Spore is out!

[sub]

So I found Earth and am trying to decide what to do. Half of me wants to blow it up, the other half wants to terraform it. There was some life there already, it was this really weird looking reptile thing. I already have a colony on the moon.

 

[guest]

You get an award for destroying it, but you might get one for putting a colony on it too, who knows.

 

[sub]

I thought I was supposed to get a badge for finding it, but I got nothing.

 

[Pieter Paul Rubens]

First 4 (and the only interesting for me) stages can be finished within 2 hours.. The space stage (the suckiest and least innovative of all stages, imho) takes too long. I wish they balanced it out more so the fun stages would last a while as well (give them more things to do in). I'm very disappointed in this game, as it was promoted as being innovative and original, and all it did was make yet another space-themed RTS clone with a fancier "create-a-character" option.

Sad, sad panda.

 

[sub]

So Spore is being killed on the amazon.com customer reviews. It currently has 993 1 star ratings and 27 5 star ratings, two of which were from 2006.

Almost all of the 1 star ratings were given to it not because it's a bad game, but solely because of the draconian DRM that didn't even work in the first place. I'm having mixed reactions about this - I don't want this to affect the sales of the game, but I want EA to remove the ridiculous DRM and this seems like it might be an affective approach.

 

[guest]

There's something else interesting on that page;

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
Spore
90% buy the item featured on this page

90% of people who visited the page bought the game. EA is getting even fuxxin richer by the day, I swear.

 

[sub]

Well, if the game goes on to sell 500,000 copies or a million copies, 1,000 is a pretty small fraction in the grand scheme of things.

 

[Majin_You]

Perhaps I'm out of the loop on this, but what part of the DRM for Spore is "killing" the consumers' desire to view the game favorably?

From what I've read, it works in almost exactly the same way as it did for Mass Effect, yet the PC version of Mass Effect, from my understanding, did quite well in spite of that.

I guess I just haven't run into any trouble with DRM when it has come into play; the games that use it have had no trouble authenticating for me, and I don't foresee hitting the three-installation limit any time soon (though I, readily, admit that the "case-by-case" basis of allowing more installations is not something I've had experience with; it might use horribly strict criteria, for all I know).

Whatever the case is, I bought Spore knowing about EA's approach to DRM, and it hasn't adversely affected me. Similarly, I can't see it adversely affecting the average consumer, provided he/she doesn't uninstall and reinstall Spore rapidly due to waxing and waning interest. Again, I stress that this comes from my own experience with EA's DRM. I can understand that there are people who will be much more limited by it than I am, but I'm not sure that those people constitute the majority of the people who will end up buying Spore.

 

[sub]

I'm with you Maj, but there are some legit complaints out there. People are upset about having to connect to the internet when installing the game. If you have no internet connection, you can't install it.

The commotion about only being able to have the game installed on three computers is a tad silly. How many computers do these people have that their playing games on?

Don't get me wrong, I don't particularly like the limitations nor do I think they do anything to prevent piracy, but they're not really affecting me right now.

 

[Majin_You]

Ah; I was actually unaware that an active internet connection was required to install the game (part of the reason being, I'm sure, that I wasn't the one who installed it =P)

I can see where having no offline installation option would be problematic.

 

[MONXver2.0]

Thinking about getting it. I've always wanted to play god at this level. Gonna go with a lizard people once I shell out the dough for it. Hell people even made deep crows from penny arcade.

 

[Almighty_Gir]

I'm with you Maj, but there are some legit complaints out there. People are upset about having to connect to the internet when installing the game. If you have no internet connection, you can't install it.

They also wouldn't be able to make that complaint on amazon.com....

ZING!

 

[sub]

They also wouldn't be able to make that complaint on amazon.com....

ZING!

Phones? Library? Friends house? A friend relaying the message?

*shrugs*

 

[Hibiki]

So spore is fun

 

[UnL1m1t3d AKA CrackerJack]

I just bought it on ebay for 30, can't wait to get it.
Im hopeing for something good.

So is the creature creator really as in-depth as they say? I didn't try the demo, never was really interested in this game till recently.

 

[L]

It's the most in-depth part of the game.

Which is really unfortunate and it's "Stages" of the game are shallow but entertaining just creating/designing stuff with the tools provided. I would recommend buying it but the DRM with the "three installs only" mutilates that since you cannot truly own the game. Some would say that you can just call in and request for more installations, I shouldn't have to do that and pay for the call, also doesn't EA stop all support of a game after some years?
I don't see any Need for Speed: Underground servers still available, let alone tech support for it.

 

[guest]

Ah; I was actually unaware that an active internet connection was required to install the game (part of the reason being, I'm sure, that I wasn't the one who installed it =P)

I can see where having no offline installation option would be problematic.

Some of the American EA servers went down on the day of release, and thousands of people couldn't install their game.

I'm going to take a final whack at Space Stage with cheats. It's too hard to do it properly, I died a third time.