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| | Publisher: Electronic Arts  Genre: Simulation | | Mac OS X: 10.4 Mac OS Classic: Not Supported
CPU: Intel RAM: 999 MB Hard Disk: 4000 MB Graphics: 128 MB VRAM |
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Sound: Ambient, Unnoticeable, Perfect The sound of Spore is equally excellent. All the music tracks fit the mood of the current stage wonderfully, the simlish language of the creatures matches their looks quite well, the firing sounds sound the way they should, and there isn't a single interaction in the game that doesn't come with a corresponding sound.There are a couple areas where the sound is particularly excellent, though. The first is in the civilization stage when you pick your national anthem. There are numerous choices for switching the mood, tempo, melody, etc... and you can even set the tune yourself using a basic note movement technique. It's almost like a small song editor, and is surprisingly complete. The second is the series of sounds the creatures make throughout the game. The mating call sounds like... a mating call, the growls are intimidating, the simlish phrases are strangely entertaining, and the best part is that each and every mouth has its own set of sounds. This provides even more entertainment when you create a creature that is nothing but an arm, a hand, and as many mouths as you can pack on. Value: The Pirated Version is Better? What? With all of that, though, is Spore worth your hard-earned money? I'd have to say yes..... and no. If Spore was purchasable without anything beyond a CD key check tacked on, it'd be a must-buy. However, the copy-protection of Spore is highly broken. Not only do you have to install SecuRom, which has serious bugs to work out, but you are also only allowed a limited number of installations. This might not seem like that big a deal, but you can easily use all your installations on a single computer just by switching between having your mouse, speakers, or headphones plugged in. This is a completely broken system and very frustrating.What makes it worse is that it is also completely unnecessary. Its purpose is to stop the pirating of Spore, but it has failed so badly that Spore was available in torrents five days before it was officially released. The illegal version was purged of all the buggy and restrictive copy-protection, so it actually runs better than the legal game. This is monumentally stupid on the part of the EA executives, as their copy-protection is encouraging the people who were looking to buy Spore legally to get the illegal version. Even with that, though, Spore is worth the purchase. It is incomplete, but it's so much fun in the space stage that it's still worth it. Hypothetically, you could purchase a legal copy of the game and then find a friend without any copy-protection problems and play on that version instead. It's worthy of your monetary support, but until the copy-protection is simplified and made less restrictive, I wouldn't recommend risking your computer with it. Pros • Procedural editors
• Addictive space stage
• Beautiful graphicsCons • Restrictive copy-protection
• Few choices in early stages
• Overly simplistic gameplay
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