Spore

[chris330 0]

Sounds like yet another example of companies getting too big for their boots and taking decisions at too high levels without consulting those on the shop floor. 3 installs must sound fine when debating it in a big office in some flashy skyscraper where brand new computers with ultra-gHz processors and silly amounts of mega expensive consumer goods are vastly abundant, but what they then forget is that their product is used & made or broken by the reaction of end users.

I hear the latest thing in operating systems is online hosted software where your computer basically just becomes a data host and graphic displayer. Apparently it's the future. Looks like that'll be the end for Microsoft and their 100% anti-customer attitude and they thoroughly deserve it too from what I hear.

Looks like EA are running the risk of making the same mistake of becoming detached from reality and abusing common sense. It never pays in the long run.

[max power 21]

The question I would like to as is why Spore owners are finding this out from some independent offtopic game board AFTER their purchase? If you buy some software and you get it home and read the EULA and you don't agree, what can you do? Significant information about the EULA should be available to consumers before they purchase the game. You don't buy a car first, then test drive it, then make a decision (ie. Now that I've been able to drive the car I own, I've found that this car only works on Sundays, but I thought I was buying a car to get me to work everyday). Now that copy protection features are getting ridiculous and may actually turn you away from buying a game, I think we need this information up front and in writing before the purchase. If it is available, then we need to get more savvy in dealing with these DRM schemes. They are only going to get worse in the future.

[sparks50 0]

Well said plaintiff.

[Baff1 0]

In all fairness - outcry against Starforce caused Ubisoft to reject and release....

No it didn't, "outcry" made no difference to Ubisoft at all.

They removed it when the court ordered them to.

This method of DRM is here to stay or until someone successfully prosecutes the company using it.

Three installs only, goes a long way to countering the secondhand market that publishers hate so much.

[Shadow NX 1]

If the numbers are correct they already got something to think about.

Sources like www.bigchampagne.com say from 1 to 11 of September there were over 171.402 illegal Spore downloads.

Many games dont even get sold in such numbers over a year.

[Hoot1988 0]

well i got spore the day it was released in the UK but was going on holiday on that day so i installed it to my macbook. I was rather pissed at first as i had to pay for a internet connection at Gatwick to register it online at first and then it still wouldnt register. something about a bug on the mac version. so i had to install a crack to get it working without internet connection.

Im planing to install it to my windows desktop as soon as i get back to uni, im assuming that this 3 licencing thing is only recorderd over the internet and not the disks itself?

Im rather bored of the game already, but that could be that im missing the user created content online that populates your world with other players creations and not just the standard maxis ones + i only got as far as the tribal phase, then the game crashed:(

Ive played the sims since its conception and one of the first PC games i ever played was Sim city, I bought all the expansions for the sims 1 and 2 and am feeling that im unlikley to buy the ones for spore unless the game gets alot better on my desktop.

Oh and spore origins for iphone SUCKS!!!!!!!

Oh and this is nothing too new. any itunes users should know that you can only authorize your music you buy on 5 machines at a time. But you can de-authorize them when ever you wish, and once every 12 months you can reset alll your authorizations. And apple support (as always) was good with me when id ran out of authorizations. (please dont scath me as i have amacbook ipod touch and like apple support. Apple rock ok! i just wish ARMA 2 comes out on mac then i may get a mac desktop.)

[Messiah 2]

my first run through I found boring, but I realised that I was going about it the wrong way. I was trying to move through the stages as quickly as possible, instead of letting evolution do its thing, and see how my creature evolves.

been sitting on the land phase for a while now, exploring everything I can.

[Baff1 0]

Good review of it here.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/218-Spore

[Infam0us 10]

Good review of it here.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/218-Spore

All of his reviews are good ... And to be totally fair I prefer his method of Interviewing as it tends to be more honest.

[-Snafu- 78]

Link

Came across this while checking out Spore.

[Lepardi 0]

I don't understand why are they implementing stuff like this, it's only making it harder for the customers who legally buy the game and easier for those who don't... makes no sense.

[opteryx 1562]

I don't understand why are they implementing stuff like this, it's only making it harder for the customers who legally buy the game and easier for those who don't... makes no sense.

Cause gullible people get a new and shiny rootkit on their Kernel.

[mattxr 9]

I just found this site about spore

antispore.com

LOL shes a bible basher.. God didnt create life.. but meh this is from a person who doesnt belive in a god. But in chance, evolution and science.

[-Snafu- 78]

I just found this site about spore

antispore.com

LOL shes a bible basher.. God didnt create life.. but meh this is from a person who doesnt belive in a god. But in chance, evolution and science.

You have been Rick Rolled.

Quote[/b] ]But the Bible teaches us that God was not done with man. For we were His creation and He then spoke to Noah in Genesis 8:21-27 after the flood.

“21. The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never gonna give you up. 22. “Never gonna let you down.†23.â€Never gonna run around and desert you.†24. “Never gonna make you cry.†25. “Never gonna say goodbye.†26. “Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.†27.â€Never truly believe anything you read on the Internet. There will always be cases of Poe’s Law.â€

It’s these teachings that I’ve spent my life learning, believing and becoming, that have made me the woman that I am today.

[Average Joe 0]

The escapist Review rocks, that bloke doesnt beat around the bush.

[Wolfrug 0]

I have to add my rant to the pile, since I've got a chance to play this game a little bit recently.

Warning: LONG RANT AHEAD.

To me, it screams of so much wasted potential! The idea is sound, and was totally awesome when it was revealed ages ago, going from cell to galactic emperor - what could go wrong? As a purely creative endevour, the creature editor, building editor and vehicle editors are pure genious, extremely well put together. A three-year old could mash together a creature and have it animate properly, and thanks to the simple texturing schemes, make it LOOK good too. They've really put a lot of effort into letting people design the kind of creatures and civilizations they want, at least lookwise, and the Sporepaedia entries show some very inventive stuff that I just have no idea how they managed to do.

But as a game? So - much - wasted - potential! I've had the most fun in the Cell stage, actually, since it was the ONLY stage in which the wonderful creature creator, the different parts, and gameplay came together. And this is supposedly the "least complex" part. In this stage, you could for instance cover your creature in spikes (if you could afford it - thus sacrificing some other parts, such as speed) which would make you almost unassailable. Or you could add a shocker or a poison thingamajig to your butt and whenever someone tried catching you they'd get zapped or killed. Adding multiple mouths to your front or sides could make eating much easier and faster - or you could focus on adding as effective forms of propulsion as possible and just go for the speed. And growing up? Awesome. Seeing those HUGE monsters that snack you and your pals five at a time becoming the same size as you....only to see other even -larger- things looming out of the mist...pure awesomeness, and survival of the fittest at its best.

The creature stage then was where they screwed this up, and the whole thing basically went downhill from there.

1) Only very few creatures are "epic", that is to say larger than normal. They don't breed either. I wanted humongous flying mantises and dinosaurs and furry weird mouth-critters that are thrice my size to liven up the place and give you something to both watch out for and possibly hunt. As it is, you're basically top of the food chain right from the start.

2) It don't matter NONE where you put your crap any more. You can put legs and arms and feet and hands and mouths and everything inbetween anywhere you want, and the critter won't be any less "level five bite" for that. A stick up your ass won't help you get rid of predators, it'll just give you more points in some arbitrary "charge" ability. Furthermore, having for instance feet that give you an ability, and then say horns that give the same won't do any difference. One'd think something that has BOTH would be more effective. There's an immediate, jarring glass ceiling that hits you - you can't get better at this or that before you "find the part". From a creative point of view - it's all fine, you want what looks good, not what plays good. From a game point of view, you just feel stupid, because -obviously- you're going to pick the "better mouth" and the "better legs" - and guess what? If you made a bad decision back a few generations, no problem! Selling parts get you 100% of their value back, so you can just switch and swap crap to your heart's content.

The tribal stage is a step down from the creature stage - it's nice seeing some of the my critter's abilities retained (charge, spit), but with the advent of tools they become increasingly unimportant. Makes sense I suppose, but it also sort of makes me feel the previous stage was pointless. Why can't we design our own huts, weapons and instruments though? Inconsistency. Also, I started to feel like I was living in a fish bowl. It was there already in the creature stage, even more so now - everything's just around the corner, dammit! Also: predators? Wut lol. Your guys will kill anything with their axes or spears, no matter how scary they might look (possible exception of the "epics"). I want wooly mammoths dammit! I want packs of predator-dog-monsters that steal my young! I want huge stretches of uninhabited land filled with unexplored creature types and crashed alien spaceships I can worship! I want a -challenge-, not "you've defeated the Purple tribe!".

The clothes are a nice idea to make things different, but 1) why aren't the fighting stats from the creature stage measured anywhere? Spitting and charging has a definite effect on how well your guys manage, so that should be added to the combat effectiveness by default. Same goes for socialization, incidentally. 2) Why is it so damned easy to max everything out right from the start? And 3) Why doesn't it matter one iota where you put your little bits and pieces once again? I want to be able to stab eye-creature in the eyes if the silly bastard doesn't put some plate there.

Finally, this whole stage is like 1/3rd the lenght of the others, what's up with that? Why is there so little to do? Why can't you slowly discover more technology and learn to work with or fight with the other tribes, why can't you set up new homes anywhere you want, why can't you do stuff like gather resources (aside from hunting-gathering), design huts, build fortifications, and so on? Maybe, you know, slowly building up towards the civilization stage. There's a ton of potential here, basically a -whole game- that's just not used. At all. The fact everyone else is just around the corner doesn't help either, it feels amazingly cramped.

And finally, the worst stage: the civilization stage. I don't even really need to rant about this very much, since it's so very obviously broken. You go from spears and axes to tanks and lasers. No transition other than a cutscene in which the tribe figures they'd like to build tanks instead of muffins (I had a sort of war-like bunch of lizards). Sooo much lost potential. In the tribal stage at least you were still in control of your little buggers - in this stage, you just drive around your ridiculous cars and crap - once again, it doesn't matter one damned iota where you've put your guns or wheels, and you just -can't- make a ground-based vehicle that does more damage than a certain percentage. It's all for looks, not for gameplay. Do we have to think about what kind of a vehicle an eighteen-legged, blind carnivore with a mouth twice the size of its head would need? Why of course not. That wouldn't be any fun for the kiddies!

The rest of the gameplay - taking over cities and crap - is just so bereft of all actual strategy and innovation that one might as well ignore it. It's just something you have to do to get to the much-lauded space stage.

As to the space stage, I didn't really get to play it much, but it seemed to be there was some game here finally. You could fly around and do missions for different races you discovered, trade spice to the highest bidder, terraform planets, abduct critters and there even seemed to be some kind of story going on there.

Here be the problems, which are the results of all the design mistakes and laziness that's obvious throughout the rest of the game: A space-exploration game is all about delving into the unknown, finding new and unexplored parts of the universe filled with exciting new life forms, some hostile, some friendly, all exotic and entirely unlike anything you've found back on your home planet. WRONG. While "growing up" you saw any possible combination of legs arms and eyes - I'm assuming they're randomly picked from a pool? Which is about as wrong as you can get. This basically just means that you've already seen it all - you've seen the green multilegged omnivorous snot-critter, the wannabe-two-legged-gorilla-lion, the walking eye, the jumping insect the....blah. -Because- it doesn't matter one single bit asides from stats what parts you affix to your creatures, and -because- each planet magically has nigh identical living conditions, there IS no evolution. Just random placement. Here on Earth, a lot of creatures have spines. Furthermore, a lot of creatures are mammals, which generally means they've got the same amount of limbs. Which is why when we see something like a whale, we go "woww, that's a mammal too? Cool!". Or when we see something without a spine, we go "heeey....nice!". We stop a moment to bask in wonderment at natural selection and the course of evolution that created them, so different from ourselves.

In the Sporeverse? They're just all the same. The same here meaning so ridiculously different from one another in colouration and general idea that you KNOW they've been put there by a computer program randomly grabbing samples from its database according to the rules of "carnivore, herbivore, omnivore". I want to see a planet populated by lizard-creatures hunting other lizard-creatures and I want to see all the creatures on this planet have three pairs of legs as a general rule. Anything, really, that isn't random selection.

Phoie.

Long rant. Wish I could put it behind a tag of some kind. But it had to come out, anyway. If I get a chance to play it properly again, I think I'll try to do it with a set of my own rules to see if I can make it any more enjoyable that way. Don't think I'll be able to have any fun in the civ stage no matter what though. Anyone got any ideas?

Regards,

Wolfrug

[dmarkwick 261]

Thanks for the run-down Wolfrug, DRM issues aside that's the sort of review I'm reading more & more. You're right of course, it's a golden opportunity gone wrong. I wonder if it was dumbed down or just over hyped.

[Average Joe 0]

Spore copyright control relaxed

Quote[/b] ]

Video game maker Electronic Arts has loosened copyright protection for the newest release of its game Spore.

Released earlier in the month, the game received a flurry of complaints about a restriction that meant the game could only be registered to three computers.

That restriction has now been raised to five computers, which the company says should account for all legitimate uses.

The company has also addressed the complaint that each copy of the game only allows one player to use it.

Thousands of Spore enthusiasts logged on to Amazon.com at the game's initial release to post one-star reviews - the lowest possible - to complain about the restriction.

Moreover, there was no mechanism to de-authorise a computer and free up another installation, as there is, for example, with iTunes. That meant the game could only ever be installed three times.

'Need to adapt'

"We've received complaints from a lot of customers who we recognise and respect," said Frank Gibeau, EA Games' president. "I believe we need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7628962.stm

[dmarkwick 261]

Spore copyright control relaxed

Hmm yeah, but on the other hand, it seems that a pissy EA moderator is able to threaten to discontinue individual licenses by the looks of it.

Quote[/b] ] Please do not continue to post theses thread or you account may be at risk of banning which in some cases would mean you would need to buy a new copy to play Spore.

I mean, WTF.

[echo1 0]

EDIT: Nevermind.

[Baphomet 0]

This heralds the decline and eventual end of the PC gaming era.

In the book 1984 the inner party endeavored to destroy the english language and reduce it to a form so simplistic that it effectively eliminated the potential for anyone to break the inner party's laws of thoughtcrime.

EA and companies like it endeavor to reduce the complexity and usability of their software to the point where everyone but the mouthbreathers will be deterred from bothering with it.

Let's face it guys, the PC crowd is an expensive and less profitable demographic to develop for. We're considerably more sophisticated than the console using demographic and we're not nearly as easily satisfied.

Imagine EA as a boot, stamping on the face of intelligent, creative gamers for all eternity.

Honestly, I had a marginally passing interest in Spore, now that I'm reading this however. I'm glad I really don't care as much as I would have in the past.

Gaming is slowly and inevitably being dumbed down, and PC gaming enthusiasts are a dying breed.

[Average Joe 0]

Baphomet, your the most optimistic gamer I've ever met  

I do agree with you on many points, but I cant believe its all doom and gloom though. A silver linings out there somewhere.

[dmarkwick 261]

There's always room for a sufficiently imaginative & creative group to grab the PC market's attention. As long as good games sell, people will make them. Half-Life came out of nowhere, OFP came out of nowhere.

[trunkz jr 0]

I've enjoyed spore, and my GF likes it even more.

As for DRM, I have no problems with that either, cause by the time I use up 3 installs I will probably be playing another game by then and no longer playing spore. Tho if spore had it so you could play online with others that would make me wanna play it much longer in the end.

In fact out of all my PC games, the only games I've had to install more then 3 times was BF1942 and BF2. Other then that, anything from Rainbow Six, 2142, CoD4 etc has been fine. Even ArmA I've only installed twice.

But thats just me of course. It's nice that their trying something to slow down piracy, they need to think of a more creative way of doing it, even if it means doing something like steam.

[Baff1 0]

How many times have you re-installed Operation Flashpoint?

>3 or <3?

And how would you have felt about buying a second copy of BF1942 and BF2?

Do you feel they each warrant a second purchase?

Now I agree this is a non-issue with games I don't want to play very much like Spore and COD4. But games like ArmA and Flashpoint, people are still playing them 8 years later.

How many PC's have I owned in the last 8 years. How many HDD's reformated?

This has nothing to do with slowing down piracy, their target is the second hand games market.

Pirates are completely unaffected by this. They use DRM free versions of the game.

But a person who buys a used game for 3 quid less on the next shelf to the full price version in the same chain of game shops everyone else visits........ that costs them a sale. Every time.

They are out to kill the second hand market. It's a direct attempt at market monopolisation.

You buy the game, but they still own it.

I think they would be better served providing rental copies to games.

Perhaps after they have been prosecuted, that is where they will focus next.