Spore
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Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): Simulation, Strategy Home Page: http://www.spore.com
Visuals, PerformanceOn a proper gaming system Spore is fairly pretty. Modern shader effects are used where appropriate and the detail is amazing, considering that just about everything is procedurally generated. Technologically Spore is definitely a masterpiece.
 Low settings - actually runs on integrated Intel chipsets found on many laptops. Not very pretty, but playable. The visuals also degrade gracefully for low end systems. While you can technically play on intergrated chipsets found in many laptops (Intel GMA 950, GMA X3000 and GMA X3100 are supported, assuming you have at least a dual core CPU), to get most out of the graphics engine requires a fairly modern card. Nothing too fancy, mind you - any good midrange card available at a bit over 100$ will do. Cards like ATI Radeon HD3850 or NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT can comfortably push Spore at maximum settings. One thing you shouldn't skimp on is the amount of memory. While technically the game does run on 512MB when using Windows XP, 1024MB should be considered to be the practical minimum unless you enjoy terrible loading pauses. On Vista, 2GB is very much recommended, but that's in line with any gaming on Vista these days. DRM And Online FeaturesSpore has also sparked some controversy with the use of SecuROM DRM for copy protection. Spore, like many other EA titles these days, no longer cares if you have the DVD in your drive. Instead, it uses activation system similar to one used by Microsoft with Windows XP and Vista. You can install the game for grand total of three times on different hardware - and in this case different hardware equals "different motherboard or different installation of Windows". After that, you effectively have a coaster and must ask for additional activations from the EA support - not an easy task, considering that you must make a toll call (email support can't help you with activations), and the "support" EA provides consists of script-reading drones. Spore has also been criticized for being family-unfriendly with it's online features. Spore automatically shares your creations with the world, and there are numerous "community features" built-in. In order to use these online features, you have to log on from the game, and you can create only one login per product key of Spore. There is no way to do multiple logins with separate folders for each user on the same computer - everything is shared and tied to the product key used to create the account, and you can create only one online account per product key. So if you buy Spore for the whole family, install it on the PC and then let one kid go nuts with the creature creator, all those creatures are labelled online as the property of the account holder - even if you may have two kids and yourself all wanting to have your own creations in the game separated depending on who made them. Interestingly, the manual claims otherwise, and there is some controversy on how the system should work. In any case, as it stands now, Spore's online features work a bit like World of Warcraft does - one $50 game box/product key per user. This greatly diminishes the appeal of Spore in multi-user environments, like when a whole family wants to play the game and share their creations. In my opinion EA and Maxis failed miserably with the whole online concept by expecting each user to buy a copy of the game for all the online features and yet they still enforce per-installation activations through SecuROM. I can understand enforcing "one copy of a game running simultaneously per license purchased" as with Steam, but Spore's limitations are simply anti-consumer. Here is a free hint for EA: Look at Valve's Steam, apply copy & paste. Stop being silly.
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