EA's (Limited) Creature Creator For Spore Released

JimboFBX writes "The Spore creature creator has been released. It's a limited demo, but it lets you make a full creature and test drive it a little. It gives some insight on what you'll be able to do with your creatures. Personally, the novelty already wore off within 10 minutes. From what I can tell, the full creature creator is a separate purchase from the actual game. Gotta love EA." An anonymous reader points to a thread at More Awesome Than You alleging that this creature creator also contains some phone-home features which might be cause for concern.

Comments

Re:About the payware version

[Daimanta]

You've answered your own question. People are willing to pay for both the creature editor and the game. So EA lets them and rakes in the cash.

SecuROM

[FnordX]

The "free" demo does also come bundled with SecuROM, so, downloader beware.

Also, it includes about 8 items out of each of the menus. If you're wanting to, you can pay the full price for the demo and get everything, and then proceed to upload your content to help out the developers by allowing them to have content ready when the game launches.

So, basically, you're paying EA to make their game world better, and they don't even trust you enough to give you access to the limited edition of the demo without some pretty intrusive spyware. And EA wonders why they get such a bad rep?

Re:About the payware version

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, not true. There are already a pile of penis creatures out there including a goatse one. There's some youtube links to a lot of them on a Bluenews thread I was reading yesterday (sadly BN is blocked here at work so I can't reference any of them at the moment).

Alleged phone-home features?

[Bieeanda]

There's one post in that thread that says something very vague about an encrypted communication, and the rest advocates disconnecting your Internet connection. That's not news, it's hearsay.

Now, SecuROM in the installer-- that is worthy of note.

On "Phoning home"

[Suddenly_Dead]

The game does utilize an internet connection for legitimate purposes. The banner at the start seems to be loaded off the internet (advertising the full game). There's a section in the "Sporepedia" that has links to purchase the game, advertisements for Spore merchandise and other things which I would think are loaded dynamically off the net. And the game of course lets you create and upload creations.

More, you know, evidence of malicious intent would be nice before people start running around like the sky is falling.

Re:On "Phoning home"

[hopelessdeskmonkey]

Yeah, you're right, just because someone has their hand in your pocket doesn't mean that they're going to take anything out. Oh wait, I don't like having someone put their hand in my pocket. To be honest the phone home feature isn't as onerous as the 3 validation limit. If you change video cards, hard drives, OS, or make a variety of undisclosed changes to your system they break your game. Why bother paying for that? I change components frequently, and would have to pay for this games 3 times a year, no thanks.

Re:WHEN PENIS MONSTERS ATTACK

[Kimos]

There are now over 300 spore penis monsters on YouTube. Really...

Bask in the phallic glory of five years of development.

Re:WHEN PENIS MONSTERS ATTACK

[the brown guy]

Be very careful when searching for "penis spore" on youtube.....should you accidentally type sore as spore your in for a nasty treat.

IT COUNTS AS A PREORDER

[azuredrake]

Hey guys,

I just wanted to point out what nobody has said (for North America, anyway) yet: If you buy the Creature Stand Alone, it counts as a preorder for Spore, in that if you buy spore at the EA online download thingy you get the CSA's price back off your purchase.

Now I'm not naive enough to think that that's going to stop most readers here from just warezing it anyway, but breaking the law is breaking the law; so for those of you who want to do it legit, this will save you money.