| Subcategories | Simulation Simulation Simulation Simulation |
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Spore | 
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| From: Electronic Arts
Category: Video Games
List Price: CDN$ 49.99
Buy New: CDN$ 46.99
You Save: CDN$ 3.00 (6%)
New (2) Used (1) from CDN$ 28.99
Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 142
Format: Dvd-rom
Platforms: Windows Xp, Windows Vista, Macintosh
Genre: simulation_games
ESRB: Everyone 10+
Media: DVD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Windows Vista
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 0.1 x 0.1 x 0
MPN: 15352
Model: 15352
UPC: 014633153521
EAN: 0014633153521
ASIN: B000FKBCX4
Release Date: September 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Create universal wonder in Spore, an exciting new simulation game that lets you develop your own personal universe. Work your way through five evolutionary phases, including Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization and Space, that offer unique challenges, thrills and goals. For example, you can start in Cell and nurture one species from a simple aquatic organism all the way until it becomes a sentient life form. Or you can jump right in and begin building tribes and civilizations on multiple planets. What you do with your universe is totally up to you.
The powerful creation tools of Spore are easy to use, allowing you to effortlessly design every aspect of your universe. Creatures, vehicles, building and even starships are all within your grasp. While Spore is a single-player game, your creations and other players' creations are automatically shared between your galaxy and theirs, offering a nearly limitless number of worlds to visit and enjoy. You can also go online to view the incredible things other players have made and can even pull those items into your universe. Spore gives you the chance to make worlds and beings that evolve, grow and delight you every step of the way.   SPORE CREATURE CREATOR Finally all that hard work creating the perfect being can be put to good use. Import creatures that you created with the Spore Creature Creator and watch them live, breath and thrive in the full version of Spore. TAKE YOUR SPORE ONLINE While Spore is a single player game, your creations and other players’ creations are automatically shared between your galaxy and theirs, providing a limitless number of worlds to explore and play within. Internet Connection Required. Minimum System Requirements This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac) - PC Minimum - Windows XP/Vista
- 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
- 512 MB RAM/768 MB RAM
- 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
- The latest version of DirectX 9.0c
- Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1
- At least 4 GB of hard drive space, with at least 1 GB additional space for creations
- Mac Minimum - Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
- Intel Core Duo Processor
- 1024 MB RAM
- ATI X1600 or NVIDIA 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
- At least 4 GB of hard drive space, with at least 1 GB additional space for creations
- This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac), or the GMA 950 class of integrated video cards
- For computers using built-in graphics chipsets under Windows, the game requires at least:
- Intel Integrated Chipset, 945GM or above
- 2.6 GHz Pentium D CPU, or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent
- 768 MB RAM
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| Customer Reviews: Read 36 more reviews...
Unfinished/could have been so much better, too small & short, no replayability If they try make Spore 2 they have a lot to learn November 3, 2008
M. Duplessis (Ottawa, Canada)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Other reviewers have already written how bad the gameplay in the various stages is. I played on Hard difficulty and I did have a little bit of a challenge at the beginning of the tribal and civilization stages. But once you bribe all the other tribes, and once you figure out which cities the dominant civilization is going to attack you take over your continent you've pretty much won. Its not really that hard.
The AI is so stupid, you can send your tanks to destroy your rival's tanks as they try to take over a city and they won't attack you.
Anyways there are so many flaws. The cell stage (technically you're not a single celled organism so why call it that? Anyways..) The micro stage barely counts as a stage; you can finish it in a matter of minutes.
The creature phase: As someone mentioned earlier, variety in creature design is severly hampered by the new way they made the parts add to your creature's abilities. You can't have a cool-looking five-mouthed turtle of doom; those +1 bite mouths that look so awesome don't stack together now so instead of having 5 bite you only have 1 bite power... even if you're a walking mouth machine. Same applies to everything else. Sorry, no super-dragonfly with 5 dragonfly wings capable of doing 200 meter flights; you'll need to get a single set of Flying 5 / Jumping 4 bird wings. Didn't want to be a bird? Too bad.
The creature phase, just like the micro-organism, Tribal and Civilization stages, are too short and feel incomplete, as if they're just filler for the upcoming Space stage. If it weren't for the 3 different paths you can take to get different bonuses at the Space stage, there would be no replayability whatsoever; playing those stages a second time felt like a chore. Even the creature stage gets quite tedious quite fast; you're always doing the same things over and over.
One major problem I see is that the environments are far too small. The creature stage feels almost claustrophobic as all the nests are next to each other; you literally have to watch out at times how far away you step out of a friendly, socialble herbivore's nest because there's a nest of savage meat-eating predators nearby. Good job on choosing the best location, herbivores!
This problem gets worse in the tribal and civilization stages, which also suffer from oversimplification. These stages are supposed to be mini-strategy stages, yet you only have 1 resource type and 1 air, ground and naval unit. There isn't much strategizing there. As mentioned the worlds are too small, there isn't a lot of room to grow without ending up conquering everything already and moving on. Too bad, I can see how those stages could have been so much more fun with some of the features like paying a friendly nation to attack an enemy city, playing politics and bribe a large nation to attack a city and start a war with another large nation...
The space stage is semi-decent, but once again I feel they could have done much more with it. Increase the maximum spice your colonies can carry, dramatically lower the amounts of raider attacks and ecodisasters; all that running around every minute to harvest spice, and to fix these disasters/raids is not challenging gameplay; it's tedious, annoying gameplay.
And you can't really interact that well with other subspace species; you can't build your own city on a civilization planet and conquer everyone else, you can't control your chosen alien tribe and make them rule the planet. Nope. But you can bomb everything however.
The space-stage quests favour quantity over quality, and this seems to be true with species as well; After a while when I had enough spice colonies I stopped caring about my allies because storywise they're just one-dimensionnal carricatures without any significant backstories, goals or ambitions. They will react to your presence (attack/start a war or trade/become allies) but they don't do much else except ask for help with their ecodisasters, because apparently they figured you, an alien spaceship captain can solve their planet's impending doom. Other than that, alien races are extremely shallow. It's impossible to get attached to them as you would to..say.. the Klingons in Start Trek (even if they are sort of caricutarized... but that's for another day...)
If the space stage were an RPG it would fail miserably because there is [almost] no story, there is [almost] no plot. You can't agree to trick the Zealotoids into starting a religous war and capturing the homeland of that military empire that's been giving everyone trouble, only come in and invade the Zealotoids with some allies while their forces are away because they're just so annoying (and probably evil anyways).
As for the useless (except for warding off potential customers) SecuROM DRM, if you've uninstalled the game as I have, here's where you can go to get that removed:
http://www.simprograms.com/securom-removal-tool-added/
If they ever decide to make Spore 2 I hope they can learn from their mistakes...
Crashed my system October 27, 2008
S. Mitchell (Ontario Canada)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This peace of sh** crashed my system, and get this, the only way I could get it to work was a full re-install of windows and than installing the cracked version I downloaded (I read on a forum that it would work). this thing is nothing but a $50 peace of worthless sh** that isn't even worth the disk it is pressed on.
STAY AWAY.
EA... You better not put this DRM sh** on Sims 3 or i will not bother buying it I will just skip right to my other solution and download it. You guys F'd up big time.
I have all my Sims stuff registered and will be emailing my complaint.
I have been a big fan of Will Wright's games for a long time but NOW I AM F***ING MAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WAY TO SLAP LEGITIMATE PURCHASERS OF YOUR PRODUCT. THANKS FOR THE HEADACHE.
I will not buy any more EA games October 23, 2008
M. Strong
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The DRM software that gets secretly installed on your computer and has complete access to ALL you computer's systems including the internet is going too far. I do have any priated games, I have bought all my games.(All of the Sims 2). But as a comsumer this is too much. I will boycott EA until they change the DRM they use.
Spore - No thank you October 15, 2008
B. Charbonneau
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Spore is a shadow of what it could be. The game play has been dumbed down and it is now boring and retitive. The only fun part is the creature creation but the design of a creature does not seems to really impact it's success or failure. Add to this a DRM fiasco that only let you install the game 5 times! Save your money and don't buy this game!
Virus disguised as a game October 10, 2008
N. Yang
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
My review will contain facts, and only facts, no commentary about EA or what's right and what's wrong. You make your own decisions.
I purchased this game 2 weeks ago.
When you first install this game, it will automatically, secretly, install a program called SecuROM into the Kernel of your computer. The Kernel is the highest administration level of your computer, it can interact directly with your hardware.
Facts:
1) SecuROM installs itself automatically when you install the game. It installs itself onto Ring 0 (Ring 3 is where most programs operate, ring 1 and 2 are your device drivers/OS, and ring 0 is the root of your computer where direct interaction with your hardware Ram CPU etc occurs). Simply put, it has total control over your computer because inner rings have full access of subsequent rings, but not vice versa.
2) The game's installer does not tell you that it is installing this program, and there's no way to prevent it. Nowhere in the manual, the online documentation, EA's website, the game's EULA does it make any mention of this software.
3) SecuROM runs automatically and HIDES itself from your operating system, it hides its folders and .dlls.
4) SecuROM CANNOT be disabled. It is hidden from your OS so you can't tell it's running unless you use special programs. Ending the process does nothing, it restarts instantly.
5) SecuROM CANNOT be uninstalled. Even if you uninstall the game completely and delete it from your computer, SecuROM is still there, still runs on your computer whenever it's on. It has no uninstaller. deleting its folder, removing the registry entries does nothing, it is now apart of your system Kernel.
6) SecuROM DISABLED MY FIREWALL!! It did it without notice, presumably to send information to EA. I don't play online, only single player. It will access your internet whenever you're online whether you are playing the game or not.
7) SecuROM uses system and network resources, and you have no control over the program whatsoever. You can not control it or what it does.
8) My system began crashing at random intervals, when it had never crashed before installing spore.
9) Contacting EA support redirects you to SecuROM support, who redirects you back to EA support who redirects you ...
10) Reformatting my computer was the only way to remove SecuROM and allow it to function normally again.
11) This is the EXACT the behaviour of the most malicious viruses out there, and it is being bundled with official software with no warning to the user - This is ILLEGAL.
Buy this at your own risk.
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