My experience with the spore creature creator.
As you may be able to work out from the image, this is not a very happy experience.
I did however manage to get it to work for a little while, however it is back to refusing to work again. When it runs it is nice, I do feel a little bit insulted in terms of only being handed safe tools with very round edges. It could be so much more !!! :) maybe if it had an expert mode I would be happier but really its as perfect as can be when considering the audience.
The problem is however that of securom which I understand is the protection of choice by EA games.
A required security module cannot be activated.
This program cannot be executed (5024).
Thanks for the useful error BTW.
There are countless descriptions of this antipiracy measure causing problems for non pirates and very few complaints from the pirates. Could this be that as with most anti piracy measures that the only people it really effects are your paying customers?
I have perhaps more experience with reverse engineering other peoples code than most games programmers. So I do understand the problems that are faced and I have seen how people who make decisions feel that it must be possible to prevent piracy on this level. It is however a much more complicated problem than most people understand. There are solutions that work on another level and have been around a long time and although these solutions are not 100% effective they are still the best solutions available to an incredibly complicated problem.
The best thing to do is have a tethered approach where you are joining an ongoing service, (think CD keys and accounts, not just pay per month) this is of course perfect for spore. Although this is something they seem to be doing, what EA does not understand is that this is the *only* thing you need to do. This social fix to software piracy works as well as can ever be expected. Basically you are not trying to stop the game from being pirated you are trying to turn the pirates into customers by offering them more when they pay for it.
Having a poke around on the customers machine and refusing to run if certain blacklisted programs or whatever are found is by far the worst possible solution. Its hard enough to get anything to work on everyones PCs without adding this extra possibility to the things that can go badly wrong.
It is retarded to the max.
Therefore it is EAs modus operandi.
Now the people who sell you this software will of course tell you how wonderful it is and how it never ever goes wrong and how the evil pirates are quaking in their boots.
These evil pirates for instance.
The current "hack" seems to consist of simply copying paid for content to the demo version.
Thats the thing, most games these days don't even get hacked, its all just script kiddies copying files or installing generic fixes to the generic protection software that the people such as securom sell the publishers.
So I don't see much fear going on there, I do however have a non functioning game demo on my machine which has successfully dissuaded me from spending any money on it..
Such a shame, I was so looking forward to this.
