Josh was purging possessions of his, and one of the things he was getting rid of was a copy of Spore. I try to avoid Electronic Arts for personal reasons, but I love Maxis games. Its a tough place to be since EA owns Maxis. Well, I took a look at the game and saw that the disc was Windows and Mac compatible so I figured why not give it a go? This was a mistake. After a 30 minute installation: I tried to run the game and was greeted by an update script. well, the game was released in 2008, so Id imagine there were some patches released... another 10-15 minutes goes by at which point the game finishes its patch and automatically tries to start. I am then greeted by another update dialog. Oh crap. Instead of a single update: Spore does all patches in sequence. 40 minutes... The last patch finishes installing and Im greeted by a Spore splash image while the game loads. Except then the slash image disappears and nothing happens. I try to open the program a couple more times just to make sure it wasnt some weird error, but nope. No Spore for me. Alright, Ill go online and see if EA has any solutions on their web site. EA didnt, but I did learn something really stupid in the process: Spore for Mac is just the windows version running through Cider. Uggh... Oh well. I go on to Youtube to see how I can get the game up and running. Immediately I find my solution. I need to uninstall the game. Re-install. Run it once without patching, and then patch the game. I follow these instructions, and sure enough: it worked just fine. I decide to authorize the serial key that came with the game so I can use the wonderful online parts of Spore... Oh guess what. It wont work. Spore was released with a wonderful piece of DRM that only allowed the game to be authorised on a set number of computers. The original number was three, but when people complained about it EA increased that number to 5. They also released a De-authorization tool in 2009, but that was for Windows only. Their web site says to check back for a Mac version of the tool later. Hows that coming, by the way? This is exactly why I dont buy anything from EA. All I wanted to do was play a game that my friend gave to me, and I ended up investing in inordinate amount of time trying to just get the damned thing to work. Ultimately to be let down by a sloppy port job, and a lack of support by the software publisher. Thanks for nothing Electronic Arts.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 15:16:36 +0000
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