Spore/YMMV

• Awesome Music: Galatic Adventures has Ambush and Epic Adventure (Skip to 0:06)
  • Slow the "Epic Adventure" music down and it sounds like something from an epic boss fight.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: It's all too easy to get attached to certain parts and to use those in all your creations.
  • Ditto for Galactic Adventures, in which everyone uses warrior parts because they're the best weapons.
• Demonic Spiders: The Grox.
• Game Breaker: If you manage your Tribe well enough to start as an economic Civilization, no other empire will automatically hate you (whereas Religious societies and Military societies automatically start as antagonists), your vehicles are almost never attacked, and you gain money by your method of conquering (which also requires money, but whatever). Because of this, you can win the stage just by allying with one or two cities using your substantial cashflow, and buying all the rest.
  • Also, the Tribal Stage can be made ridiculously easy by going social since giving gifts will always bring other tribes to a (temporarily) ambivalent opinion even if said tribe already declared yours their sworn enemy. Bringing their relationship higher then becomes a mere matter of taking at most your entire tribe to perform for them, since enemy tribes are so easily appeased and their opinion of yours will never sour after getting a content face unless you are stupid enough to attack them.
    • Even more so if you have the "Fireworks" special ability, which temporarily raises a tribe's relationship to you to "friend" even if they were your sworn enemy before.
      • The "Fireworks" ability can actually be used as an offensive weapon by attack a tribe then after a little bit use the "fireworks" and suddenly they are friendly to you then finish them off before they know what is happening.
  • The Zealot archetype in the Space Stage has Fanatical Frenzy which instantly captures an enemy colony, but comes at the price of a half-hour cooldown time and a severe relationship penalty with nearby empires, enough for them to declare war on you if you didn't attempt to raise relationships beforehand. However, the former can be mitigated by simply reloading the save file, and since you can automatically steal an enemy colony, it ultimately doesn't matter what they think of you.
    • Especially useful against the Grox since rarely are other empires near enough to them for the penalty to matter and the Grox actually like you to use it, even if it's on them.
    • To a lesser degree, reloading also makes the Diplomat's Static Cling a Game Breaker as it immobilizes the enemy into being unable to attack, and this doesn't come with a relationship penalty.
  • The "Refill Motives" cheat. Getting hungry and can't find food? Refill motives. Tribe member or vehicle low on health? Refill motives. Running out of energy far away from your home planet, nearly broke, and don't have the Shaman superpower? Refill motives! Since the No Fair Cheating penalty is just a lack of achievements, if you are willing to cheat, you will use this a lot.
  • Giving your captain wings (especially for the starter missions) will make everything way easier.
    • Even easier if you give him high-jumping feet to supplement the flying.
    • Stealth is also one. The only thing that will harm the captain are "Kamikaze Creatures", creatures that have the sole purpose of picking up a bomb and moving over to the captain and waiting for it to explode. And unlike the creature stage, your invisibility will last forever unless you take damage or attack something.
    • The ecologist parts; mostly because they allow for health recovery and even the level one health capacity increase adds roughly double your health level. Just having the first two will really make things a little easier if your captain doesn't have a whole lot of health.
  • Be a herbivore. Find the biggest, meanest, most ruthlessly combat optimised creature you can find. Use Siren Song. Make friends with it. Go on interspecies murder spree with bottomless army of expendable goons.
  • Herbivore, Adaptable, Friendly, Religious. You now have the Return Ticket ability and Speed Demon perk. Enjoy your ability to instantly teleport out of danger, repair at your home world and get back to the front lines before your enemy has had a chance to recover from your assault. Random teleportation murder is fun!
• Good Bad Bug: If you have Galactic Adventures and use the Holo-scout, the colonist outfit for your creature is replaced with the captain outfit. This opens up new opportunities allowing you to make colonists that use otherwise restricted parts for the colonists. This can, however, lead into a problem as you cannot remove the captain parts afterward.
  • The Creature Creator's Asymmetry Glitch and Invisible Limb Glitch won't affect gameplay, but they greatly increase the game's creative potential, allowing you to make lopsided creatures before patch 1.05, Hive Minds, Raymanian Limbs, and all sorts of other fun stuff. Some mods make the glitches easier to use, and unlike many modded creatures, they can be loaded onto the public server.
    • Asymmetry became an Ascended Glitch in a patch a little bit before Galactic Adventures was released.
• Hate Dumb: Some people feel that Spore is really a big piece of crap and a giant toy for little kids (and probably haven't even played it. See Hype Backlash for some other reasons.
  • It's ridiculous. First they're angry about how the game didn't turn out the way they wanted. Then, to remedy this, Maxis made a "Creepy and Cute" parts pack, full of gruesome-looking parts and paint-jobs (well, also some cute ones, but these, too, can be made gruesome-looking if you're creative). How do they respond? They boycott it because it costs 20 dollars. Well, they basically said that it wasn't a true expansion pack, despite the fact that it was a PARTS PACK, not an expansion pack! Then Galactic Adventures comes out, which everyone except them is excited about. Why? Because it happened to be easy enough for an 8-year old to figure out and didn't come with all the complex functions that they dreamed of using to make Game Maker-esque adventures. One reviewing member of the Sporum gave it a 16/30. The only justifiable complaints really center around the "Robot Parts" Dr. Pepper promotion, because the sodas are only available in the United States and had problems unlike the Creepy and Cute parts pack. To make it worse, the deadline of the parts was extended to the end of 2011 but the codes of no longer being made. Some think that the parts will be availible to everyone once the promotion finally ends.
    • And then Maxis made yet another attempt to please some of the older players who weren't satisfied with Spore by making Darkspore, a Darker and Edgier spinoff of Spore. Cue the players yammering on about how Maxis was just trying to make a "hardcore Spore" to coverup the "failure" that Spore was and how it won't be able to compete with similar Action-RPG titles like Diablo. Also, many complained about Spore having a lack of blood and violence because Old Spore had it, but when Darkspore sceenshots revealed what they wanted, they complained that there was ‘too much blood’. Maxis attempted to fix this by giving the option to replaced the blood effects with E-DNA.
  • Also in Galactic Adventures, don't dare make a Clark & Stanley spoof; you will be burnt alive by more serious adventure makers. Unless the adventure is satire or a real, quality piece of work, unlike the 'adventures' that many people made starring the duo.
    • It should be worth noting that the original fans of Old Spore (which is the version of Spore as seen in the 2005 and 2006 demo) declared that not only Spore is a dissapointment, it's the BIGGEST dissapointment in gaming history and nothing will ever top it. OK, they really didn't say that, they just said it was a really big dissapointment.
• Fetish Retardant: Just go ahead and make yourself a female captain... She'll have a very "commanding" voice.
  • This is so problematic for many adventure makers that a voice editor is in fact, being petitioned to EA to be in the next patch or upgrade.
    • It can be remedied by giving the character a bird mouth. As long as the character is a NPC and not the captain, it will use a chittering, high-pitched voice.
• Holy Shit Quotient: For every player, the first time they saw an Epic Creature trundling around.
• Hype Backlash: Big time. Parts of the game were first demoed years before the game was finally released to great excitement, and the hype grew from there. When the game was finally released, it was painfully obvious not all of the demoed features made it into the final product, resulting in a ton of Hype Backlash. Even trying to take the game on its own merits, many reviewers gave it So OK Its Average scores. However, even if it didn't live up to the hype, it has been far from a failure; with a huge user community, many wonderful creations, successful expansion packs and companion games.
  • But this still doesn't stop people from throwing a fit though.
• Lethal Joke Character: Lethal Joke Weapon, in this case. The Shaman Parts, while using up no captain energy, deal much less damage than the energy-guzzling Warrior parts, and only two of them do any damage at all. But the "Summon Swarm" weapon has an interesting quirk. It summons a swarm of bees to torture and distract an enemy for several seconds, making the enemy run around screaming in pain. If you use it when the enemy is near lava, he will run around on air unaffected by gravity and fall into the lava when the swarm wears off. Got a high-health enemy you could never beat? Got some lava around? Use the Summon Swarm!
• Memetic Mutation" Somewhat. The Clark and Stanley adventures are painfully popular within the casual Spore community because of the easily gained points and humorous deaths. Sturgeon's Law applies to nearly all of them, unsurprisingly.
  • The Hugmonster and for the forums, the emoticone.
• Misblamed (Will Wright personally took responsibility for the controversial shift in game direction from "Science" to "Cute" when one of his teammates was accused. People still like to place the blame elsewhere, for various reasons.
  • Also, many claim that the reason why Will Wright left EA is because his game was ruined by the people who published it. This is not true but the reason why Will left is because he wanted to work for The Stupid Fun Club, which is a company he formed with his friends. But Will says that EA will still publish games, so nothing really major happened.
• Moral Event Horizon: Allying with the Grox could be considered one. Everyone except for your closest allies will want to kill you. Even species you've uplifted afterwards.
• Most Annoying Sound: The sound of your communicator beeping as your colonies and allies beg you to save them from pirates/ecodisaster/invasion for the millionth time; while you are busy handling another person's crisis, on the other side of the galaxy. Luckily, patches, fan-made mods, and improvements that can be bought in the game tone this down and take care of it for you.
• The Scrappy: Adventure Town. Many user-created missions are basically "blow up Adventure Town/Adventure Town sucks/Monsters attack Adventure Town".
  • Don't forget Clark and Stanley.
• That One Level: TX-5000 Superweapon is very difficult for what should be an easy Maxis adventure, and requires specialized captains.
• What Could Have Been: Spore was originally designed as a game with more science basing. Somewhere along the line, the "Scientifically Accurate" team and the "Cute and Fun" team got into a stand off, with the Cute and Fun team winning the argument in the end. Considering the fuzzy feel of the game is one of the key issues (and Will Wright taking the bullet for that side), one wonders how the game would have ended up if the other side won.