NOW happens, at least your game will be saved sometime before you crashed right?

WRONG. This game has NO AUTOSAVE WHATSOEVER. EVEN THE SIMS HAD AUTOSAVE. You leave your house? SAVE, enter? SAVE!

This game? the only time it asks you to save is if you are quitting your current game. No autosave after stage change, event occurence or even periodically. So that means if the last the time you saved was during the Cell Stage and you went all the way to Space and Ragequit? You. Lose. Everything.

Not to mention the problems with this game and linking to EA. I just bought this game NEW from Best Buy and even though I managed to register it once with my EA account, every time I try to log in it says the install code is invalid and that I do not have correct spore.com privileges to link it. This is a game I PAID MONEY FOR. Why do I have to go through this crappy linking process to get access to the database of user created content?

At time of writing, EA has responded and said that it is linked to my account and basically said they dont know why its not working. Thank you EA tech support.

Tl;Dr. Spore was a game of high expectation that ultimately fell flat when held up to the sunlight. A box of fancily wrapped chocolate only to find that the chocolate inside is some half melted M&M minis, a marshmallow, and the sixth sense that the other brown stuff was not chocolate at all. And a man is standing next to you saying you dont even have permission to even look at 90% the box.

Customer Buzz

"WHO CARES ABOUT DRM!" 2009-11-20
By
I bought this game a month after it came out. I read the review talking about some sort of DRM thingy. Well I learned that DRM just keeps you from installing it more than 3 times. Just install spore onto a laptop with vista or install spore on a mac notebook and then bring the laptop to your friends house. But get a mouse because it is easier to move the camera. The goal of the game is to evolve from a cell to into the space stage Let's get to the point. Here are the Pros and Cons

Pros

360 view with just holding the right and left mouse button

great graphics

complete control of your creature

large varity of parts for your creatures

desision to kill or befriend creatures

in the civilization stage you can make your own vehicles

large amount of weapons and other tools to use in space stage

easy controls

awesome superweapons in civilization stage

Cons

no game over

not a lot of different weapons in civilization

have to evolve to land

I would recommend this game for 5-12 years olds. For 12 years old it might be too easy but for 5 year olds a little challenging and frustrating. This game is a best buy. [...]! I hope you will buy this great game

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TWEET FOR SHOP

9.12.09

Spore Galactic Adventures

Technical Details

1.12.09

Spore

Technical Details