*whimpers* SPORE : Galactic Adventures seems to have vanished from my computer.... the start icon's gone and I can't find it anywhere on the harddrive.... what happened? D8

I don't want to have to do it all over from scratch.....

EDIT : And now, even odder, it seems to be running fine - but it still isn't showing up with I run an autosearch of the harddrive. Very peculiar

If there's one problem with Spore : Galactic Adventures ( apart from a snapshot bug that makes some adventures unsharable, and certain shortcuts in game physics that makes the enclosing volume of any building completely opaque to NPCs even if the building consists of four widely spaced posts... ) it's the fact that half the players appear to be illiterate. Sure I've had the occasional spelling error or duplicate word sneak through the first round of proof-reading, but, Oh, the pain of random capitalisation! The spelling! The grammar! I can't recommend it to Purrdence or other professional English-speakers. You'll burst a blood vessel.

You'll probably burst a blood vessel in some of mine, too... but only because of the puns. There's a particularly gratuitous one about a sentient sun in "The Green Marauder".

A few new characters and sets I think I'll re-use, too. Including one Grald Corsair Captain, Chlanda Bludd, wanted for grand larceny, murder, and impersonating a priest; and his parrot, Rodney. He's fun.

Been having a lot of fun with Spore : Galactic Adventures. For one thing I can really go to town on alien cities, with hundreds of buildings, flying machines zooming around in every direction, strange vehicles thundering along roads, and busy crowds all chatting or shouting or running in screaming panic. Admittedly the crowds do tend to thin out a bit when the citizens stroll out into oncoming traffic.

I can build hideously complicated mazes as well - such as the one I'm using as the corridors of the Mukpukukmukpluk Cheese Foundry, where they have a rogue Edam on the loose ( and the room full of giant cheese mites is genuinely disturbing); or the aerial platforms of an experimental spice mine on a gas giant, where only half the teleport pads are working, and you have to jump between the rest in the middle of a howling hurricane.

Writing the dialogue and cut scenes is fun, too - the dialogue for Wynan, Cheese Knight in Cheese Beast! is especially silly. :D

Future adventures planned - The Goodies episode Kitten Kong, a sequel to Skyfall! and Cheese Beast! and a zombie bash complete with allies succumbing to infectious bites. So far my creations have been well-recieved. Should be fun :D

Spore : Galactic Adventures hit the stores yesterday. Naturally I promptly procured a copy. It's an expansion for the Space stage, enabling you to design and share missions and adventures for your Captain and the redshirts Away Team to beam down into. It's great, although I must find how to get back into the tutorial. It gives me an opportunity to use all my themed building sets I've done in the past into coherent narratives, or indeed, pile them up into a passable city. Writing dialogue for my creatures is fun too.

I've put one simple adventure up already - a simple little rescue mission called 'Dem Dry Bones', where you investigate a crashed starship, dodge the giant iridescent scorpions, kick away the head-sized tardigrades trying to climb up your legs, and go find the surviving crew before they die of thirst or resort to cannibalism.

I've run my choice of Captain through a few missions, too. Vitus, naturally - is anybody even remotely surprised by that? Appropriately, his first two real missions were a little bit of magical warfare, and a dungeoncrawl. But nothing explains the dancing Frou-Frou Bunnies & exploding pies of 'Adventure Town', or the way Vitus dances whenever he succeeds at a mission. Clearly somebody has been slipping him strong drugs.

So... Anybody want to see any adventures in particular?

Kate! I promised you a Manticore to go with Tarkus so they could have a WAR.

Here you go :D



Also the Grasshopper thing and the pterodactyl - which for some reason has rendered as three separate frames overlaid. dunno why.

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You know you're playing Spore too much when your WIFE dreams about it. In this case, she was starring in Spore : The Musical, one of a cast of millions in a choreographed acrobatics scene building a planet.

Been rather long since I was given these Too Much Information Spore challenges.

For wirrrn, a crab with the parasite Sacculina.

( All Your Reproduction Belong To Us )

And then there's the delicious_irony's Salps.

( Trailer Trash Of The Sea )

tigris helped me get Spore working again - hooray! now, the Creepy & Cute pack purrdence bought me doesn't crash the game!

Of course now it has to download my entire Sporepedia again - and I'm uncertain if I'm going to loose any any critters yet - certainly, there's a LOT missing from what I have so far :(((

re Sporn. I suppose it was going to happen someday, but at least I'm not making Penisaurs and their deadly enemies the Vaginadactyls. (what would their ecology be anyway? - better phrase than "which would fill the carnivore slot?")

Anyway. I made an anatomically correct Vitus. Hooray for a menu of parts so versatile you can use them in ways the designers never intended. You can even tell what religion he isn't.

"Oh, it even swings about when he walks"

Admittedly, this means a tribe of naked hyenas all apparently male and frequently openly lusting after each other, but then, that's entirely accurate for spotted hyenas anyway (even if that little datum of biological accuracy was never a feature of the Auran gnolls )

But why, oh why, if the ranged attack weapons I built into the design ( "I cast Magic Missile!") are hidden inside the wands he's carrying, why does the spit attack animate as him bringing both hands to his crotch and pelvic thrusting?

BBWAAAHHAAHHAAHAA HAA

The Pineapples made it to The Core!

Quite a satisfying start to the year - the Pukusian empire now runs in a continuous strip from the outermost reaches of the galaxy to the supermassive black hole in the Hub. (well, it was - my outposts along the finally stretch are getting big chunks taken out of them by the Grox.)

And my, wasn't what we found in the Core worth it :D :D :D

But it was going to happen anyway - once the Grox discovered my listening post cunningly disguised as a wrecked Pukusian spacecraft, the Coldest War became unavoidably Hot, and if I was going to be down in the Hub anyway, then I might as well go see why every fossil civilisation in the galaxy tried to do the same thing.



So, all out warfare it is - we're currently carving our way back out again, with giant transforming mecha, fungal parasites designed to give the Grox terminal thrush, and our cat Asti with a rocket engine glued to his back (let's see how the Grox like being woken up at 6 every morning by a monstrously oversized housecat punching them in the head and demanding food)



regarding 2008 - thank fuck that's over with.

Been playing Spore again, this time with the high definition graphics running. Snow crystals drifting across the screen! Pollen clouds! White Giant stars boiling up through the morning mist over the spice mines! Getting to watch Eric Cartman getting blown to pieces in glorious slow motion!

That last one probably requires a bit of explanation. For the last few weeks of play I've been using the far end of the spiral arm as a testing ground - dropping simple ecosystems with lots of Meat Gobbet variety, and sending in the Black Monoliths. Naturally I've been keeping all the valuable planets for myself.

The result is my Pukusians holding an almost total monopoly on blue, pink, green and purple spice, and surrounded by several dozen different Bite-Sized Meat Gobbet Pocket Empires, with the occasional local, or Beer-Flavoured, or Species-The Monolith-Landed-On-By-Mistake civilisations for variety, on every barely habitable red or yellow hell-planet in the area.

Funnily enough they didn't seem to hold this against me. It's good to be the King patron species God.

But it did start to get a bit confusing, especially when one lot of Bite-Sized Meat Gobbets would start yelping about how they're being attacked by Bite-Sized Meat Gobbets when there's already two other identical wars already going on elsewhere.

So the Pukusians have reluctantly decided that all this cultural diversity is getting in the way of an efficient galaxy, so they'll have to go.

Which has been easy enough to do. I just picked a single planet of Meat Gobbet with a supertech I want to acquire later, and slip them a few sporebucks to invade everybody in sight. I put economic pressure on the rest until they're forced to sell me their homeworld. Buying out the Dalek Empire was quite satisfying.

The two-prong plan has worked surprisingly well. These Meat Gobbets now outnumber me, at least up this end of the galaxy. Indeed, as of last night they're surging ahead, swallowing up a dozen systems in one
hit when I only wanted them to put a bit of pressure on one. This is just a bit alarming. I may have to stop encouraging them.

I did feel guilty about the demise of all these empires, but it's not like the Meat Gobbets are committing genocide - they're the Life-devoted ecologist cultural type. So they're probably just levelling the target's cities and enslaving the survivors to toil in their underground sugar mines.

Anyway, when one of the systems on the map lights up, and I'm not too busy planting colonies in any system that looks vaguely interesting, I can toddle along to check the progress of the war - set up a picnic blanket on a nearby hill and watch as a fleet of Coca-Cola Polar Bears bombs the Baby Unicorn capital to the ground. And if one of the random buildings the program has installed is the Eric Cartman, I get to watch as Cartman explodes with internal floors, windows, etc collapsing to the ground in a cloud of dust.

My, but my old allies back around the homeworld are going to get such a shock when an endless armada of rabid hippie sentient tissue cultures swarm down out of the Trailing Arm...



( Tip for any Sporecast players reading this - tagging your buildings with, for example, set:pukusiancovert, will ensure the program selects a matching set of buildings when it's populating alien cities - in this case underground bunkers disguised as rocky hills, as used by the Pukusians in the Coldest War.)

Kate! For your amusement, based on the infamous Prog Rock album covers you linked to in your recent post, I present!

Tarkus!



Not a bad likeness, I feel.

(You may also not the much improved quality of the render - it turns out I'm been playing with the lowest graphics setting all these months)

Right, as I promised crypticgirl, a Spore millipede plus essay



Detritovore arthropods, of the order Diplopoda, most well known for their very large number of legs, which exceeds 700 pairs in some species. The largest around today is a little over 15 inches long. The largest we know about was just a little bit bigger.

( AAAAAARRRRRHHHHHH )

Camel,you say, stawberi?

I even have the horrifying data ready, because I already written an essay about them. This entry, about camels and their Giant Pulsating Organs.

Thus - one dromedary, with pulsating love organ and bucket of spit.



I even gave him a Spit attack :D

Response to more Spore challenges.

stawberi requested

With regard to Australiana, I'd like to see some sort of puppet/mascot. Agro. Dickie Knee. Dooper Dog. Fat Cat. Humphrey B Bear. Whatever is possible.

None of them were possible!!! *sobs*

leecetheartist wrote:

Okay, a BBQ. With T-bone and sausages.

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wirrrn wrote:

A Shoggoth? And perhaps a Deep One?

Shoggoth was done earlier :)

myrystyr wrote in response to my suggestion of an Aurastorm sporecast

Aurastorm - *unearths D&D modules*

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wirrrn wrote:

The Magic Pudding!

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Next challenge - suggest a real-life animal or microbe ( the plant editor hidden inside Spore, she is broke ) and I'll create it in Spore, and given you an essay about it, in gut-wrenching detail.

Combat Wombat

Spore Shoggoth teaching the spawn how to rip off any passing heads.

\

I'm rather pleased with them. Alas, Spore seems to lack "Tekeli-li! Tekili-li!" as a soundbite

Was making stuff for the Aurastorm Sporecast, got to Pit Vipers, and thought - hmm - these guys are evolutionarily convergent of some of our Australian elapids ( yes, I do think like that ) and so made a Death Adder, too.



Death Adders, of the genus Acanthophis, are Australasian elapids of infamous venomosity. They easily rank in the top ten deadliest snakes in the world, and some authorities put them at #5. They are indeed very viper-like, with robust bodies, triangular heads, and a bite that can kill you stone dead. They're called Death Adders for a reason - it pays to advertise. Before the development of the anti-venom, there was a 50% chance a bite would kill you within two days. They're still that deadly in Papua New Guinea, where anti-venom is in short supply.

However, they are not related to true vipers, pit vipers, or or any of the other crotalids/viperids found elsewhere in the world. Death adders have simply evolved along convergent lines - or rather, as we like to think about it, we've got real Death Adders and the rest of the world has to make do with half-arsed copies such as water-moccasins and rattlesnakes. Interestingly, Death Adder venom is purely neurotoxic - it doesn't need the blood or muscle poisons others snakes include. Although it's doubtful you'd be in any position to appreciate the distinction as your lungs seize up.

The tip of the tail - narrow and segmented - is used as a lure to attract prey. The snake will pick a nice spot, and bury herself in the leaf-litter or sand, with only the tip of her tail and her head visible. Then she'll twitch it, until some passing bird or insectivore notices and comes looking for an easy meal. And indeed, an easy meal is soon provided. For the snake.

Here's one twitching away in response to a passing dead rat. Notice the speed of the strike - a record-breaking 0.13 seconds to strike, bite, envenomate, and return is not at all unusual for a Death Adder.



Alas, I can't find any of the lovely footage of them doing this in the wild, altho here's a lovely example of an African Puff Adder using the same trick. Most of it seems to be captive specimens, and there's a lot of captive specimens. Indeed, they're very popular pets for the more experienced herpephile. This gentleman for example is endearingly enthusiastic about his, even as one of them has a go at the camera he's holding.

They are amazingly placid snakes, usually. Take for example, the wild one in the video below. The bloke happily lies down nearby and lets her climb over his hand, and allows itself to be handled without retaliation. Of course, if YOU try something like this, you're a fucking idiot.

Oooh, exosketetal limbs! I'm going have *fun* with those. Thanks for the heads-up about the patch, and the expansion, MrTeufel.

Also, I got my first blue approval ratings! Yay! Creations of mine that have received enough up-rating clicks to rise above 'indifferent'. Being so hungry for approval as I am, I'm delighted. Below are my most popular creations.



Of course If I get any more popular I risk getting involved in the Rating Wars - where arseholes are exploiting bugs in the EA website to boost their own ratings, and spend hours hammering down anything actually creative that makes it onto the Featured, or Most Popular lists....

For Calafin - some anthro Phins

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Ideas for future Sporecasts - Aurastorm! Of course I'll have to try and remember every species we ran into.... care to remind me, myrystyr?

Unless there's more Australiana you'd like me to attempt, hit me with suggestions for the Cthulhu Mythos sporecast :D

Meat Pie Floater, with sauce