Tag: Spore
EA's Need For Speed, Spore Creatures and the Simpsons headed to the iPhone
EA have today announced that it plans to release versions of three of its flagship gaming properties onto the iPhone. Need For Speed Shift, Spore Creatures and the Simpsons Arcade represent months of EA honing their skills developing for the…
Spore DRM finally eased
Call it a victory for pester power if you like, but EA has just released a deauthorisation tool for their DRM system in Spore. As previously reported, Spore would only let players install the game five times before forcing you to buy a new copy. This patch allows you to ‘de-authorize’ a computer, meaning that you get one of your credits back.
Interestingly, the de-authorization process doesn’t involve uninstallation, so you can leave it sat on your hard drive, and just de- and re-authorize as necessary. Of course, if your hard drive corrupts, then you’re not going to be able to get that installation back, but do you know anyone who’s lost five hard drives that way, ever?
Spore Deauthorisation Patch (via RPS)
Related posts: Spore becomes most pirated game ever | SPORESUIT: EA sued over Spore DRM
Spore becomes most pirated game ever
Largely thanks to the draconian DRM bundled with Will Wright’s ‘Spore’, the life-simulation game has been downloaded an epic 1.7 million times since its release at the start of September. If my maths is right, that means that one copy is downloaded every five seconds or so. If that rate had been maintained over the whole year, then people would have snagged 6.5 million copies.
Interestingly, second place in this year’s top ten most pirated games, published by Torrentfreak, was the Sims 2, showing that piracy isn’t limited to hardcore gamers (who generally hate the Sims), it’s become a perfectly mainstream pastime among ordinary people. It’s impressive that despite being released in 2004, it’s still right up at the top of the list, though it’s unclear how The Sims 2’s multiple add-on packs are counted.
(via MCVUK)
Related posts: SPORESUIT: EA sued over Spore DRM | Spore fans threatened with game ban over DRM discussion
EA gets more DRM lawsuits over its use of SecuROM
Electronic Arts, the company responsible for the Spore DRM fiasco earlier this year, has been hit by two new lawsuits over the hated SecuROM ‘copy protection’ system that installs itself if you so much as look at an EA product, and can only be uninstalled by chucking your PC into a black hole.
Both suits have been filed in Northern California, one references the free ‘Spore Creature Creator’ demo/software toy, and the other names The Sims 2: Bon Voyage as the culprit. These follow another class-action suit earlier this year. In the suits EA are branded as “immoral, unethical, oppressive [and] unscrupulous”. Crikey.
SPORESUIT: EA sued over Spore DRM
The Spore DRM Wars rumble on. The latest development is that a class action suit has been filed in the Northern District of California court. It’s being brought on behalf of Melissa Thomas, and all other Spore purchasers. That includes me, actually…
Spore fans threatened with game ban over DRM discussion
The company vs consumer battle between EA and its customers is really starting to kick off. The debate centres on the DRM slathered all over Spore – the new game from Will Wright, creator of The Sims. The digital rights management system that EA built into the game has led fans to plaster Amazon with bad reviews, and even create protest species within the game…
EA to ease Spore's DRM restrictions
EA says they will be launching a patch for Spore in response to fans’ anger over the game’s DRM restrictions that will enable users to install the downloaded version of the game more than three times.
It will work my dissociating each version of the game as it is removed from a computer…
Spore fans in uproar create DRM protest species
Users within Will Wright’s latest game, Spore, have been creating creatures protesting the game’s draconian DRM measures. The animals, pictured above, are rapidly populating the Universe of user-generated-creatures online. Although it’s certainly not the strangest thing we’ve seen within the menagerie of creatures brought to life by the game, there’s a certain charm to these shambling monstrosities…
UPDATE: Creationist rage at Spore was an elaborate Rickroll
The big Rickrolling meme from earlier this year may be somewhat past its sell-by-date, but you’ve got to salute the effort one intrepid netizen put into giving thousands of people a burst of the old Astley. Turns out that the creationist website Anti-Spore, which we previously reported on, was a fake…
Sporegasm: Creationists and gamers angered but Maxis release game prototypes to quell the riots
This is three stories in one really, so I apologise in advance for the length of this post. The three things I’m about to cover are as follows: Creationists are trying to ban Spore in the USA due to its evolutionary content, video-game fans are slamming EA and refusing to buy the game due to its DRM system, and EA have released a bunch of early prototypes of different aspects of the game….
