The Spore franchise continues to expand and grow. EA announced yesterday that Spore Islands is available on Facebook. Actually it’s been available for about a week, I’ve been playing it with a friend. You pick an island then build and color your creature utilizing DNA points. Friends can send a creature to your island and you can build one to send to their island. During observations, you can see the creatures eat, fight and lay eggs. The one with the highest points win.
During observation
You earn points when you or someone else observes your creatures. It’s a fun little game that is a nice break from Farmville and Mafia Wars. The only downside I have found is that you can only earn 12 DNA points at a time. To get more, you have to spend money. The incentive to spend the money is to buy hats and parts to add to your creature. I’ve not seen a need to spend money on it but it’s still fun.
An explosion in the galaxy!! Meteors red and blue suddenly come crashing down to a beautiful alien planet. (sound familiar?) The meteor cracks open and out crawls an evil red creature named Zarkhator. The adventure begins and Spore Hero is born.
I just heard back from EA with a functional workaround for installing the v1.1 patch for Spore on the Mac. I’m sure by now you’ve heard about all the wonderful issues with the patch. But after spending a few hours, I now have everything up and running with the newest patched version on my MacBook Pro.
Here’s the gist. You need to uninstall the game from your system. Don’t worry, your save data won’t get removed. Drag the SPORE folder from Applications to the trash. Then fire up Finder and go to “/Users/[Username]/Library/Preferences/[Game Name] Preferences/p_drive” and delete all the files there as well. Once that’s done, reinstall the game and download the patch when prompted. Now, here’s where things get interesting. This is a line from the email I received from EA:
*Please Note: This process may take a considerable amount of time. The patch process may seem to stall, but the installation of the latest update could take up to 20 minutes. Please be patient.
I did that and, after 20 minutes, the patch completed the install and Spore booted up. The game ran fine and things worked as you would expect.
So there you have it. If you try to patch your game on your Mac and it freezes up, follow these directions and you’ll be off and running. Get some.
I’m not an angry person, but this is part one of what set me off last night. I bought myself a copy of Spore a little while ago and finally got down to start playing it Thursday night. I installed and fired up the game and was prompted to download a patch. Ok, seems normal. What PC/Mac game doesn’t have patches? What ensued started a fire-storm.
I sat there for literally an hour and a half as this patch downloaded and tried to install. Guess what? It froze up my entire MacBook Pro. Yep, good times. So, I restarted and fired up the game again. Not being prompted for the patch this time, it took (again, no exaggeration) ten minutes for me to get to a point where I could create a new game (I already have a Spore account, so all I had to do was login). After starting a new game, I entered the Cell stage. To my surprise, I had NO creature displayed on my screen. That’s right, I didn’t exist. Yay! Yet another broken piece of the puzzle.
GameStop and Amazon both briefly listed an expansion pack for Spore on their systems, before removing them from the online stores. Supposedly shipping November 18th, the Spore Cute & Creepy Parts Pack looks to retail for $19.99.
No word on exactly what cool parts will be available and requests to EA were not returned by press time. You can check out Google Cache of GameStop and Amazon to see what they showed before things got taken down.
Being this close to the game’s release, are you prepared to pay another $20 for Spore content? I’m not.
There have been grumblings about the much anticipated Spore for the PC. First there was widespread hacking of the game code. Next, we hear that you only get three installs per serial number. Finally, we now understand there is only one account per game. What are the chances that you may live with more than one person who wants to play it?
That section in the manual was a misprint and will be corrected in future printings of the manual. There is one Spore registration/account per game/serial code so you are correct in that you cannot make multiple accounts at this time. I have sent your guys’ feedback to the game team though since I can understand the desire to share a game on a system that you entire family uses.
This is just another reason why PC gaming is becoming more of chore than a pastime. PC games are much better for RTS games but I would use a wireless keyboard and mouse on a console for that reason.
It seems the intarwebs are a bit pissed off at the SecuROM DRM scheme in Spore. You’re allowed 3 activations of the game before you have to call EA for help. When that happens, EA doesn’t even have to allow you any more activations. Sad. People have taken up arms on the Amazon reviews page. Check this one out:
First of all, the game incorporates a draconian DRM system that requires you to activate over the internet, and limits you to a grand total of 3 activations. If you reach that limit, then you’ll have to call EA in order to add one extra activation. That’s not as simple as it sounds, since when you reach that point EA will assume that you, the paying customer, are a filthy pirating thief. You will need to provide proof of purchase, reasons why the limit was reached, etc, etc (it has all happened before with another recent EA product, Mass Effect). EA, of course, is not obligated to grant you that extra activation or even provide that service. In a couple of years they might very well even shut down the general activation servers, because “it’s not financially feasible” to keep them running. What you will be left with is a nice, colorful $50 coaster. And you will be required to pay for another copy/license if you want to continue playing.
Many people are arguing that you’re essentially renting the game, and I can see their point. I hate being penalized for actually buying a PC/Mac game. You’d think game companies want to find ways to reward their paying customers. It’s things like this SecuROM crap that make people want to pirate games even more. I’m debating buying Spore and this fiasco is really leaning me towards not doing it. We’ll see what happens.
It seems that EA’s DRM policy is hurting a lot of gamers right now. Spore dropped today in a lot of places and the EA authentication servers have crashed under the load. Users can’t activate their game, which means all online aspects are null and void.
While this doesn’t mean you can’t play the game, you can’t have other people’s Spore creatures come and populate your world and other aspects of the game. This somewhat takes away from the experience.
EA says the servers should be back up in about 5 hours. But still, shouldn’t they have anticipated this? They expected the game to sell over 2 million copies in the first month. You have to expect that day 1 will be huge.
Anybody out there having trouble activating their copies of Spore?
Don’t worry, you won’t need a monster rig to play Spore. This should open the door to a lot more people than the specs we’ve seen for Crysis and Assassin’s Creed. Here’s what your computer needs to play Will Wright’s latest:
Windows XP
2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
512 MB RAM
A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
At least 6 GB of hard drive space
Windows Vista
2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
768 MB RAM
A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
At least 6 GB of hard drive space
Mac OS X
Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
Intel Core Duo Processor
1024 MB RAM
ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
At least 4.7GB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for creations.
Not bad really. All these are subject to change, but I wouldn’t expect anything major happening with these specs.
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