The 'Shroom:Issue 113/Palette Swap

Director's Notes
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Hello, everyone! I hope you're still enjoying your summer/winter/bug season! I head back to school in the next week or so, so I'm trying to get as much as I can out of these last few days of freedom.

We have some very good sections for you this month, but we are in need of new sections as well, in a big way. If you want to write for us, please send a completed application to Henry Tucayo Clay on the forums. Got a new idea that you want to discuss? Send me a PM and we can talk about any new ideas you might have before you submit an application.

With that all out of the way, let's get to everything we have for you all this month!

~FunkyK38

Section of the Month
Another great turnout! Thank you to everyone who voted, and please keep voting for your favorite section!

wins in a landslide victory with a section of mods from New Super Mario Bros. Wii! Congratulations!

What's on the Box?
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Donkey Kong. The only word I can describe him as is... bananas. But we should be glad that we have games like Tropical Freeze to keep us company at night. It's good that Nintendo kept the Kongs as a consistent series, instead of discarding them and later "rebooting" them terribly. But that sometimes makes us wonder: what if DK became a possession of Microsoft and went down the Banjo-Kazooie root? An artist named KongFan answers this burning question with a hypothetical box-art for a game titled simply "Donkey". The most prominent feature of this work is the big gorilla himself facing away from us and looking into a fire. Could this hint at his character being a distant one, always looking back into the regret filled past of destruction that we know as "The Great Ape War". This is entirely speculative, but perhaps in this reimagined plot, Donkey Kong chose the path of crime to provide him and his family with bananas, but the solo art seems to indicate that the protagonist is a lone monkey. Maybe the game focuses on reuniting the Kongs together? Who knows in this theoretical world of rebooted destruction. We are never shown a shot of gameplay, but judging by the DK model used to render the SNES sprites in his first Country game, he could be returning to his roots. I believe that there may even be a new gimmick, such as car levels or a mechanical theme. Imagine that! "Donkey: Nuts and Bolts". I'm sure people would love that. My last point I'd like to make is the hint of blue flame in the corner. I can only think of one character capable of producing that: Dry Bowser. But, y'know, that's unlikely. It would probably be Dry Tiki Tak before a crossover. But lastly, one final question: will K. Rool be in it?

In your hypothetical dreams.

Game Mods
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Greetings, fellow readers, I, Baby Luigi, am here to write about another hack, which of course, you should know now just by reading this section. It's nearly the end of summer break now, and school should begin for some of you unlucky folks. But even with school in the way, the love and passion and modding still burns brightly, as hot as the summer heat where I live in.

This month of Game Mods, I'll be talking about a pretty major and big hack. First, though, I'll ask you a question: do you know Spore? If not, I'll give you a quick run-down through it, or you could just read the article I linked you. Anyway, Spore is a 2008 video game developed by Maxis, best known for their primarily PC series, The Sims, also published by EA. The game is basically a sandbox creation tool, where you create your own creatures and make them evolve through various stages, first starting out a cell, walking on the land as a creature, forming a tribe, then a city, and finally venturing through space in their spaceship. The catch is that much of the important assets you create yourself. If you create a plethora of other creatures, you might catch them wandering around in your world, or as space-faring alien civilizations. In the civilization stage and space stages, you create vehicles and buildings yourself. The game is extremely customizable, and boasts probably one of the best asset editor out there, with its extremely simple to use interface, having a great ton of parts to choose from, and the ability to manipulate parts, where it be stretching them, shrinking them, and so on. You also get outfitters to play with your creature as they evolve. While the gameplay itself is nothing spectacular most fans of Spore would agree that the creation tools are the main reason they go back to it, and the biggest praise the game has received. In fact, some regard Spore as not really as a game but as a tool to create some art.

Unfortunately, Spore hasn't received much support, at least in comparison with The Sims. It received few spin-offs and only one expansion pack, Spore: Galactic Adventures and while the expansion has a very powerful adventure editor and new creature parts to play with, making it a worthy expansion pack to the original Spore, it simply wasn't enough. Then along came Darkspore. Although only tangentially related to Spore in terms of gameplay, as it was a dungeon crawler-styled RPG in a similar manner to the Diablo video game series, it was also developed by Maxis, published by EA, and borrowed many parts from Spore as well has having the customization part borrowed from Spore's creature editor.

Why do I talk about Darkspore? Because one day, a person named Davo has decided to port some of the various Darkspore parts to Spore, and thus, the Dark Injection mod was created, the biggest and most popular Spore mod out there.



What does this mod add? Plenty of things. First of all, all parts that are featured in Darkspore become usable in your Spore editor. This means a lot more parts to play with, so therefore, more ways to customize your creature, and you can near perfectly recreate the player characters in Darkspore. Second, it also features custom-built parts from other users of the community, and many other concept parts not featured in Darkspore itself.

The Darkspore mod also enables you to use civilization, space, and captain outfitter parts, something you may not normally use in the creature stage, making creatures that require such parts even easier to build, as it does not require you switching back and forth between editors constantly. I will also mention that limitations of creating your creature such as limited DNA points (used to spend on parts) and the complexity meter (think of it as the Block limit from Super Mario Maker) are lifted, meaning you can make your creatures as complex as the game and your computer allows it. Another thing that the Darkspore injection adds is the ability for invisible assets. You can add invisible legs, invisible arms, invisible mouths, and different abilities without having it seen, hence why it's possible to have my Baby Luigi appear to not have any mouths at all, or you can create Rayman-like characters, or floating characters like Boo. In core Spore, you are unable to create floating characters or parts without use of hard-to-use glitches. I also use invisible parts to my advantage: my Baby Luigi creature actually uses invisible limbs for the arms, as I don't want his skin showing where the sleeves of his arms are supposed to be. Any of you who has played Spore, at least until the space stage has heard about the evil race of creatures who inhabit the central part of the galaxy called the Grox, right? Well, the Darkspore injection lets you use their parts freely as well.



One more thing is that the Darkspore injection lets you use new abilities as well as the standard Bite, Strike, Spit, Sing, and all of that jazz. Now you can make your creature shoot out lasers, beams of light, and body beatdown your worst enemies to death. If you have Spore: Galactic Adventures, these abilities can lead to...interesting ways to kill creatures I guess, as you can see all of that in action if you make your creatures attack others.

Though you can't go around creating good creatures without some talent and knowledge of how the game works in the editors (for example, my first Baby Luigi creations aren't, uh, the best at all, compared to my most recent revision), and unless you're a seasoned Spore creator yourself like me, you can't really replicate what I have done in these screenshots, these Darkspore parts and some of the cheats it comes along with it certainly helps create characters as alike to their base version as possible.

I don't really have much to say other than it includes new parts, because that's mostly what Spore is all about, building your world with the tools provided, especially with Spore: Galactic Adventures. People often bash Spore for not meeting expectations, and although they are to some extent correct, Spore is a beautiful programming feat for artists and world builders alike, and Spore: Galactic Adventures alone ranks as one of my favorite games of all time. In my opinion, Spore is meant to be played with the creating tools, not for the average click and watch stuff happens gameplay. Because of its tools is one of the many reasons mods are being worked for it, and even after the sad death of Maxis and probably the official death of the Spore franchise, the Darkspore injection mod is still being worked on today, alongside many other mods so Spore will continue to live on in the fan's hearts, as well as mine.

External links:


 * Official Dark Injection page
 * Spore wikia page on Dark Injection

Ongoing Fan Projects
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Take Cover!
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HI, everyone! I'm your illustrious Stats Manager, Tucayo, here with the a new edition of Take Cover! Let's get right to it!

I hadn't shown any video game music, but it was not a conscious omission, rather it was simply the fact that I had other songs slotted for the previous issues. The cover I'm showing you this month was performed by Imagine Dragons and the legendary Koji Kondo at The Game Awards 2014; it's a medley of The Legend of Zelda's Fairy Fountain Theme, Song of Healing, and the Zelda overworld theme, capped of by a duet performance of Imagine Dragon's It's Time. Oh, and the performance is introduced by Reggie himself. The medley itself is simply beautiful and Mr. Kondo's piano on It's Time is quite good and gives the song a completely different feel; all in all, an excellent performance (and much better than . And a small piece of trivia; the Fairy Fountain Theme is actually a remix of Water Land's in Super Mario Bros. 3.

By now you have surely realized I love covers, but there's one specific type of cover I particularly enjoy: all-star covers. These amalgamations of artists from different genres and different styles are disliked by many but I always find them to be great. OK, maybe, but even when they're bad they make for an interesting listen. Anyway, this is one of my favorite all-star covers, and it's The Beach Boys' God Only Knows, as covered by the BBC's "Impossible Orchestra". This supergroup is formed by 27 diverse musicians, accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra. And brace yourselves because I'm about to name all musicians, by appearance order: Martin James Bartlett (playing the celesta, Pharrell Williams, Emeli Sandé, Elton John, Lorde, Chris Martin (of Coldplay), Brian Wilson (of The Beach Boys), Florence Welch (of Florence + the Machine), Kylie Minogue, Stevie Wonder, Eliza Carthy, Nicola Benedetti (playing violin), Jools Holland (playing piano), Brian May (playing electric guitar), Jake Bugg, Katie Derham (playing violin), Tees Valley Youth Choir, Alison Balsom (playing piccolo trumpet), One Direction, Jaz Dhami, Paloma Faith, Chrissie Hynde, Jamie Cullum, Baaba Maal, Danielle de Niese, Dave Grohl, and Sam Smith. All profits made from the single were destined to Children in Need, as was the case with the, which honestly, is not such a good cover.

Suicide Squad is now out so that means Jared Leto is relevant again. I didn't like his Joker at all, but something I did like is Thirty Seconds to Mars' cover of one of my all-time favorite songs; U2's Where the Streets Have No Name. I'm always very critical of covers of my favorite songs, but 30 Seconds and the accompanying choir gave their own spin to this rock classic and it worked out quite well. The cover was most famously performed by Leto and company for an episode of MTV Unplugged, of which you can see the video. Even if they are not your cup of tea, you should give this cover a chance.

You may remember last month I told you Rockin' 1000 would be playing a concert in their hometown; well, that concert took place a couple of weeks ago and we were left with some terrific covers such as, which you can listen to on repeat until we meet again next month!