As controversial as it is hotly-awaited, I picked up Spore the other weekend.

The latest game from Will Wright, it finds you guiding a new civilisation through all stages of its development, form the primordial ooze, through to its mastery of intergalactic travel.

Taken on their own merits, each of these five stages (cell, creature, tribal, civilization, space) could be viewed as a bit simplistic (although I’ve only just gotten onto the space stage, and my feeling is that its a very different, much more in-depth beast to the other four). However this is a game that’s more than the sum of its parts. While the gameplay might be simplistic in some regards, I’m not sure that’s where the focus is. Instead for me, its simplisity is part of the appeal, and guiding a creature up from being a single cell organism is incredibly satisfying, and really helps you bond with your creations.

A huge part of this game’s appeal is the level of customisation.  From the evolution of your creature in the cell and creature stages, to customising their buildings and vehicles in the civilisation and space ages, there’s a lot of fun to be had with the very flexible in-game editors.

I’ve only just started the space stage, but I’m really enjoying the game.  And there’s an added level of fun to be had knowing that the creatures inhabiting the game can be created by other players, all sharing their creations via the online Sporepedia.

The thing I find a real shame though, is that this otherwise great fun game is picking up a lot of negative publicity due to the draconian DRM restrictions EA have placed on the game.  Regular readers will know that I’m no fan of these kinds of methods, as they largely have no use, other than to punish those who’ve legitimately purchased the product.

In this case, Spore seems to be no exception.  While the box cover makes no mention of the fact, the story is that the game only allows you to install it 3 times.  After which you need to contact EA support to get the key reset to allow you to install it again.

This is frankly just rubbish.  I know I’ve got many games that I regularly uninstall, then reinstall to free up disc space for other things I’m wanting to play at that time.

According to Wikipedia, Spore is fast heading towards the honour of being the most bittorrented game ever.  Says a lot for the draconian DRM restrictions.  They’ve clearly not prevented the piracy of the game, so you have to wonder what the point was.  All its done is resulted in the game getting some really bad press.  Not to mention, you wonder how many of those downloaders would’ve bought the game legally, if not for those restrictions.

At the end of the day, its the devs I feel sorry for.  They’ve crafted a really fun game, only to see it crippled by the studio.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 10:10 and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.