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Far far far from the original concept and vision of the game. Completely dumbed down and linear, creature creator is only good for asthetics and doesnt effect anything else other then body part attributes (shape doesnt matter).
BAD!

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My wife and son bought this against my recommendation. Game play aside, I knew from the reviews that it would be a challenge just to make this thing run. And I will be having my "I-Told-You-So" moments, shortly.

I've spent hours trying to make thing thing work for my disappointed kid. I got past the first hurdle when I discovered that there was a conflict with the way the game phoned home, and the way K-9 allowed access to the internet for minors. After disabling K-9 just to get the game activated, it seemed to run pretty well. For a day.

The next day, it Blue Screened every time we launched it. I tried updating the video driver, playing with compatibility modes, and launching as an administrator. We tried installing the 1.05 patch (which, humorously, wanted you to be running first to download it). Nothing worked.

This is not some exotic system we're using. Windows 7 with an Intel chip and an nVidia graphics card. If it can't run on this, I can't imagine what it was designed for.

I'm sure there is some collection of drivers and patches that'll make this work. If not, there wouldn't be some many reviews about the unimaginative game-play. But I've gone past the amount of effort I'm going to put into a game. And the rest of my family has learned a lot about buying DRM riddled garbage from EA.

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Spore is a five star game. You get to create your own creature- from a one-cell organism to creatures like us. It's the best ever!!!
Anonymous, age 9

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Remember when you could just buy PC games, install them on your computers, and just be happy with them? Well, sorry! Big gaming industries instead decided to make it utter hell to try to install and play a game that you legitimately bought. 10 years of game development went straight down the toilet for EA. Which is really sad, because I wanted to play this. I never did get it because of all these horror stories, yet I gave it 4 stars for fun because, from the gaming videos I've seen, it looks like the kind of thing you'd play every once in a while. I was distraught by the security garbage that was incorporated into playing Empire: Total War, so I think I can have some empathy in losing $50. I'm not surprised by how far down the price for Spore has gone. Even in Best Buy, it's maybe 1/3 of the price it once was. EA has mentioned that they will remove much of the security issues, but it probably won't be enough. Will the PC gaming industry crumble from pirating? I'm not sure if that's true because I don't know the environment of developers vs. pirates and how catastrophic it can be. I do know that new PC games incorporating a sickeningly heavy amount of restrictions on installation and whatnot and infiltrating one's system with checks to see if they're a pirate makes pirates look like heroes. Perhaps the game will soon be released free of all locks and chains. Maybe not. I just hope that PC game developers look at why customers rage against the games: drm and tight security.

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The registar code key didn't work, as in invalid or already used so couldn't use the online feature. Sucks. Games okay, pretty, but not what you'd call a real challenge of any sort. This is a game for kids, like maybe 10 or so... my 15 year old was bored after playing it twice. Pretty, some good ideas, but it's setting gathering dust on our shelf after just a week....