SPORE, for me, could have been the game. When it was released, I was front of the line and rushed home to be disappointed like I've never been before. After what SPORE was turned in to, a shadow of even the limited builds that Will Wright had shown off prior to it's release, I was angry that so many of the features that had been promised had been cut.
And then news of the first expansion pack started to circulate, and I knew exactly where all those features had gone. And, of course, DRM is never fun when you own multiple machines and often jump from one to another. I swore never to buy an EA Games product again, after seeing what 'improvements' they made to Wright's game, until they changed their ways and made SPORE live up to it's promise. Unfortunatly, a friend of mine acquired a copy of Galactic Adventures and I after seeing his I was, once again, drawn in by all that it promised and like the fool I am, laid down some money to give SPORE another chance to live up to it's potential.

First, let me just say that the release version of Galactic Adventures is actually very prone to crashing. As SPORE has no Auto-Save feature of any kind, and never prompts you to save - ever, it's quite easy to in fact lose everything you've done with a single crash. Needless to say, it's a lesson I learnt playing SPORE at it's release. Galactic Adventures introduces an interesting solution to these crashes; the most recent update fixes the crashing - but it breaks over 75% of all currently available Adventures due to a bug. In fact, only a small fraction of the included, offical Adventures work once you've updated. The solution to the bug that breaks that adventures hasn't offically been acknowledged, however SPORE's patches haven't been speedy to say the least so it's not known if this will be corrected. Crashes or broken adventures; oh what fun!

But - and this warrants breaking the normal rules of writing - Galactic Adventures is... good. It's very good, actually. The power of the Adventure Creator reminds me of the RPG Maker programs you see across the internet - albiet a little more limited in what it's capable of and at the same time so much more powerful. As you're able to tie in several Adventures together in a 'Series' you can create some great story lines and some very, very fun missions. The offically included ones give you a taste, however compared to some of the higher quality content available by the community they're pretty awful. One adventure I downloaded reminded me of the classic scene in the original Starship Troopers, where the Outpost on the desert planet was attacked by swarms of Bugs, and considering this game is rated PG in Australia it was pretty intense stuff.

Once the bugs and issues are all ironed out, I honestly have to say that Galactic Adventures is a worthy purchase for any SPORE fans out there. This doesn't let EA Games off the hook for me though, they've got a lot of ass kissing to do.