Spore Week
Spore
Check out the horrific reviews on that Amazon page. We have it on good authority from son Chuck, though, that this is an organized campaign because of the draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM, copy protection.) When we heard of that ourselves some time back, yes, we were none too pleased. You only get to activate the game on three computers, meaning after you upgrade hardware a couple of times you’ll need to repurchase (theoretically.) That’s if you only have one computer in your house. Our three activations will be eaten up the first day.
Organized or not, some of the reviews are quite detailed. We ourselves have had a mildly negative predisposition since seeing the preview videos. The creatures have been made a bit on the cartoonish side for us. But Chuck assures us that the skins will be moddable, so adding realistic textures should be possible.
We disapprove of the overbearing DRM well, but with all the piracy you can see why a company would take such steps to protect their $millions$ in investment. However, it does not help in the long run. We have bought our copy in part because of extreme anticipation and a high interest level in the topic. We’ve always been interested in life simulatiors. We were too far along in our commitment to the purchase to back off. If we had known about the plans for the DRM we’d have thought twice so we, like many other, we’re sure, are feeling a bit ambushed by it and it doesn’t sit well.
The ill will generated will carry over to other purchase decisions involving the same publisher. Case in point, we bought Silent Hunter III, a World War II submarine game, which had a frighteningly invasive copy protection scheme that pretty much required you to install the game company’s own DVD-ROM driver on your hardware. It would then make a scary clunking noise whenever you ran any disk. Turned out to be a chore to deinstall the game and the driver. I removed it the first time, and then reinstalled the game two years later after having forgotten all about that nasty copy protection. Played a few times but couldn’t enjoy it, and then uninstalled again. This time I put a note in the box. “Do not install because of invasive copy protection!”
We would never even entertain the remote possibility of buying a game from that company again.
$50 for three installs? I don’t see Spore lasting much beyond that as a resident on Shear computers. We’ll see. It had better be good.
