Spore Creature Creator

My 10-year-old received Spore for her birthday and became instantly hooked. It allows her to use her creativity, as well as indulge her love of science. She had no problem learning how to use the software and was able to start making creatures right away.

My 10-year-old daughter bought this with her own funds about 6 weeks ago for use on a MacBook. SInce then we've had great fun creating creatures, both images of our pets and fantastic fictional animals. We have had none of the issues reported by other users, perhaps because our computer is new and runs OSX 10.5.

Fun game: one person creates a creature that looks like a specific pet or other known animal, and everyone else guesses who it is. We've done all the dogs in the house, plus the lizard, newts, rabbits and salamanders. We're moving on to neighborhood pets next.

I've decided to buy Spore, and look forward to importing our creatures into that game.

My kids were really excited by the splashy advertising in the lead up to the full Spore. They decided to buy the game. They were really excited about it, for a day, but since then it has languished unused.

Besides that, we faced several installation issues. The game wouldn't run at all because of some interference with EA's download manager. After I uninstalled the download manager, it worked, but only arbitrarily on certain user accounts. Attempts to resolve the issue through customer support were initially supportive, but quickly devolved to the point where it was clear they weren't even reading my messages.

First and foremost, THIS GAME HAS DRM.
What does this mean for you the consumer ? You are RENTING the game, you don't own the game.

As for gameplay, you can tell that the creators put a lot of time and effort into the creativity aspect of this game. It is quite enjoyable i found for the first few hours, however gameplay dulls after a bit of time(then again what game doesn't).

If i knew this game had DRM, i would not have bought it. Although the game is decent, with DRM it instantly loses it's replay value since you can only install it a few times.

If this game didn't have drm, i would have rated it 3 stars (as i did the fun aspect). Unfortantly this is not the case.

I didn't give it a 1 star because I got it to work on my kid's system but it doesn't work on mine.

For some reason it keeps saying that I'm not online and can't verify the game. This really irks me because it only works on my kid's computer. I followed all the tips on EA's tech site but to no avail. They really need to do something that doesn't punish legit customers. According to several reports, the game is one of the most pirated games of all time--I guess EA got the opposite effect of what they wanted.

On a positive note, the Creature Creator really is a work of art. Please note that you don't need to buy the seperate Creature Creator if you get the full game Spore (which was my mistake). You can build almost any type of creature, vehicle, and building imaginable. The only thing missing that I wasn't able to find was the ability to customize the sound of your creature. On top of that, downloading new custom creatures is done through small 30kb PNG files. Even if Spore becomes a failure, I really hope the Creature Creator technology can be put to good use in all customizable games.

Without the DRM issue, I would give it 4 stars. It's probably worth 5, but I really see no reason to buy the standalone Creature Creator when the full game is out.