Spore stuff again!

[Silver]

So Spore recently released a Creature Creator demo to try out and I've been having some fun with that. You can get it at:

 

http://www.spore.com/ftl

 

When installing a game, don't install the EA download manager. For some people (me) it makes Spore crash to desktop.

 

 

Anyways, when I finally got it to work, I did what I've been thinking about for more than a year now. I made a zergling. Or as close to a zergling as I could given the limbs and controls available.

 

 

I call it a proto-zergling, the creature that the zergling is based off of :D.

 

Other than that I've just been messing around with it and creating zany creatures. The second creature I had wanted to create was a carnivorous Care Bear that spat acid from it's stomach. Unfortunately I haven't been able to make one that I like. Plus the limited limbs I could use were right for it.

[SinisterDeath]

Look up my name, or the creature name Enigma, Tis my 'creation'. ;)

 

I don't have any Screen Shots really available...

[Silver]

Check out my creature Mek, my user name is Thomathan.

[SinisterDeath]

 

Are those nipples on its shoulders? :P

Anyways, this is my 'creature'.

Yes, it has 4 legs, each set of 2 legs has a different type of foot, (Hoof & Monkey Paw), and 4 Arms, each set with a different type of 'hand'. If you notice, one hand is a 'insect claw' and the other set is yet again hands.

What you don't see, is it has that same type of eye on its Front, Also on its ASS.

So, yes, the creature can watch its self poop if it so desires.

Or, It can see behind its self, Allowing it to see anything attempting to sneak up on it from behind. :P

[Silver]

Actually, I'm pretty sure the insect "hands" is a mouth. And Noooo, those aren't nipples! They're plasma cannons! And the pods on my creatures sides? Those are bio-PPCs. :D

 

 

Yeah, one thing I don't like is that it forces your creature to have a back and front. I wanted to make a 360 creature but it wouldn't let me. And feet can only face forwards with respect to the creature, which sucks.

[SinisterDeath]

doh I forgot that the insect hands were the mouths.

 

You can have the legs facing the opposite direction, however Im not sure about the feet. If you can its a manual edit.

[Kara_J]

Yay...someone else that has got this! I've bought the full Creature Creator for £5...if you do that you get £5 off the Spore game when it is released.

 

The game itself looks great but i'm having fun creating my own creatures :P

[Silver]

does the purchased creature creator have unlimited access to animal parts? currently, in the demo you only have a very limited selection of limbs and stuff. like there's not even any herbivore mouths i think.

[Kara_J]

Yep...you get everything from shark jaws through to mole, bird and insect mouths, you have a larger selection of legs, arms, hands and feet as well as weapons and other details. You also get a greater range of colour schemes and patterns to decorate your creature with.

 

I think you also get more "money" to spend on them too.

[Kara_J]

*resurrects*

 

Has anyone got this? There's been a huge brouhaha about Spore when it was released because you are only allowed (thanks to the software) to install it three times on your pc. If you tried to install it on another pc then you can't play on-line or use your own account. My bf and I bought a copy and he can play on-line using his account.. since I installed the same copy on my machine I can't go on-line and use my account I'd created using the creature creator. :(

 

 

BUT....

 

The makers of Spore have no climbed down and will shortly be releasing a patch which will enable you to install Spore unlimited times as long as it's on no more than 5 pc's and you will also be able to have multiple user names on one copy of Spore.  :)

[Haxorsist]

When I found out Spore comes with SecuRom I decided not to buy it. All SecuRom does is make playing the games frustrating for people who actually buy them. You don't get a notification telling you that the program will be installed on your computer, and after you uninstall the game, SecuRom doesn't get uninstalled and it's not possible to uninstall it either.

 

I'm looking forward to Empire: Total War, but news of it coming with SecuRom has put me off a bit. I might just download it instead.

[Silver]

I still buy the games but just get cracked versions. I do that for all my games, it removes the hastle of always needing a CD and you bypass the security crap.

 

Though for Spore, I only found out about SecuRom after I had installed it so... Oh, and I believe EA is adding a program that'll let you unactivate your activations.

 

 

BTW, Spore is a fun game but not as great as it could be. All the stages are fairly dumbed downed (well except for cell stage, not much to dumb down (ps, I LOVE cell stage. my favourite stage)). They should've added 2 modes, casual player and gamer.

 

Second, Tribal stage neededs to have assinable hotkeys. You can do this in Civ stage but not tribal for some reason.

 

3rd, Space stage. So many things to change/add.

a) Lower the pirate attacks for warrior. Is you even try to start out space stage by attacking people you're screwed. Pirates and enemies will attack your planet every 5 minutes. If you're just a peaceful trader you get attacked maybe once an hour.

b)You can set trade routes with other Empires but I don't think your money actually goes up. The only thing it does is allow you to buy the planet after a certain amount of time. Make it so trading routes gives you money.

c)Spice harvesting. Every 15 minutes you have to make a circuit of all your planets to pick up spice and sell it off to some other planet. It gets damn annoying and tedious after a while. There should be trade ships that do this automatically for you.

d)You are the ONLY ship in your Empire. Even if you have 50+ planets, you're still the only god damn ship. The only thing close to another ship is a defensive drone you can put on a planet, and then only one on each. You should be allowed to create a defensive army of ships that will automatically fly to and defend each planet.

e) You should be able to add more ships from your own Empire and add it to your armada that flies around with you. As it is, only 1 ship from each friendly empire can fly with you. Well what if I don't want friends? I was to dominate this damn galaxy!

f) Eco disasters. I can terraform entire planets, destroy entire planets, I have a empire spanning several planets and yet when there's 1 damn eco disaster, who do they call? Me. Appearantly, I'm the only one qualified to kill a infected creature. I mean bloody hell, there are land and air based vehicles on each of my planets, go kill the damn animals yourselves.

[Kara_J]

Agree whole heartedly! Got totally pissed off with the space stage. even on the easy setting all I ever got to do was run back and fore between three colonised planets defending them from pirates...I never got a chance to deliver much spice or raise cash to buy anything else.

[SinisterDeath]

Well, I've basically 'beat' spore if you want to call it that. I love the space stage, but I agree

 

1. We should be able to build ourselves an Armada! Our ENIMIES DO IT! You know how hard it is, to take on the Grox with 1 F***in ship?!

 

2. The trading at first is 'fun' tryign to find the best buy, but you can't really 'buy' spice from other worlds, so buying low selling high isn't really possible, and the trade lines don't actually 'increase' your wealth or increase you spice count. In actuallity, Planets you trade spice with, bring the value of spice down so you make less money off of it! (Its true, check it out) your spice Stock doesnt even increase faster, and its only value is

A) increases your rep with that ally,

B) lets you buy there planet.

C) eco disasters can be diverted on your planets fairly easily with a nice device. ;) Also balancing ecos can divert them to. And yes, its annoying when your allies are constnatly hittnig you up to fix there damned planets...

 

I'm hoping that the guy who did spore, will create a few more patches that fixes a few issues, and adds functions, and Expansions that add more gameplay would be nice to. It is simplistic, and with this damned many phases, it needs to be simplistic, and when it gets down to it all, the space phase is the most complex... Though I do wish that the 'stat system' they had in place through out all of the phases had some bearing on the space phase.  Or at least something that makes your weapons/sheilds more powerful/less powerful then just through 'achievements'. ;)

 

[Kara_J]

Well EA Games, the makers of Spore, are being sued by someone for the SecuROM program :P

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/26/ea_spore_class_action_lawsuit/

[SinisterDeath]

These class-action lawsuits are just a bunch of money grubbing ass-holes.

Everyone knew Spore was coming out with SecROM, a little 'research' would have wielded that info.

[Haxorsist]

Not everybody is in the know. If you just go into a video game store, and buy Spore, you might not have even heard about SecuROM. I didn't know Oblivion came with SecuROM when I installed it. Now I have the damn program on my PC.

[SinisterDeath]

Not everybody is in the know. If you just go into a video game store, and buy Spore, you might not have even heard about SecuROM. I didn't know Oblivion came with SecuROM when I installed it. Now I have the damn program on my PC.

 

Thats why us smart consumers, research our products before we buy them in stores. ;)

And quite frankly, I don't care if secuROM is installed on my pc or not. If it is, it is, if it isn't, it isn't. I don't agree with it, but thats not going to cause me to boycot a game that I want to play. There are already game companies out there, that are basically beacons to other companies that SecuROM and other such 'programs' are worthless, hurts only those who buy the products legally, and quite simply, kills there profit margin. ;)

 

Look up the Witcher Sometime, not a 'horrible' game by any standard, (I still haven't beat it, but I did buy it through Direct2Drive), its got some 'security' you know the basic cdkey and such (very standard for PC) and just recently they released the Witcher ENCHANCED edition (Which supposedly makes it the perfect game, I dunno I haven't loaded it up yet.

 

But this is unprecidented for 'gaming' companies.

They released the Enchanced Edition, FREE of charge to anyone who purchased the orginal game.

And of course, they re-released the Enchanced Edition so if you don't own the orginal, you can buy the enchanced edition. Mind you, this 'enchanced edition' is like a total re-work of the entire game. (suposedly, filesize, its about half of hte orginal, like a free expansion)

 

If PC game producers pick up on this type of stuff, they'll realize, that secur-features and such, are just a pain in the ass for people who own the games legally, SPORE was cracked a week before it was released! Once they realize that eliminating these security features, will increase there sales, and not 'hurt' them like they think it will, they'll find that the entire industry will start to 'pick up' more, as more and more people are buying games.

 

Hell, if PC games dropped there prices another $10, they'd see even more people buying the games! PC games are standard of $49.99, where as Console is standard of $59.99. I think spore was $39.99 >_>

Some reason the people who do the pricing, haven't thought that maybe if they lowered the price the game would sell more copies, which would create a larger market for them, because people who would download it online would go, (hmmm I could wait 3 weeks to download it, or I could buy it today, for $29.99... hmmmmmmmm).

 

Now if only more game companies would do what they did with FarCRY did on fileplanet, And that was offer the ENTIRE game for free, and the only catch? Commercial breaks when you load a new level. ;) (seriously, this type of software could be HUGE, and that means FREE 'retail' games, to anybody who wants to dl it, with comercial breaks which = money in the pocket everytime a comercial is viewed to the guys who made the game. Stops piracy in its tracks! Why steal it, when you can get it for free, Legally? 30s-60s comercials between 30s-60s loading screens? Sure why not!) ;)

[Haxorsist]

I'm of the opinion (which I think the plaintiff agrees with) that I shouldn't have to research whether or not a game contains malware before I buy it. It's a perfectly reasonable expecation to assume the game will not contain an intrusive program like SecuROM.

[SinisterDeath]

I'm of the opinion (which I think the plaintiff agrees with) that I shouldn't have to research whether or not a game contains malware before I buy it. It's a perfectly reasonable expecation to assume the game will not contain an intrusive program like SecuROM.

 

How exactly is it malware?

The closest arguement you have for it being malware, in the case of spore, are people who couldn't play it, becuase the DRM servers for Spore were down the first day. And from what I've found it doesn't 'do' anything to your computer (aka slows it down, hogs resources), all that porn you watch however, does slow it down. ;)

 

also,

http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming

[Haxorsist]

I've had problems with Oblivion where it suddenly won't read my disk. It's only with Oblivion and it works on other computers. I've heard other people having similar issues with Medieval II: Total War. The guys who had problems with Total War had to format their hard drives and re-install it to get it to work again. I'd say it's borderline malware in that it doesn't ask for permission before it installs and it doesn't allow you to uninstall it, even after you've uninstalled the game.

[SinisterDeath]

I've had problems with Oblivion where it suddenly won't read my disk. It's only with Oblivion and it works on other computers. I've heard other people having similar issues with Medieval II: Total War. The guys who had problems with Total War had to format their hard drives and re-install it to get it to work again. I'd say it's borderline malware in that it doesn't ask for permission before it installs and it doesn't allow you to uninstall it, even after you've uninstalled the game.

 

You do know how many 'things' are like that on Windows that aren't 'malware' right?

And theres always a way to remove something, Its just not as easy as pressing 'uninstall'.

 

I mean, just doing a quick google..

http://www.ehow.com/how_4421446_remove-securom-files-from-computer.html?ref=fuel&utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=ssp&utm_campaign=yssp_art

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/98241-13-remove-securom-malware-uninstalling-bioshock-demo

http://xperiencexp.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-remove-securom-user-access.html

 

There are some other 'services' that come with XP, that are basically malware, and ARE virtually impossible to 'uninstall' through conventinal methods, hell even some software, edit the F*** out of yoru registry and have been greater nueciances to deal with...

I can't remember exactly what these programs are called, becuase its been so long since I've had to 'deal' with them. But I seem to recall a certain application, you couldn't uninstall, and the only way to uninstall it was.

A) take it a specific registry file

B) Take out the registry file that was actually apart of the program

C) end various processes in ctrl-alt-del

D) Then you could 'uninstall' the software.

 

I believe the orignal msn messenger, was much like this, as well as some other things out there... But you know, I'd be more afraid of malware that can actually 'damage' your computer, instead of something as simple as a format... (which you should do at least once a year!)