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"Spore"

Has anyone got this? Is it actually any good?

I understand there's a bit of a furore over the DRM contained within the game. Something about you can only install it 3 times or something?

Reviews seem to have been taken down from Amazon. The ones that are up are generally only 1 star.

Anyond had any hands on?

Has anyone got this? Is it actually any good?

I understand there's a bit of a furore over the DRM contained within the game. Something about you can only install it 3 times or something?

Reviews seem to have been taken down from Amazon. The ones that are up are generally only 1 star.

Anyond had any hands on?

I was just about to say, it must be pretty crap to get 1, 208 one star reviews on amazon.com :) Can you really only install it 3 times? That's terrible, I'm guessing thats to stop people from selling/trading it in rather than to stop piracy.

I really hope EA will take notice, as I won't be buying it until they take all this out. pb or GP might be buying it though, so I'd love to read what they think.

I read on one review that once it's enabled online, you can play it without the cd. So you could sell it, then carry on playing it until you have to reinstall your system.

If it is just to reduce the second hand market, why don't they just sell it at a lower price. People only trade games in to get money back, and people only buy second hand to get it cheaper.

If games sold for a lower price initially, would it reduced the trade ins, therefore selling more new copies?

Heh, just had a look at the Amazon.com reviews. At least they left them up though, which is more than the UK site did!

YH wrote:
> Has anyone got this? Is it actually any good?

I've got it, not played through a whole game yet though.
I think whether you consider it any good or not depends what you expect. When all said and done it is another version of The Sims. So its some very powerful creation tools wrapped around some incredibly simplistic gameplay (too much so in my opinion).

At the moment, I'm just hoping that they rethink the DRM situation - I refuse to buy this otherwise great game, purely because I don't want to be limited to having only 3 chances to install before I have to ring up a costly EA support line. Also, that fact that it uses Securom, which runs in the background, which essentially acts like malware, doesn't really go down well with me. I don't like being punished for buying a game.

Just had a look, I dont think the securom service is present this time. Which would make sense I suppose since theres no local disk authentication either.

I've only seen the advert on TV, am I right in thinking it's an Internet game, or does it allow you to play offline as well?

The "online component" is that things you create can be shared with the world and in turn your game world is populated by creatures etc. that others have created. You can play offline as well though.

The aspect that puts me off is definitely the DRM restrictions. It is ridiculous that you get 3 installs then it's game over, most of the games I've owned have had more than three installs, things change new PC's, restoring older PC's. It is as good as saying that everyone is a criminal so we should stop them enjoying something they have paid for. Though I am sure there will be ways around it in no time...