Spore Galactic Adventures

(It also adds a fun level to the idea of Spore recapitulating games' development. Starting with simple arcade games it goes through all the genres, ending in an almost-freeform exploratory god-game thing. And now, on top of that, there's another level where you become the actual creator of games.)

Which all sounds terribly exciting, but whether it works is down to the creator (as in the tool - not Him). From my brief look, it seems to lean towards the friendlier end of that scale, rather than something incredibly ornate. Still, you're able to do things like create multi-stage adventures where each act leads to new things appearing or disappearing, tied together with user-generated text.

In other words, expect to see my Sweary Adventures, featuring thousands of enormous and monstrous phalluses. In terms of obvious things missing, there's no ability to add your own music, own voice-acting, no riding vehicles ("yet") or to have something akin to a conversation tree, but there's plenty of potential for people to easily create stuff. For example, during the demo, gargantuan penguins are created hidden behind a wall of exploding barrels. After they're defeated, there's an attack by unicorns. Player objectives and sound effects are thrown down randomly. It's not much of a level, of course, but it's been done in seconds. I'm immediately thinking what sort of things I could do. And more so, what those who actually put the effort into Spore's character creators are going to do.

And then there's Spore Hero, which goes completely the opposite way, and immediately raises the hackles of anyone who ever liked the idea of Spore in the first place. It's basically an arcade-adventure with you playing a Spore creature. In other words, it's a little like the creature stage in the original game, but leaning towards a traditional Nintendo-esque action/exploration game rather than the MMO vibe. You walk around, you fight, you solve quests, you communicate, you explore.

All that really remains of Spore is the fact you design your character with the parts-based system. You locate pieces throughout the game - in a semi-random fashion - and then can redesign yourself, sticking on new abilities as you desire. Of course, you can also do a Spore thing and cheat, adding a tiny pair of wings to your underside to allow you to fly and reach those unreachable areas, but without breaking your carefully thought out design. However, bar your mutable lead character, the rest of the game remains totally stationary, designed by the team, similar to Spore Creatures on the DS.

When questioned, the developers argue that they decided to go this way so they could actually have control over the actual narrative of the game. After all, if they don't know if a character is going to be scary looking, how can they do a quest appropriate for it? You do see the point, but there's an excluded middle where some of the characters in the game could be from others while key ones are defined by the team. As it is, we're left with a game that's basically just an adventure where you can design your character. And while there are apparently elements like other characters responding to what you look like, in a Fable-esque style, that's not enormously exciting.

Between the next two Spore releases, you can see the best and worst possible futures of Spore playing out. In one, just surface-fiddling and brand-servicing. In the other, opening a Pandora's Box of possibilities which not even the designers know. As such, while we don't know the results of either, Galactic Adventures is the one holding our attention.