- Site: SPORE Galactic Adventures
- Publisher: EA Games
- Developer: EA Games
- Genre: Simulation
By Brad Cook
[STAR DATE 062309.08] I, Captain Gilderfarb, have answered a distress call: the Banana Princess must be saved from a vicious attack by marauding monkeys. After beaming down, I decide to speak with Mike the Angry Fruit Tree. If I can make him my ally, I’ll receive some exploding fruit that may come in handy.
[STAR DATE 062309.09] As I suspected, the malevolent melons reduced those simians to cinders. The Banana Princess asked me to escort her home, where her grateful father requested my assistance in the war against the monkeys. “The Banana Kingdom will not tolerate such aggression toward our bunch!” the Banana King declared. “The time is ripe! They will peel our wrath!”
Determined to assist such a slippery situation, I discussed strategy with the Banana General, who told me the monkeys were receiving their battle plans from the Typewriter of Doom. Our only hope was to throw the Monkey Wrench in the works.
[STAR DATE 062309.11] Dodging enemy blasts and hiding behind the Bananas’ sundae tanks, I recovered the Monkey Wrench and jammed it into the Typewriter of Doom. The monkeys’ source of power was destroyed and the war ended. What a shame they had been using it for evil, rather than trying to write the complete works of Shakespeare.
[STAR DATE 062609.16] Princess Banana and I were married during a small ceremony. She said I looked very appealing.
Strange New Worlds
“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.
A mission features a storyline with up to eight acts, each containing three goals — the tone can be serious, silly, or somewhere in between, and the goals can involve anything from simple tasks to major battles. You could even create a mission that’s an arcade game, complete with a maze, objects to collect, and enemies to avoid. And if you see an adventure in the SPOREpedia that you think could use a few tweaks, feel free to make some changes and share your version with the SPORE community.
Each mission also stars a space captain, who can be a unique creation or a character drawn from the SPOREpedia. The captain beams down to a planet, with or without a crew in tow, and earns SPORE Points for completing the adventure, bringing him closer to a new rank. Each rank attained unlocks new accessories and weapons, such as the powerful Energy Blade or the ever-useful Jetpack. As in the main game’s space stage, your captain follows a specific path, such as trader or warrior, with appropriate accessories and weapons unlocked along the way.
At the end of an adventure, you can compare your captain’s performance against other players on the leader board, where the top three earn gold, silver, and bronze medals. (If someone bests your score, you’ll lose your medal.) Galactic Adventures also ships with over 50 new achievements to accomplish, so get ready to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilization, and boldly go where no captain has gone before.
Game Hardware
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Should You Choose to Accept It… Your jetpack might help you navigate the fray below during this mission.
Crystal Caverns. Help defend the base from waves of attacking aliens.
Why Did the Robot Chicken Cross the Road?
To play SPORE, of course. The creative crew behind the hysterical TV show “Robot Chicken,” including co-creator Seth Green, wrote their own goofy missions for you to download from the SPORE Galactic Adventures web site. Defend the Banana Kingdom from the monkey army, enter the Readerdome (if you dare), and more.
SPORE
Learn more about SPORE by reading our previous feature which covers the original version of the game. Begin your eons-long journey as a single cell in a primordial stew. Emerge on land and dominate the other creatures you find. Form a tribe with a village and then establish a civilization.
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System Requirements:
The Genesis Effect
Begin creating your adventure with a blank starter planet. Apply a theme, such as violent volcanoes or a harsh desert landscape, with a single click, or start terraforming the world with custom continents, mountains, rivers, lava pits, and more. You can even modify the atmospheric density, the global temperature and water level, and the time of day when the mission starts.
After deciding on your story and setting the stage with an introductory text box, choose a musical score from among the existing compositions and begin placing creatures, vehicles, buildings, objects, and visual and audio effects. Then select personality traits, such as territorial or aggressive, and movements patterns for your creatures and vehicles, which contain pilots and drivers by default. Creatures and vehicles can be aligned with or against the player, or they can take a cue from Sweden and remain neutral.
You can make the creatures’ interactions as complex as you want, with the option to have them behave in specific ways at certain times (for example, a friendly creature might turn on the player in a later act). Creatures can also be directed to pick up or give away objects, whether to a specific character or simply to whatever happens to near them, even if it’s a building.
Don’t forget about dialogue: Creatures can speak anything you want when the player clicks on them, with the ability to include multiple speech bubbles. They can direct the player to the next goal or even try to dissuade them from doing certain things. A story act can’t end until all of its goals are completed, so don’t use the latter unless you’re sure the player will eventually find the right path.
When you’re done, add your episode to the ever-growing SPOREpedia and see how well it fares. It will eventually earn a difficulty rating, depending on how many times players win or lose it.