mellowtigger | Entries tagged with spore

I heartily disapprove of SecuROM. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but I thought that Electronic Arts had removed it from their distribution copy of the game before they released Spore upon their paying customers. I thought the initial outcry had persuaded them against their plans.

I went to the SecuROM website and found where they explained (# 37) how to remove the program from my pc. Oh, good! I downloaded their uninstaller, I unzipped it, and I ran it. Then I was prompted with a messagebox that contained this garbage:

SecuROM Uninstallation
SecuROM is about to remove files and registry entries created by SecuROM from your hard disk. For complete uninstallation, it might be necessary to log in under an account having administrator privileges. Please note that these files and registry entries will be recreated when another SecuROM-protected executable is executed.
Do you want to proceed?

What is the point, really, in proceeding with the uninstall if the DRM just reinstalls the next time that I play Spore?!

Well, good news. Somebody is finally creating a class action lawsuit (pdf court document) over this nonsense. I emailed one of the lawyers tonight to say that I wanted to participate as a paid customer of Spore. We'll see what happens out of this. I suppose it's too much to hope for that EA would have to release a fix for the program, removing the stupid DRM that succeeds only in annoying their paying customers.

For grins, I also emailed Avast to ask why their antivirus program didn't warn me when this program attempted to install itself. Sure, SecuROM doesn't replicate. It piggybacks onto a program that I do want to run, it installs itself without my permission, and it consumes system resources against my will. That's exactly what I want an a/v program to warn me about.

The new game Spore is such a mixed bag. I'll save the good things about it for a later post. My recommendation is to go ahead and try out the game (pirated version if necessary, pay for it if you feel compelled) just to see what all the fuss is about. But make it plain to EA that you're not going to pay for the later expansions unless they remove the DRM from these programs. I paid for my version. My mistake.

1) DRM causes game crashes

Digital rights management (DRM) is software that game producers add to otherwise functional code as a means of pretending that they discourage piracy. It has no effect on piracy, mind you. It does, however, break games. My Spore game crashes in the final stage of the game (space travel). I've seen lots of complaints, so it's happening to other people too. Buried in the crash log is a reference to a DLL that seems to be involved with their DRM.

Remove the DRM, and the game no longer crashes. Unfortunately, Spore servers recognize the alteration and then you can no longer exchange creature data with them. *SIGH* I was one of the people who voted at the Amazon.com to give it a review rating of only 1 star. I thought they told us months ago after the initial outcry that the DRM was going to be removed from the game?! Obviously, it's still there, and it's causing game crashes on my pc.

2) There is no step 2

Lots of people are talking about this video and how they really wish the game that was demonstrated in 2005 was the game shipped in 2008. It appears to me and a few other people that they essentially had the game completed in 2005 and then spent the next 3 years removing features from it. The current release moves directly from cell stage to land stage. There is no intermediate aquatic stage, so the "evolution" in game makes a huge counter-intuitive leap. Basically, your little one-cell organism suddenly sprouts legs and jumps onto land.

I'm guessing that they're using the Electronic Arts playbook and will be slowly releasing "expansions" that put all of this functionality back into the program. This game is a very good idea, and I understand that they might actually need more than $50/person to pay for development costs. I just wish they'd be up front about the idea instead of releasing this pared down program and calling it complete. Because it just isn't.

3) Mic^*beep*ro-manag^*beep*ement rules in ^*beep* the space st^*beep*age

There's a whole lot of micro-management in the final stage of the game, which is bad enough in itself. You can't even pursue it, though, because of the constant alerts from disasters afflicting all of your other worlds. There's no way to adjust the alert level, and some of the alerts will cause you to lose worlds if you don't go attend to them. There's this beautiful world engine that shows off various species roaming a planet, but you can't spend time "enjoying the sunsets", as it were, because the game interjects to demand your attention elsewhere. Hugely annoying.

4) Not enough meta-management

I can't get my own creatures to show up in my own game-internal list of "My Creatures". *sigh* I'd like to add creatures that I find while roaming the web database into a "My Favorites" list to use in my game... but I can't do that. Or, if there's a way then I haven't found it yet. I'd also like a default template for use in-game when creating new cities on planets. I don't want to have to repeat (for the umpteenth time) selecting the same house images for my structures and placing them in exactly the same order on every planet.

5) Nothing matters.

All the work that you put into modifying looks and abilities of your creature in earlier stages... none of it matters in space stage. You don't see your creature (you just see the spaceship), and it has no "stats". Everybody starts out with the same ability in every game upon reaching the final space stage. *SIGH*

There's plenty to DISlike about Spore. I'll write about the good things later. Time to go play some more Spore. :D

The Spore website makes it easy to upload/share your own creatures, but it doesn't have any facility for creating a "favorites" list and sharing that too. I'm going to try that here, and I'm calling it a Spore print. Moreover, I'm also defining here the rules for a no-contest contest. There is no competition, there is no ranking, and there is no reward. It's just an invitation to get creative and do something original. :) I'll do the work in compiling links and photos for easy sharing.

For each week until Spore is released, I will define a particular theme. To participate, just click on the appropriate date (at the top of each column in the table) then post a reply to that calendar week. Include either a link to your specific animal or a link to your main Spore page and also write in the name of your animal. At the end of each week, I will review all of the submitted links and compile them into this main post. I'll display half-size images of each creature with links to the creature's detail page. I will update this one livejournal entry (so you can bookmark it if you'd like) for easy viewing of all the results in the main post.

You don't have to be a LiveJournal user to post. You can post anonymously (identified by ip address), and I will approve the posts for display as I encounter them. You can post sooner, just find the appropriate week in which to add your reply. So feel free to go ahead and create all 10 creatures in your first session with the Spore Creature Creator. Don't be late, though, because I might not go back and update sections that have already been completed.

Clicking on an image will open a new browser window with the creature details in it.

spore print: countdown to release date
6/29-7/05 scary	7/06-7/12 cute	7/13-7/19 plant	7/20-7/26 flyer	7/27-8/02 humanoid	8/03-8/09 wet	8/10-8/16 immobile	8/17-8/23 gangly	8/24-8/30 object	8/31-9/06 favorite