SPORE Released 5 Days Early In Australia

knypha writes "Several sites are reporting that the much anticipated SPORE has been released 5 days ahead of the scheduled release date in Australia. I can confirm that SPORE is sitting on shelves in retailers and for the tidy sum of A$95.95 it can be yours. Why the early release exactly seems to be a matter of contention. No news if the game can actually be played yet or if the lucky early punters will still have to wait till the official release when EA allows for any validation process to occur. I guess EA could possibly be using the relatively small population to test the servers...or someone somewhere stuffed up!"

Comments

Good luck to australian gamers

[Anonymous Coward]

Paying A$95.95 for the privilege of hosing your system down with SecuROM. I can't say I envy you.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Das Modell]

If it uses SecuROM I'm just going to torrent it.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad it works on 99% of home users without causing problems. SecuROM is just how you're justifying to yourself receiving the software they paid money to produce, without paying for it.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Paradigm_Complex]

Not buying it because of SecuROM is certainly justified, but not buying it because EA is using Cider rather than making a real Mac port is just silly. The only thing EA is going to actually understand from this is that they're not getting Mac sales and they wasted time and money getting this thing cross-platform on PC's.

Unless you *don't* want them making it on the Mac at all - or if it just plain doesn't work well under Cider - than don't let the fact it's not native stop you from getting it. While making games for the Mac is still so uncommon this kind of thing should be encouraged, not discouraged. Later when it's considered SOP to make games of the Mac you can go ahead and complain about such things.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[tuffy]

Just because no one likes SecuROM doesn't mean one is entitled to download the game for free.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Starayo]

Oh, crap, I forgot about bloody SecuROM. That's what I get for buying a game legally for once.

No issues yet, but now my PC feels tainted...

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Mascot]

He should buy it if he wants to play it

Unfortunately, he has to pirate it to ensure he can play it.

I just hope Fallout 3 won't follow this sad trend. If all games start going the "online activation, max 3 installs" route, I might have to find a new hobby. I sure as hell won't buy games in this state.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[SoCalChris]

What about buying the game, then installing a downloaded version to keep their crap off of your system? I've done that before, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Ralish]

Not buying it because of SecuROM is certainly NOT justified, for many reasons.

Firstly, while I'm opposed to copy protection of this flavour in general, SecuROM is one of the tamer options out there. Yes, it causes problems for some users, but really, there's far worse out there. For instance, the horror that is StarForce. That's an example of a copy protection that crosses the line so blatantly, that it would be justified to all-out refuse to buy the game. SecuROM has if anything improved recently, notably, the v.7.x series can install and run in a non-administrator account, which has obvious security and stability benefits.

But more compelling than such technical arguments, is the ethical one from the developers point of view. Maxis is owned by EA (which is genuinely evil, or at least, has some pretty miserable standards), and I doubt the option of choosing whether to implement copy protection in the game is ultimately their choice. I'd imagine if a Maxis rep. went to EA and said "Spore is done, and by the way, we're releasing it free of any copy protection, except for a basic CD-Key check with server-side validation only in the case of multiplayer", they'd be laughed out of the office and/or fired. I don't believe it's fair or at all reasonable to let Maxis suffer because of the inclusion of SecuROM. They worked hard on this game, invested a lot of time to develop it; refusing to buy it purely because of copy protection is more a snub to them than it is to EA.

Should we protest against the inclusion of such copy protection mechanisms? Absolutely. But do so through means that don't whack the developers pocket except in extreme cases. Complain on the game forums, let both Maxis and EA know your opposition to the inclusion of SecuROM. If you are vocal enough, they may even remove the SecuROM checks from the binary. This has been done by developers numerous times in the past through future patches when faced with enough opposition.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Anonymous Coward]

I only steal canned ham and evaporated milk from the grocery store, and in most cases they're past their Best By date.

Thieves suck.

--

Don't steal the dream - don't steal music.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Bloodrage]

Circumventing security features is only a crime in the Land of the Free...

I will buy and modify the product as I see fit.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Mascot]

By buying it, you are endorsing the protection.

I'm so much against the notion that I should need to break a protection scheme on something I bought (it's legal where I live), that I refuse to buy it to begin with. They know what they need to do to get my money. Their move.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[Michael Hunt]

Cider _is_ native code. All the way down. The only real difference (user interface issues aside, and most games don't use the native UI in any event) is that each DirectX call obviously goes through one more stack frame before it hits the hardware (game->cider directX->OpenGL->driver rather than game->directX->driver).

It's been my experience that the speed difference in Cedega (or lack thereof) from a 'native' DirectX implementation is marginal. With Cider, one would assume any differences would be more marginalized again given the fact that the code is in a native binary format and the vast bulk of the application isn't making calls through translated APIs.

It'll be interesting to see if anybody takes the freely available (albeit not open source) Cedega DirectX 9 code (or, for that matter, the open source but somewhat slower Wine DirectX 9 code) and adds the DirectX 10 APIs to it. A system like this would, in theory, allow DirectX 10 apps to run on Windows XP as well as other GL platforms.

Re:Good luck to australian gamers

[LingNoi]

Then run it with wine in a chroot environment if you're worried about the control of your machine.

Spore will work in wine if you look on wine-patches mailing list for the setScissorRect patch and getStencilDepth. It hasn't been included in the main git tree yet because the code doesn't mimic windows behaviour exactly, but it'll make Spore work.

There, now you can play Spore without any worry of the DRM effecting your machine. You can also now play Steam games too so go knock yourself out and have some safe fun.

Oh...

[neokushan]

Oh the PURE and UNADULTERATED HORROR of it all!

It's clear why they are doing it

[Henry V .009]

They are trying to get a good Zero Punctuation review from Yahtzee.

Re:It's clear why they are doing it

[ccguy]

They are trying to get a good Zero Punctuation review from Yahtzee.

Nah, Bill Wright visits slashdot from time to time and he read many Australians whining about their lousy Internet conditions... so he thought he'd give them a 5-day head start.

It also gives us the rest of the world a chance to whine about our lousing gaming conditions.

makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the seas around Australia have perfect conditions for the formation of early life...

Too expensive.

[Mystery00]

Like for most games, our stores once again double the price for no reason other than that they can. If I buy this at all it'll be an import from somewhere like play-asia.

It's Simple

[Bieeanda]

Australia has more horrifying, poisonous creatures per square meter, than any other place on Earth. If anyone is going to understand Spore, it's them.

Re:It's Simple

[ZeroFactorial]

Ah yes, the dreaded Australopeniscus.

Yes, it is confirmed that you can play early

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not have a slashdot account, so I doubt that I will be seen.

But the whole reason this story broke is do to this person here.

http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=603042

The bastard is gloating in his 15 mins of Internet fame. :p

Ambivalent

[Chris Pimlott]

I'm not sure if Aussies should be boosting that they get first crack at this game or shamed at revealing how much computer games cost down there...

Re:Ambivalent

[fostware]

I'm not sure if Aussies should be boosting that they get first crack at this game or shamed at revealing how much computer games cost down there...

haha... "first crack"... Is that a challenge? lol

Seriously though, I'm getting angrier and angrier at how much games cost here. I almost never buy retail anymore, and no doubt the games companies will blame it on piracy.

Re:Ambivalent

[Starayo]

It is incredibly cheaper to import games than it is to buy locally. My country is a little fucked up.

Re:What's so great about this game?

[Das Modell]

I anticipate that Spore is going to get pretty boring pretty quickly. It doesn't look like it'll have much replay value.

Re:Importing

[CogDissident]

Notably, the price is in Australian dollars. In American its 81.36$. Still a huge markup for apparently no reason.

Re:What's so great about this game?

[jayhawk88]

I imagine someone saying something very similar right before the release of SimCity and TheSims. "It's just creating a city, how many times through do you really need to play it?"

let us rejoice, for we are young and poor...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you know it's great and all that we Aussies are getting it early. Too bad we have to take out a mortgage just to pay for the bloody thing.

The gouging the video game industry does against Australians is absolutely deplorable. The local EB games is still trying to flog off the Warcraft 3 Battlechest - part of which is almost 8 years old - for $110!! At current exchange rates that's about $95 US.

I order my games from the UK and even with shipping it's practically half price. The best part is you get around the stupid censorship imposed by Senator Atkinson.

With all of the BS we're forced to tolerate, plus the whole descendants from convicts thing, it shouldn't be too surprising that many Australians turn to "alternate channels" of distribution for their video gaming needs.

Re:Importing

[Fweeky]

Direct download from EA is £39.95, or £42.94 if you want to be able to redownload for 2 years instead of 6 months. 95.95 AUD is £45, so not that much of a markup.

Of course, if I buy a physical copy, I can get it for £28, or £30 if I want it (almost) guaranteed on release day, so you do have to wonder what EA are thinking with that download price..

Re:What's so great about this game?

[Das Modell]

I guess I should have elaborated, because I wasn't making a joke. Spore just looks like it will quickly become very repetitive and dull.

Re:Importing

[ccguy]

Of course, if I buy a physical copy, I can get it for £28, or £30 if I want it (almost) guaranteed on release day, so you do have to wonder what EA are thinking with that download price..

That's easy: "Let's make an extra profit from the people who can't wait an extra day, and make sure we don't piss off retailers by setting a price that could actually be seen as competition."

Amen to that

[patio11]

Amazing how folks on Slashdot think that the industry is totally deaf.

"I'm too much of a Mac snob to buy games that would even function on another system."
"I pay $15 a month for WoW because I have to but torrent everything else I can get my hands on, because I hate DRM."

Its almost like that sort of attitude among customers might, hmm, drive business decisions or something.

Re:Amen to that

[Paradigm_Complex]

I just view companies like EA as I do children, or maybe dogs. These ideas, justified or not, are too complicated for them.

Child does good you praise it, child does bad you put it in time out. Dog does good you give it a treat, dog does bad you stuff it's face in the mess it made and yell "bad dog." EA does over-all net good you buy their game, EA does bad you boycott it and maybe yell on their forums. Don't try to say "Making for mac is good but [details]." Details are confusing while they're still struggling with the whole Mac-good or Mac-bad thing. Again, like children or dogs it may take a good number of reward-punishment cycles before these ideas start sinking in and you can try to teach it something else. Don't be discouraged when yet another game is released with DRM or Cider.

Re:What's so great about this game?

[Crookdotter]

I've never understood this attitude. Everything in the world is repetitive. Pick a game, ANY game. Football, darts, rugby, World Of Weirdos, Half Life, etc etc. They are ALL repetitive. That's what games are.
Spore might not be a good game, but being repetitive should never be seen as a negative. Games are repetitive, and repetitive != dull.

5 Days Early?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, it's because of time zones. When it's Thursday here in the states, it's like February in Australia.

Re:What's so great about this game?

[jollyreaper]

I guess I should have elaborated, because I wasn't making a joke. Spore just looks like it will quickly become very repetitive and dull.

It's supposed to be a sandbox. Did you have a sandbox as a kid? I did. It was only as boring as the limits of your imagination.

Of course, if Spore turns out to be a crappy sandbox, then you can't really blame it for being boring. But Maxis has had a history of creating good sandboxes so I don't think I'll have to eat my words.

I just want Stephen Colbert to cover the game so we can see him do a Spore Report.

Re:Importing

[SupremoMan]

So what after 6 months you can't download the game you bought anymore? What a piece a shit! I can't believe there is a digital download service that's worse than the IGN one!(Direct2Drive)

Re:What's so great about this game?

[tolomea]

Well...

Cell stage was kinda hectic and reminded me of flow, didn't get boring before it was time to move along.

Creature stage got boring and fast, maybe next time through I'll try something aside from killing everything in sight.

Tribe stage was fun and gave me a surprising amount of challenge for easy difficulty setting.

And then I was designing a town hall for the start of Civ stage when it crashed, rebuilding that is going to be tedious as hell.

And yet...

[ekhben]

... we're still waiting on WALL-E.