"I'm always looking for unique worlds to go to in animation," said the director, Chris Wedge. "From every perspective - visually, thematically and comedically - the world of 'Spore' provides the potential to put something truly original on the screen."

Variety says Patrick O'Brien, of Electronic Arts' EA Entertainment division, will executive produce the picture with Lucy Bradshaw, the vice president of Spore developer Maxis.

Spore joins a number of other EA titles that have reached deals with Hollwood, including The Sims (Fox); and Army of Two (Universal). Dante's Inferno, Dead Space and Mass Effect also have been set up for production.

EA sets up 'Spore' at Fox [Variety]

If not, he's probably best known—in addition to his contributions to Spore—for one of his Game Developers Conference talks, in which he described the Wii as "a piece of shit" and slammed Nintendo for its hardware design choices. He later apologized for those remarks.

He may also be recognized from his rant Do Your Job Well, Please, an editorial delivered at this year's GDC on video game journalism.

By Hecker's estimate, the cutbacks at Maxis numbered 24 (he thinks). He estimates in his personal list of contributions to Spore that some 80 people were working on the game as development wrapped up.

Hecker announced on his personal site his follow up project, an indie game called SpyParty, which he describes as "a very different multiplayer espionage game" that apparently offers a level of excitement on par with ski jumping away from massive explosions.

Elvis Has Left The Building [Chris Hecker's Website]

"Often in the video game industry, the size of a studio fluctuates in response to business conditions," an EA spokesperson wrote in an e-mailed statement. "In this case, EA has taken action to reduce the workforce at Maxis as we focus the business and focus Maxis. EA remains fully committed to Spore and other IP within Maxis, with games planned for launch in the next few months, including Spore Hero, coming to the Wii for the first time, and Spore Hero Arena on the DS. All eligible employees will receive severance and outplacement assistance."

The layoffs were in the Emeryville studio, which is Maxis headquarters and the base of operations for Spore development. The Sims franchise, which was born at Maxis, is built out of EA's Redwood Shores offices, where The Sims 3 was created by the Sims Studio team.

Layoffs at Activision's Raven Software were also confirmed today.

We'll have more on this story as it becomes available.

While the top-selling console game was Prototype, with 419,000 copies sold, EA shifted an impressive 820,000 copies of The Sims 3 in the US market. And that number only includes the copies sold via traditional retail channels (stores, major mail order outlets), so when you factor in digital sales, the number may well be approaching the million-sold mark.

That's a more successful launch than the Sims 2, which "only" moved 700,000 units in the US in its first month on sale. And considering The Sims 2 is still a heavy-hitter in the PC market, we can only imagine/fear what kind of success The Sims 3 will have.

Obviously, the game stopped the NPD Group's monthly sales charts for June, but if you'd like to see what ran 2-20, the full chart is below.

1. The Sims 3 (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
2. The Sims 3 Collector's Edition (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
3. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
4. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (Blizzard Entertainment)
5. World of Warcraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
6. Spore: Galactic Adventures (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
7. World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment)
8. Spore (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
9. Empire: Total War (The Creative Assembly, Sega)
10. StarCraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
11. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (Blizzard Entertainment)
12. Reel Deal Slots Adventure (Phantom EFX)
13. Civilization IV: Complete Edition (Firaxis Games, 2K Games)
14. WarCraft III Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
15. SimCity Box (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
16. Diablo Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
17. The Sims 2: Apartment Life (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
18. Prototype (Radical Entertainment, Activision)
19. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GOTY Edition (Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks/2K Games)
20. Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Terminal Reality, Atari)

Exclusive: The Sims 3 Breaks 800K, Tops U.S. Game Sales In June [Gamasutra]

Cole used commenters' responses to his post, The Impact of Homophobia in Virtual Communities, to drive discussion among panelists Caryl Shaw (Senior Producer at EA's Maxis), Dan Hewitt (Senior Director of Communications & Industry Affairs for the Entertainment Software Association), Stephen Toulouse (Program Manager for Policy and Enforcement, Xbox Live), Cyn Skyberg (Vice President of Customer Relations at Linden Lab) and Flynn DeMarco (founder of GayGamer.net). Read on to see if you made the cut.

First up was McLuvin's comment about flaunting sexuality. Next was GameBuddy, continuing the discussion. Then came bLaZINcOdE3's comment about the "gay mafia" forcing companies to hold "token meetings." OrigamiNinja's comment about how harassment makes the game less fun made it in, as did Nnooo's about whether or not gamers can expect Mario to save a prince instead of a princess someday. User saulpimpson's comment steered talk toward developers refusing to make games based on gay or gay bashing content. Then DanoruX's tongue-in-cheek "this is so gay," statement got a discussion going on "innocent" slurs. Phydeaux's comment on "play to file" introduced the topic of abuse reporting in online communities. Lastly, ach77 made it in as part of a general statement that gay gamers just want to have fun like every other gamer – and to introduce the founder of gay-centric World of Warcraft guild, The Spreading Taint who happened to be in the audience.

Aside from being shamelessly proud of Kotaku commenters, I was interested to see how Kotaku alumnus DeMarco reacted to comments from his ex-audience. He did almost half the talking at the panel and demonstrated the most gaming expertise. Whenever an issue was raised, DeMarco could name at least two games in response whereas everyone else just fell back on their own games (like Shaw's Spore and Skyberg's Second Life) or defaulted to Halo.

The other big talker was Microsoft's Toulouse, but I think he was being targeted. At the beginning of the panel, Cole presented a video that outlined the issues facing gays and lesbians in online gaming. All of their in-game examples seemed to be from Xbox Live – most specifically, Halo multiplayer. To his credit, Toulouse responded to almost every issue raised by Kotaku comments and admitted that Xbox Live hasn't got it right quite yet – but they're committed to making their community a safe place to game for everybody.

The quietest panelist was Second Life's Skyberg. It takes all types to make a virtual world like Second Life and I know they've had issues that prompted developer Linden Lab to create an adults-only space. Skyberg did pipe up at one or two times to talk about anonymity making it easy for people to use gay slurs in online communities – and made an excellent point that as people invest in their online identities more, this anonymity goes away.

The only dull part of the panel was the Q&A. I'm not sure if it's because the two hour time limit was almost up and everybody wanted lunch, or because the audience was the choir being preached to – but nobody asked anything that hadn't been addressed. One lady asked if the "dehumanizing" aspect of violent games like Halo brought about gay bashing and DeMarco responded that the problem wasn't that the game that engendered homophobia, it was that the audience that the game tended to attract was immature and ignorant of gay issues.

In sum, this is what I took away from the panel: Don't hate the game, hate the player. Or better yet, don't hate anybody.

But it doesn't. Not really cranky, anyway. EA boss John Riccitiello can see the positives in the piracy, and - in a repeat of what he told us a few weeks back - provide a refreshingly realistic outlook on the effects of piracy on a major game release.

"You identified our secret marketing campaign!" Riccitiello says, jokingly, to IndustryGamers. "That was a very large scale – concentrated on Poland and China – demo program."

"In the game that was pirated there's [only] one city [out of two]... and Sims 3 has a massive amount of content, and a lot of it is downloaded once you register with EA... and join the online community" he elaborates. "So you get that content in addition to the second city [which is downloadable for people who register], and that's a major component... A huge amount of the gameplay is an overlay for the community, where you are sampling assets created by other people".

"So for the pirate consumer, they don't get the second town, they don't get all the extra content, and they don't get the community. It was only concentrated on Poland and China, but I think of it as not being that different than a demo."

Man has an excellent point. It's like the old shareware model that companies like id used to specialise in. Give 'em half the game, get 'em hooked, and they're more likely to buy the rest.

Works for publishers in terms of sales, works for publishers in terms of combating piracy.

EA Views Sims 3 Leak as 'Demo Program' [IndustryGamers]

There are two types of Sims player: the Second-Life types who enjoy crafting and sharing stuff online and the God-types who look for new and interesting ways to terrorize their virtual dollies. The Sims 3 has room enough for both types in its expansive gameplay and online-feature set that lets you create and share everything from couch patterns to machinima.

The once-narrow world of the Sims has been expanded to a persistent environment where Sims can freely walk from one lot to the next, the town around them progressing instead of freezing ‘til your Sim arrives on the scene. This makes the life cycle of the Sims more fluid; as your Sims grows old, so too do all the Sims around him or her. But to counter-balance the relentless flow of time, the developers have added a sixth stage of life, young adult, to the normal cycle to prolong gameplay without forcing you to buy a college-themed expansion pack.

Long six-phase life story short, The Sims 3 is packed with new and different stuff to spice up Sims gameplay we've been used to for over a decade – but here's how it stacks up as a standalone game.

Loved
The Traits System: The second-largest tweak to gameplay after the persistent world feature is the traits system. Sims can carry up to five traits in their adult life that affect their involuntary and menu-based social interactions – stuff like Couch Potato or Flirt that allow them to "Hang Out" or "Ask if Single." Different combos of traits can result in weird Sims that like to go through their neighbors gardens or have a mild psychotic episode while cooking spaghetti. Even better, baby Sims start out with two traits at birth determined by how well Mom's pregnancy went—the better it went, the more likely the user will get to pick them—and develop more based on how rough their childhood is. So if you get a sporadically ill-treated baby, you can wind up with a very strange Sim.

Young Adult Phase: It's nice to have a little extra time to climb the career ladder. Unlike the Sims 2 College Life expansion, there's no limitation to being a young adult. Being a Young Adult in Sims 3 just means more options: climb that career ladder or get married and knocked up as soon as you stopped being a teenager.

Half-tile & Diagonal Placement: Anybody whoever struggled to create perfect symmetry in the Sims or the Sims 2 will jump for joy the first time they place an item in between tiles instead of aligning them perfectly with the grid. Similarly, those obsessed with slanted things will appreciate being able to build diagonal walls that you can actually align objects with.

Who Needs Friends? In Sims past, an expanded social circle was crucial to climbing the career ladder. You needed at least 10 friends to score some promotions and that required roughly 10 phone calls a day plus 10 friend-dates every other day to build up relationships. Sims 3 cuts down on all of this tedium by not requiring a friend count for job promotions. There are, however, advantages to having tons of friends: knowing certain Sims triggers Opportunities—mini-quests where Sims might have to do some chore or stay late at work—that can score a Sim extra cash or move them up the career ladder faster. And friendships in Sims 3 are way easier to maintain; if you haven't called someone in a while, they become Distant Friends and will still show up to parties – especially if you have the Legendary Host lifetime reward.

Let There Be Shoes: The Build-a-Sim menu has been beefed up quite a lot with all kinds of color editing options and the ability to coordinate outfits, makeup and hairstyles for various events. But the best part of all is that they've finally added socks and shoes to the wardrobe menu. Fashion aficionados rejoice!

Hated
Feels Like A Real Time Strategy Game: The persistent world was cool when I was going to parks and fishing at the beach. Then I realized that you couldn't go with your Sim inside a lot of places like their workplace or the sports stadium. The user's view remained outside the building while the Sim's icon stayed in the building as they went about their business. The only impact you could have on them at all was to change their work setting to do stuff like Suck Up To Boss, Talk To Co-Workers or Slack Off; or in shops a menu would pop up, allowing you to buy and sell goods. Once I had a family full of children going to school and parents going to work, it really felt like an RTS where I would just set their orders and pull back to the Town View to watch their icons move into position and freeze for six or seven Sim hours. It was kind of boring because I always seemed to spend more time waiting for my Sims than actually playing with them; not even the fast-forward button helped balance the ratio.

Marriage Is More Complicated: A few tweaks to gameplay make the getting hitched process more complex. First, there's actually advancing a romantic relationship. There's no number value attached to Sim relationships anymore – just a bar beneath their face that grows into red or green depending on how positive or negative their interactions are with your Sim. While interacting with a specific Sim, a text bubble informs you how the other Sim feels about the interaction, like "So-and-so thinks Betty Page is being flirty." Without a number value, you can't know how close a romantic relationship is to marriage or sex or anything. You just have to watch the interaction menus and scan for "Propose Going Steady" and then later "Pop The Question" after letting your Sim and the other Sim perform enough Flirty actions to get the text bubble to say "So-and-so thinks Betty Page is irresistible" and only then can you get engaged. Now comes the wedding – like Sims 2, you either have to throw a wedding party and click on the other Sim during it to select "Get Married" (you can also do this without the party). But doing so pops up a really detailed menu where you get to pick who moves in with you and if you accidentally select the other Sim's household's "Make Active Household" button, you'll immediately exit the lot, exit the wedding and wind up in some stranger Sim's house without the married couple. The whole process felt complicated and would definitely have benefited from a tutorial section – just like every other aspect of Sim life seemed to have.

Inconsistent Standard Of Realism: Some things in the Sims 3 are more realistic – such as food going bad in the fridge – while others have become even less realistic. For example, there's no longer a changing table for infants and you can't bathe them when they get filthy; you just select Change Dirty Diaper and the babe gets spun around in the air and magically comes out clean. I could understand that certain lapses in realism just make the game more fun; nobody likes having to do laundry even in a game. However, the standard of realism doesn't always make sense and there's still plenty of tedium in the game besides baby-bathing – like having to wash dishes.

A Little Impersonal: In favor of the movie editing software, the developers have scrapped the big moment cut scenes from The Sims 2. There's no special cinematic when you finally get it on with your lover and no special ceremony when your Sims exchange rings at their wedding unless you want to capture the moment on your computer and then edit it together after the fact. For me – a God-type gamer who doesn't mess with the online stuff much – this made my Sim interactions even more impersonal than ever and I cared even less when I destroyed their lives.

The biggest flaw with the Sims 3 is that it's going to take some getting used to. Like when Sims 2 came out, not every original Sims fan was ready for all the changes and many of them were offended even at little menu tweaks. The initial changes might be tough for the first few hours. It took me about 10 hours to start appreciating the persistent world and I was still pining for pre-rendered cut scenes. But after about hour 12, I was adjusting to the changes and by hour 15, I was getting my God-type Sims fix as easily from Sims 3 as I could from Sims 2.

Other than that and the few gripes listed above, I can't say there's anything about the Sims 3 that stands out as so completely alien and wrong that it will turn off Sim fans. Even better, the menus are all intuitive enough that noobs won't be lost if they choose this installment to get hooked. Whether you're a seasoned Sims fanatic or a newcomer, though, there's got to be something in this massively massive game for you. So – get cracking, get creating and remember to update the drivers on your graphics card because that persistent city requires a lot of rendering.

The Sims 3 was developed and published by EA for PC and Mac on June 2. Retails for $49.99 USD. Played through all six phases of life and one Sim's death. Total number of babies spawned: eight, total number of marriages wrecked: two, total number of jobs held: three, total number of houses built: one and a half, total times visited the mausoleum to have my Sim mauled by a bear: three.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Hot on the heels of this morning's announcement that the Robot Chicken team was providing downloadable adventures for Spore's Galactic Adventure's expansion comes this video, proving the fact. It features one hell of a Spore rendition of the titular chicken, along with a bonus appearance by Breckin "Garfield's Jon Arbuckle" Meyer. It doesn't get much better than this.

Robot Chicken co-creators Seth Green and Matt Senreich conceptualized a special campaign for Spore Galactic Adventures, which was then handed off to their writing team to add in what in the television business is commonly referred to as "the funny". The special campaign will be available for free on June 23rd when the expansion launches.

"We're big fans of Spore, so teaming up on Spore Galactic Adventures was a natural fit and so much fun for all the guys at Robot Chicken," said Seth Green, co-creator of Robot Chicken. Co-creator Matt Senreich continued: "We're all gaming geeks, so when the Spore guys said they had an alluring proposition for us, how could we say no? Instead of creating absurd worlds with toys, this gave us the opportunity to create literally anything we wanted as gamers. Geek moment. We think that RC fans will love the pretty random and absurd adventures we created and we can't wait to goof around with the ones the fans create."

While the official announcement is a bit vague on what to expect from the new adventures, they do mention planetary rest stops, man cannons, and banana monkey wars, which are of course the three core elements of any successful science fiction project.

More information should be available soon at http://www.spore.com/wtf.

The Maxis/Electronic Arts life simulation was name-checked on the most recent episode of the NBC comedy, one of the better video game-related cameos in recent memory. Certainly better than recent video game allusions from Ghost Whisperer and The Simpsons.

And they may have even worked in a little Donkey Kong joke, a warm up to let you know that video game jokes are incoming. Or do Italians smash barrels outside of the Mario universe in situations that I'm not aware of?

30 Rock "Mama Mia" [Hulu - thanks, Haroon!]

Using Maxis' "in-house exporter", which is able to export all the "skinned, rigged meshes along with all of the textures (normal maps, specular, diffuse, gloss, etc)" of a Spore creature, toy designer Hellopike whipped up these renders of a "Cthulhoid".

They're just renders. Not pics of a real toy. But wouldn't it be great if, some day, your little bundles of alien joy could look - whether in-game or just as a figure - this damn pretty?

Cthulhoid Spore Creature Render A Go Go [GameSetWatch]

It was all looking very mysterious, with a mysterious website and a mysterious Spore-branded teaser (Find out what happens...May 19th), until Reuters went and blew the project's cover.

And that project is "Titan Maximum", a piss-take on 80's giant robot cartoons like Voltron that's due to begin airing in September. Robot Chicken producer/writer Tom Root explains:

There were always teams of extraordinary young people with the fate of the universe in their hands. In reality, that would end terribly. The last thing you want when giant monsters attack is a bunch of teenagers in charge of defending you. 'Titan Maximum' is about what would really happen if a team of idiot kids was in charge of a six-story-tall robot.

Watch the clip and you'll see that Spore is being used extensively, at least in the design process, for the show's various alien and robotic characters.

Whether it'll be used in the actual show - Spore replacing Robot Chicken's clay in the actual animation - I guess we'll find out on May 19.

"Robot Chicken" crew constructs new series [Reuters]

UPDATE - Oh no! Despite the video and the announcement hitting within a few days of each other, and both involving aliens and robots, Robot Chicken tell us they're not the same project.

Titan Maximum will be a stop-motion animation project, similar to Robot Chicken. The clip above just shows the production team helping promote the upcoming Spore: Galactic Adventures by kicking the expansion's tyres a little.

According to the Spore fanatics at Spore Illustrated, the mark was reached around 5:10pm EST yesterday, April 30. And while it's an impressive feat, we can't help but wonder how many more there'd be if EA hadn't been so strict with the penis monsters.

1 trillion? A trillion billion million? Eh, probably more.

Spore 100 Million Creations Milestone [Spore Illustrated, via VG247]

These new screens are meant to showcase a couple of things. One, that if you leave them alone, the Sims will still head out and do the stuff they love, like visiting museums, or the, uh, pool. The other, that you can make vampires in the game.

The famed digital toy maker responsible for SimCity, The Sims and Spore, is leaving video game publishing behemoth Electronic Arts to dabble in every form of entertainment from robots and toys to television shows, movies and, yes, even more video games.

Wright recently announced that he would be departing EA for his new company, Stupid Fun Club, which he describes as an entertainment think tank. The company was actually started in 2001 as a club for designing robots to compete in television's Robot Wars, he said.

At entertainment think tank Stupid Fun Club, Wright will be able to spend more of his time focusing on creating entertainment and less time worrying about how to bottle it.

Shortly after announcing his departure, Wright spoke with me about his decision. It's one, he agrees, that will allow him to be much more media neutral in his creations.

There are two ways creative things are made, he said.

"One model is the Marvel, Lucas Arts idea, where you focus on core themes," he said. "The other side is where you concentrate on developing core technologies. Then you figure out how to build a new property around these new tech-enabled experiences. "

Wright hopes that Stupid Fun Club can meld both ideas, working on concepts and themes from the bottom up. Once an idea achieves critical mass, the company would work with an external product team to turn it into something marketable.

"We will have to have a very tight working relationship with companies like EA," he said.

What excites Wright the most about his new company is the potential it will have to blend the languages of different forms of entertainment.

"You see television shows picking up the language of video games, toys borrowing from the web, it's all kind of already happening, but it's a little unnatural," he said. "We will be an entertainment company first and then figure out how to get a great TV show or video games. "

While Wright's company is already working on potential video game ideas, he seems most interesting in delving into the process of creating physical toys.

"The toy industry has almost been like the television industry, in a slow decline," he said. "Kids are growing up in this digital age, they are finding video games so compelling and centered on them that they find that a plastic toy isn't very compelling.

Wright thinks that if toys can be made to feel more personal, more about the children, they will become more compelling and thus more relevant.

"Toys gives you an interesting way of looking at the world around you," he said.

I asked Wright what he would tell people he did now that he's leaving the more familiar realm of game design.

"I don't know," he said. "I suppose entertainment designer."

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

The effects tool lets you customize your adventure by adding things like strings of Christmas lights or glowing floor panels. These things aren't like items in that they're part of the environment instead of interactive objects. You'll find them in the planet editor, along with more natural effects like rainbows and meteor showers.

Sadly, most of these new screens show off the Captain editor instead of the effects menu. The one thing they do show is a boring old sunrise. To really get an idea of what you can do with the effects tool, imagine Laser Floyd and multiply the trippy factor by ten.

Once space exploration is unlocked, players can choose the Galactic Adventure tab from the main menu and get down to some real exploring – like where you get out of your ship and walk around. This gives players more of a connection to their Captain characters, especially when you start going on quests and leveling up with experience points.

What's really going to be the draw of the Galactic Adventures, though, is the adventure editor. This is a shame because there's so much to that particular facet of the expansion that I don't feel like I got to see enough of it to really write a fair preview.

Oh well. Here goes…

What is it?
Spore Galactic adventures is an expansion pack for Spore that lets you extend the space exploration segment to actual adventure gaming – kind of like the creature phase, only now you have guns and armor and stuff.

What We Saw
I got about twenty minutes with the title toward the end of an EA press junket held in possibly the noisiest club I've ever been to.

How Far Along Is It?
The build looked pretty final to me, but the game ships June 23. It's likely Maxis is doing a very careful polish with the extra time.

What Needs Improvement?
Spare Me Spore: Whatever else this expansion accomplishes, it's not going to change anyone's mind about the game. It doesn't address all the issues critics attacked the game for; it doesn't do anything particularly new or different to the established method of playing the game. That doesn't mean it's a bad expansion – it just means it's almost exclusively "for the fans."

Wings are in the way: You play the adventure mode pretty much the same way you play the creature mode – from a behind the shoulders view. However, because it's an adventure and not a virgin planet, there is often a lot of stuff on screen at one time that narrows your field of vision (buildings, trees, cars, etc.). This kind of makes it hard to play the Captain like you would an adventure game – especially if they have wings that get in the way whenever they walk into a building-dense town to talk to an NPC.

Adventure ADD: Twenty minutes wasn't really enough time to get a handle on how intuitive the adventure editor was – but I get the distinct feeling that all of the stuff you can do (planet editing, object editing, NPC dialogue trees) will likely overwhelm more than a few seasoned Spore players. Even my demo master said he'd start to create an adventure then "get ADD" and never finish it. He'd get side-tracked by some neat gimmick he invented (like disguising mines as cakes – see below) and forget what he wanted his enemy NPCs to do when they encounter the Captain (follow, territorial, defend, etc.).

What Should Stay The Same?
The Cake is teleporter Lie: All adventures have an item component. You can make your own items or choose from an extensive selection of random stuff that Maxis has cooked up for you – and then drag and drop them into your adventure. Once you do this, you can choose to set that object's "behavior" for different parts of the adventure. Like in Act 1 of your adventure, you can put a bunch of cars down in a town, but set them to be invisible. Then, for Act 2, you can set them to visible – so that when your Captain completes Act 1, the cars magically appear before him. Or – you can disguise objects with other images; like setting down a teleporter, bur disguising it as a cake. It's a very clever game mechanic that empowers the user.

The Planet Editor: I've longed for this since the original game, so I'm glad Maxis included it. You can't really change the size of the planet, but you can customize the colors, the weather, the water-to-land ratio and drop some really weird geological formations almost wherever you want.

That pre-created "Bar Hoping" adventure: According to my demo master, the Bar Hoping adventure I chose wasn't done yet – but whatever it was, it looked cool. My Captain was put in an alley between two clubs playing loud rave music (another customizable feature) and I had to get him past the bouncers to go inside and start picking up beer bottles.

Big Bang for your Buck: There is so much stuff to do in this expansion. Sure, it's overwhelming, but never let it be said you weren't getting your money's worth.

Final Thoughts
Whatever its flaws, Spore: Galactic Adventures does exactly what an expansion is supposed to do. It expands on the original gameplay, adds a bunch of new stuff to make the purchase worthwhile and does little (if anything) to appease people who've already given the game up or never tried it in the first place. The only thing you can really fault Galactic Adventures for is possibly dabbling in the dark side of EA's expansion pack practices — but I'd wait for a Spore: IKEA expansion before getting upset about it.

Its pretty much a whole new game added onto the already existing one, once the Spore: Galactic Adventures expansion is released this June. A whole new game starring a space captain you create yourself, capable of guiding your little sporelings as they explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and just boldly go about their business.

After this week's big ghost baby reveal, I'm really looking forward to The Sims 3. But with these cloyingly sweet images comes an important public service announcement.

Happy Valentine's Day!