Spore Galactic Adventures: The new LittleBigPlanet?

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The low-down on Spore's DLC game creator and what we plan to make with it

Pac-Man


Zelda-style RPGs

Don't think that your adventure's objective will be limited to basic navigation of the environment though. In a move that blows Galactic Adventures' potential wide open, up to five goals can be tagged to your environments and their inhabitants. What this means is that certain areas, characters and objects can become objectives, and each in turn will trigger the next one when reached. As it's possible to attach your own text dialogue to "cast" characters, instructions, missions, and therefor mini Zelda-style RPGs should be more than feasible.

We were shown a basic "Rescue the princess"-style quest, whereby a Spore beamed down to a planet only to be met by a worried king asking for help. Upon reaching this goal point, dialogue was triggered recalling the calamity of the kingdom's princess being captured by a dragon. The next goal point? Finding the dragon and killing it. Once this was achieved, the next goal point became the princess herself, who once reached, triggered the end of the mission.

It was a simple example, and of course with only five goals you're not exactly going to be making Twilight Princess over a weekend, but with some imagination and deft writing, we can see some cool little adventures appearing throughout the galaxy in the months following GA's release. After all, the "Go here, trigger this, gain instruction to go there" mechanics are what Zelda games have been built upon since the year dot.


Quake 3 Arena

Maybe we're being a tad ambitious here. After all, we don't yet know exactly how complex Spore Galactic Adventures will allow us to be with our environments. But with weapons and jump pads available, an attempt at recreating Quake 3 Arena is just too obvious an ambition for us to ignore.

Above: If Orb looks lonely, it's only because he was the only Q3A character we could find on the Sporepedia. But if our plan is possible, that will change.

Picture the scene. You beam down to a planet, meet some insidious overlord, and aren't allowed to leave until you defeat him in combat. And then it's into a closed arena packed with platforms and jump pads for a lot of bouncy bouncy, killy, killy. Spore's more sedate pace means that things are unlikely to ever reach the vomit-inducing inertia of the original Q3A, but as videogame mock-ups go, it could certainly better, say, this.


Bizarre things involving lots of cocks

Because well, it is Spore.

David Houghton
David Houghton
Long-time GR+ writer Dave has been gaming with immense dedication ever since he failed dismally at some '80s arcade racer on a childhood day at the seaside (due to being too small to reach the controls without help). These days he's an enigmatic blend of beard-stroking narrative discussion and hard-hitting Psycho Crushers.