Is it me, or does the emperor have no clothes?

Cell stage:
- Very fun, very cute, VERY SHORT. Blew through it in a few minutes. It's a minigame or a casual game.

Creature stage:
- Best part of the game. Carefully iterating your creature's anatomy to give it the desired abilities is great fun.

So far, so good! Looking promising!

Tribal stage:
*sigh*. It's a garden-variety RTS. Not even a particularly good one. I'm repeatedly beset by enemies that I haven't got enough resources to fight off. After about a dozen deaths and restarts, I finally get lucky and fend off the attacks enough to advance to the next stage...

Civilization stage:
... ANOTHER garden-variety RTS. Again, not even a particularly good one. *SIGH*.

Space stage:
What the heck is this? It's an exact copy of Star Control 2. Except, the conversations you have with other civilizations aren't funny this time around. And the interesting multi-ship space combat sequences are gone. And every task is an annoying fetch quest!! Except now, for some reason, the go-back-to-deliver-the-goods portion of the fetch quest has a time deadline, so most of the times I try them, I fail because I didn't rush back quickly enough.

Does the space stage of this game get any better than fetch quests, or should I just go back and play through the creature stage a few times?

Dunno. All I've seen of Spore so far is a splash screen and 2 icons in my dock. Cider fails yet again to impress me.

That's too bad.

I think I know why the space sequence is bugging me so much. I can tell that the missions are more or less randomly generated. So poking around and doing fetch quests seems so pointless to me. At least in Star Control 2, there was a carefully penned plot and dialogue, and you could see the puzzle pieces coming together as you played through it. It gave the game interest.

I was looking forward to this game and really excited about it. Most of the reviews I've seen tell a similar tale as yours. Nice idea, bad execution, bad game. I was going to buy it this weekend, but I decided to hold off.

Looks like zeropunctuation didn't like it either: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/218-Spore

Yeah, I laughed my ass off at the Zero Punctuation.

So far, I haven't gone back to the Space segment of the game once I realized it was simply a big, randomly-generated Star Control II. Has anyone else played a significant amount of time in the Space segment?

I did, however, go back and do the Cell/Creature stage a couple of times just to try out different kinds of creature approaches. I'll probably do it a few more times. That's quite fun.

Still haven't played. So far, EA support has:

1. Sent me a blanket list of things to try, like making sure I did have a machine up to spec, kill all background processes except Finder, and LoginWindow (loads of fun to do on OS X), run system update, and so on.

2. Sent me another response to check parental controls, the hosts file, and send back a system profile and traceroute, even though the system profile was attached when I created the issue.

3. Sent me a response today basically saying "This is a tough one, give us a bit".

No response to my question of "Will EA refund my money if this doesn't get fixed, as my return window is rapidly shrinking?"

*continues to wait*

I happen to have a box I can't get it to run on, either. It keeps crashing in DINPUT8. Haven't found a solution for that one. At least it runs on one of my boxes.

"Your Mac Profile indicates you have two video cards hooked up to your Mac Book. Can you explain how this is possible?"

*sigh*

Guess I should write back and explain that Mac Pro means it is a desktop, and it has these things called PCIe slots that accept video cards.

Sounds like Apple is hiring Tandy employees now...

Uh oh. Clueless tech support is bad but finding somebody with half a clue is even worse.

This is EA support. And no doubt about the Tandy employees going there. I'd hope Apple support would see "Mac Pro" on line 3 of the system profile report and understand what it is.

And finally got a solution, but on my own. Got bored, so I did a clean OS X install to another drive and updated to 10.5.5. Spore worked fine. So, I tried yanking my second video card. Spore worked fine on the normal install. Put the video card back in, installed the 10.5.5 update again using the combo updater (not the delta one), and it works now.

Probably won't have time to get sucked into it till next weekend.

Yeah. The funny thing is, the DRM and account restrictions were fine for me. I don't suppose they can make the gameplay more fun in the later stages with a patch...

EA is always surprised by these things oddly enough. I guess they didn't pay any attention when it happened for their other games...

The restriction on number of accounts is pretty weird tho. How would that help piracy?

I wasn't fine with it, and nearly did cancel my preorder. Only Will Wright's name kept me from doing so. The reason is that prior to the changes, your CD key became deactivated for any future installs after installing it 3 times. Work, home, and laptop would blow that for me day one, meaning I'd have to call EA and fight with them to reinstall the game. At some point, they will have a tool to de-authorize a system, and are bumping the number to 5. A step in the right direction, but I'd really prefer the DRM to be pulled completely like it was for Bioshock. EA is already bad about keeping old servers online, so who knows how many years the Spore DRM system will even be kept online. DRM didn't prevent me from firing up Sim City 3000 recently, and I'd hope the same doesn't happen to me for Spore in 10 years.

And then of course there is EA's ability to force you to buy a new copy just for bringing up SecuROM on their forums...