Spore GA review

[kazebird]

I recently arr'ed a copy of Spore Galactic Adventures, and I would give it about an 7.5 out of 10. It is fun, but can be annoying sometimes.

The Good

- Surprisingly, all the EAxis adventures are really fun. Also, they can be witty at times. For example, there was a museum in one adventure that had a sword in a stone encased inside one of the displays. Here is what it said "The corpse of King Rocky the Rock. As you can see the implement that caused his death is still impaled in his lower abdomen..." (Take note that Rocky the Rock came with the Sims 2 Bon Voyage.)

- They put really good collision protection in this game. If you plop down a building with an arch, you can walk through the arch.

- The adventure creator, while easy to use is also complex. You can adjust anything, and while it has a complexity meter, I managed to place over 100 objects before it even showed any complexity. Also anything you can do with hot keys in the building editor can be applied to the buildings in the adventure creator. I am just scraping he tip of the iceberg in my review too.

- The textures have been updated to look nicer, and actually like inside the editor. Unfortunately, this only applies to civilization, and space stage if looking really close to your buildings, or vehicles.

- Adventures are nicely incorporated into space stage. You can either look for an adventure planet labeled with a flag, or ask a civilization for a mission. You can still get the Base Game missions, but if you do, just turn them down, and find another civilization to ask.

- There are hundreds of special effects, from DNA holograms, to mushroom clouds. As well as some catchy music.

- Finally, according to the site, it requires the disk to run, which could mean they removed SecuRom from this game as well.


The Bad

- There are only a handful of EAxis made missions. While they are good, they leave you craving more. Unless you are willing to turn on CC, you can't get more. (I ended up braking down, and doing this.) Not even the robot chicken made ones. Which isn't much of a loss, since the one I played was supremely stupid.

- While the adventure creator itself is complex, you have a limit of at most 24 actions your character can do in a single adventure. This can be used well, but most of the time is not, making for short adventures. Also the actions you can take are a bit limited. But the limits aren't horridly restricting if you know what you are doing.

- Creating an adventure is very time consuming.

- There is currently a glitch that occasionally gets you stuck inside an object if you run into it too fast. If this happens, just hit the beam up button, and retry the adventure. Frustrating, but the only obvious bug I have seen.

- You can't make giant adventures in one piece, due to restrictions in the lack of a save button during an adventure. However, at least you can pause for a meal or break.

- You can't beam down to non adventure planets, but what would you do there anyway?

- Make sure to put the tag "gaprop" on your props. I once ran into my character's sidekick's Empire, because I forgot to label him with this tag.

In conclusion, if you don't like creating things, this is not the game for you. If you do, you will have a ton of fun with the editor. It does have that one large glitch, but hopefully without any other big ones, EAxis may be able to fix this one with a patch. They clearly were trying to give the public something they wanted, and while some aspects could have been more fleshed out, I would say this EP is equivalent to The Sims 2 OFB. If the base game wasn't worth paying for, this may actually be worth it.

[SNUGGLES]

Cool review. I've been debating getting GA.   I got several of those EA cash cards half off and free overnight shipping discount from EA.   So the game won't cost me much.

I have been reading the spore bbs and saw several of the sheep say EA removed securom.  But I hardly trust anything I read at an EA forum.   If securom really is removed, then I will get the game without hesitation. 

[notovny]

Personally, I'm also finding it a lot of fun. More fun than S4, but I've got a lot of stuff lying around that I made a year or so ago that I can plonk in.   I think I need a wider variety of aliens, though.


I only got it two days ago, so I've spent some time mucking around with it.  Trying to set up a two-team sport with an explosive ball,  putting together a brief "Get help for us!" adventure, and trying for something cinematic.

My first adventure. Very rough-hewn.  Named it "Misson of Mecredi" for no good reason. The Epic in the picture is not actually in the adventure, that was based on an early version.
 



And then, while toying around with the adventure creator, I set this up...Ulthanatos Attacks

[kuronue]

Anyone else having issues with lag? I meet the listed requirements and turned everything to the lowest setting (well, it did that for me) and I laaaaag. It's insane. Also my captain wants to randomly move backwards, which I think might be related somehow. What are the *actual* minimum requirements for the missions to be playable?

[kazebird]

Have you tried lowering the resolution. I had trouble playing on highest resolution even if I lowered all graphical settings.

With the second highest, I can maximize all graphical settings.

My suggestion is to lower the resolution until the lag disappears.

[Kyna]

Have you tried lowering the resolution. I had trouble playing on highest resolution even if I lowered all graphical settings.

With the second highest, I can maximize all graphical settings.

My suggestion is to lower the resolution until the lag disappears.

Wow, deja vu.

I'm SURE I've read your response twice before Parrot, on two separate days, yet it was posted only 2 hours ago.  I assume you're deleting it and then reposting it for some obscure reason.  Stop doing that, it's irritating to keep coming into a thread that is listed on "show new topics" only to find nothing new has been said.

[kuronue]

...I thought I was going nuts when I got a topic reply notification for a post I'd already read.. two days ago. Either the system is glitching or this has happened multiple times.

[Insanity Prelude]

Umm, how can we turn CC on in an arr'd copy if you're not supposed to let arr'd things connect to the internet?

My base Spore is legal (though I'm sure EA wishes that buying their games used for $10 was illegal. XP), but my GA... yeah. Assuming I even can register the base game (serial code might have been used already), I can't actually take it online, right?

I suppose I can always wait for GA to go down in price too, though.


Edit: Disregard this post, I found a used copy cheaper than yesterday.