I haven't played much, so I wouldn't know.

I'm not understanding something....

At what point do you make your own custom species?

The entire time.

Your creatures evolve every time you mate, and trust me, you need to evolve or it gets hard.

Hmm, i see.

But at what time do you do the creature creator thing, where you build your own species as if you were a master 3d artist?

Each time you mate, you go to a special screen, and make one or two changes based on the points you got before?

Yes to the second. I think also every time you switch stages you do it too.

Ahh, very cool.

No, the advance to the tribal stage is the last time you can change the evolution of your critter (it says so in great big warning letters).

That said, I keep running through the cell and the tribal stages over and over, trying to figure out what I want to do for a race to continue on with, so I don't have much experience with tribal yet. Just the very beginning stages, with trying to fit some clothing on a creature that was not made to wear clothing.

Pants are over-rated anyway.

No... I mean, not made to wear any clothing, at all. I can't even figure out where to put a fanny-pack on it.

It took me awhile to notice that the first setting was meant for the head. None of it really looks like it was meant for it.

The clothing is very funny looking.

Anyone know why the Sporepedia has over 1000 results it could be showing me, but only displays about 30? And I can't find a button to go to a next page to see more.

Sadly, Amazon is being Techmeme / Slashdot / Google bombed by negative reviews because Spore uses a form of DRM. Yesterday there were 100+ reviews, most of them just stating that the game had bad DRM--even though nobody had it in their hands yet. Since then, close to one thousand reviews, all saying DRM sucks and not reviewing the game. I suspect Amazon might have to purge most of those so-called reviews.

Nope, you'll just need another techmeme / slashdot / google blombed campaign to marked the reveiws as unhelpfull.

Spore has been out for a while, in non-American places, remember. But the part of DRM that most people are complaining about is a bit more complex, and far worse than you might think. And the same (or highly similar) copy protection was used for Mass Effect on PC, with various problems. Most of these weren't as public because Mass Effect was released first on the xbox 360.

First off, it uses secuROM, which is basically a rootkit. Fun, eh? I'm not even sure if the 'basically' part should be in there - it might be best to just say "which is a rootkit". Oh, and it's not removed when you uninstall Spore.

Furthermore, you can only install it on 3 computers per disk, due to an authentication limit. After this, you cannot install the game again (and possibly not download new stuff, but I haven't seen this particular possibility addressed anywhere). This might be fine, but then you have problems with defining a 'computer'. Mass Effect, as I said, used a similar system - and reported a 'new computer' whenever you changed your hardware or similar. Things such as reinstalling your OS, hardware failure, upgrading your system or (reported several times) upgrading your drivers can all lead to another authentication being used up.

Some people have reported bugs which led to having to reinstall Spore and losing authentications despite the 'reinstall as often as you like once that computer is authenticated' thing. Don't know how widespread this is, though. I gave up reading all the posts in the official thread (linked below) after about page 30. Jumped to the end and saw that the complaints hadn't been addressed.

In order to get new authentications, you have to call a pay-per-minute number and prove that you're a good customer. This is not a 24-hour number - it's a 9-3 Mon-Fri number. For relevance, this translates to a 10pm-4am Australian number. Alternatively, there's a horrendously slow email way to do it, which involves disclosing all kinds of information.

Here are a few relevant links:
A Shacknews article which mentions their removal of the every-ten-day activation (wouldn't have eaten up an authentication, but would have needed internet access).
Official Copy Protection Q&A. Note the lack of official responses to the various questions posed. Warning: long, I'd recommend reading the other ones first to get some background.
A gamesindustry report on the Amazon votes.
A simprograms review.
EAs support info for the DRM. 58 of 282 people found this helpful.
Someone who had troubles with authenticating the CC. As far as I can find, there isn't any indication of being able to free up an authentication the way PieJesu recommends.
Some of this may be for the CC, but there isn't any indication of changes being made between the CC and the actual game.


A friend and I were considering splitting the cost of a game to see if it's worth it, but after this I wonder if we should just wait.

Is this review accurate?

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/spore/review.html

Fairly, I disagree with the cell bit and saying it's not fun after awhile. I enjoy chasing other things around.

I'm still having lots of fun! Just barely hit Space because I keep replaying all the other stages and building new stuff.

How many hours would you say you could play a single "game" for? From the review it sounded like its just 10 hours or so??

It depends on your dedication and how much detail you put into some parts.

I enjoy it, but sometimes I do run into a "...You've got to be kidding me." moment.. Like spaceships that run away and no matter what you do you can't kill them with the beginning weapons before they auto heal to full. 7 to 650 health in a few seconds... That irritates me.