Spore

[Frith-Rae]

What is really killing things for me is the anti-pirating feature. Basically, you can only have one copy per home able to connect to their servers. My boyfriend and I each have a copy. His can connect with no problem, and he can upload and download user created features. Mine can't connect at all and I can only play offline content. This takes the (limited) social aspect completely out of the game. As far as I can tell they don't seem to be all that motivated to fix this problem, either.

Thanks for posting this actually - that will be at least 50 if not 100 less dollars they'll get from us.

[velveeta]

not to bring politics into things, but i haven't even played an EA game since they shut down Earth and Beyond to bring us Sims Online.
in my opinion (but i am not alone in it - please see http://forum.enb-emulator.com/index....wtopic=4713&hl= if interested), ea is a totally piece of shite corp with delusions of godhood. they have the worst business practices and customer service and human resource practices i have ever suffered from - worst even than pmi ei whatever.

just a little investigation will show you what i am talking about.........

(and you are talking to someone who usta love playing the sims on pc...)

[Kumu Honua]

I won't deny that EA does suck as a company but I still enjoy games. Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth is a good game and quite fun. Spore looks like fun.

I personally can't boycott a parent company. I will boycott for abusive copyright protection (Like their previous incarnation.) but I can live with this version.

However I went to Wal-Mart today and saw the price at $75! Now, it was the "galaxy edition", but there is no way I will pay $75 for a computer game. Especially one that you cannot trial the gameplay of.

If you look hard enough every company has problems. Especially the big guys that buy up the small companies and bring them into the fold.

Bioware, Bullfrog, Interplay, Microprose. All great till they were eaten by big guys.

[Dremora]

I pre-ordered Spore before I found out about the horrible anti-piracy thing it comes with. My computer needs reformatting more often than I care to admit and 3 installs just isn't enough (or did they change that?). And if I payed for the thing, I expect to be able to install it however many times I want.

The game looked pretty interesting before I found out about all that, but now it just looks boring and from the reviews, the replayability level seems to be rather low...

Sorry for being Ms. Negativity

[aine]

Hmm, I just pre-ordered Warhammer, an EA game, for my son's birthday. Not 15 minutes before reading this, in fact. He is beta testing it now, so hopefully he knows it will work with his pc, etc. *Sighs*

not to bring politics into things, but i haven't even played an EA game since they shut down Earth and Beyond to bring us Sims Online.
in my opinion (but i am not alone in it - please see http://forum.enb-emulator.com/index....wtopic=4713&hl= if interested), ea is a totally piece of shite corp with delusions of godhood. they have the worst business practices and customer service and human resource practices i have ever suffered from - worst even than pmi ei whatever.

just a little investigation will show you what i am talking about.........

(and you are talking to someone who usta love playing the sims on pc...)

[Dremora]

Just found this:

"... No matter what people think about the actual game play, the story now centers around the DRM scheme EA built into the title, and a grassroots movement has begun to tell gamers just how bad the DRM sucks. The method? Bombing the comments on Amazon.com ..."

So I guess they haven't gotten rid of it. Figures.

[Kumu Honua]

Yes. They did.

The original copy protection was a forced "Call home" every 10 days. If you didn't "Call home" your game would not start. Now the only time it does the call home is when you are downloading patches or content for your game.

I had a HUGE problem with something that could cause something that *I* paid for to not function based on an internet connection. I've had times where my cable was out for a month. Sometimes the bills are tight and the luxuries go away. A game that I paid to play should not stop functioning just because it can't call home. That was ridiculous.

The only thing that I have a problem with now is the limited installations. I really hate when I have to call Microsoft because I have reformatted my harddrive again. I'm going to do the same when I have to start calling EA after Microsoft.

[pevil2000]

Meh I borrowed the game. No way I would pay more than £10 for it (certainly not £35 as they're trying to charge, despite most new pc games coming out at £25 or £30 now). It is nothing more than Sims with a new skin, and I even find it less engaging than Sims. (do'nt get me wrong, I enjoy sims). Basically played in on Saturday for maybe... 6 hours. The cell stage was the most fun (admittedly I only got to Civilisation stage, so that played more, or the space one could totally change my opinion, but I've felt no need to play it again).

There's no immersion for me outside of the cell stage. In that one I truly felt like a predator/prey thing was going on, you had to pay attention, go for all the food you could and avoid the big nasty things that would suddenly pop up by you and try to eat you. It was quite exciting! The creature stage however... you either could run from everything or got stomped in one by the epics. It's a fairly mundane case of "attack or befriend species, eat to stay alive, attack or befriend species, eat to stay alive..." Same with the tribal stage, "gather food, attack or befriend tribe, gather food, attack or befriend tribe".

The game is technical genius with what it has created, but that is the problem for me. I can stand back and admire what they have created, no doubt about it, but I don't feel immersed or even slightly compelled to keep playing. At least Sims usually holds my attention for a week before I get bored with it. Which is a huge disappointment for me, coz even though I'm so severely against the horrible DRM it is, I was still tempted to buy it, but am very, very glad now that I didn't, even with my 25% staff discount :P

Seems I'm not the only one thinking that way either, a lot of the ratings on it have dropped apparently (though I haven't looked for them). It's a shame, I really wanted Spore to succeed.

Oh and there's a stupid anti-spore site as well because 'evil Will Wright' is trying to force evolution on us all rather than creationism

[Takora Drakan]

You people should play till you reach the galaxy stage, then the game REALLY starts Thousands of plantets to explore, different races, animals, stuff, artifacts...

Yesterday I purged a planet from the tribe that lived there with my spaceship... run for ya lives! I also kindnapped some of them for science .. lol I am evil ^^

[Sika]

So after making a phonecall to EA about my inability to connect to the Spore servers, they said it would take a day or two for them to get it fixed. I have no idea if they were honest about that or if they're just stringing people along, but I figured I should at least share that info.

It's really a shame, because it feels like Spore was created by a group of artists, but no game designers. Everything looks pretty, and the creature creator is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the game itself is just dull. I played through the Civ stage last night, and again there wasn't a whole lot to do. Most of the towns didn't even put up a fight, and there was no strategy whatsoever. There also doesn't seem to be much of a point to building up cities.

[Tcei]

I agree, Spore has been kinda disapointing to me. I was only able to play to the Civ stage before I lost my card *sigh*. I liked the cell stage, and creature stage was nice too, tho I wish the other animals would wonder from their nest sometimes, I almost died laughing when the first epic animal that landed was my parrot creature. At least in creature stage you had lots to do with finding body parts and the like. Tribal and what I saw of civ stage were- meh...

[Fridlekh]

I bought the Galaxy edition with my $5 off coupon for having bought the creature creator :P Of course, it was $79.99 at Target where I'd bought the creature creator, so it looks like I was rightly reamed bleh. Ah well, this is a game worth getting screwed for the pretty packaging. ^_^

Anyway, the History Channel special DVD was pretty neat, and I like the making of video and the art book.

The neatest thing was seeing my creatures that I created in the creature creator before release rampaging around the countryside in the creature phase. I wanted to befriend one of them, and got stepped on instead. x_x

I killed the game by remote desktoping in while idling full-screen at the "make a city hall" creator (I'm not creative enough to make buildings!) and I haven't started over yet.... but here's what I've accomplished so far:

http://www.spore.com/view/achievements/Fridlekh

[Sigi]

Oh and there's a stupid anti-spore site as well because 'evil Will Wright' is trying to force evolution on us all rather than creationism

Thought that to be really funny

[Arietna]

Both my hubby & I play (using my copy on different PCs) and we both have the connection working fine.

[Frith-Rae]

*rofl* So if we buy two copies we're borked, trying not to pirate...

But if we use one game for two people, which is actually "pirating" works fine...

That's just awesomesauce...*cries laughing*

[Justa Mirage]

It really depends on your type of connection:

We have a cable modem with 2 unique IP addresses stored in it.

Some people use Smart routers that assign IP numbers to the local machines, but the net traffic goes out the same IP number to the servers for Spore.

Spore might be seeing 2 copies of the game coming from the same IP number and crying foul.

[CallakDW]

*buys and downloads it* This game just looks and sounds too interesting to pass up.

[CallakDW]

Ok, am I just having problems with this game or is there a verification server that's down? I can't even make any conections with EA's sight in my browser.

[Shian]

I couldn't get mine to connect at all either. Good thing it was just a trial version instead of something I paid $70 for.

[CallakDW]

Says the following:

"The game can not start.

The game needs access to the interent in order to verify ownership of this game.
Please ensure that your computer is online and try again."


Cant get through to their help site, can't even dowload the manual.