So following a four day email ping pong match with EA’s support chimps, they have closed my case as resolved by telling me to stop running the game on two video cards, stop running it on two cores, and stop running it on my sound hardware, and if I get any problems, get back to them…

Firstly, none of this actually helps, since my initial description was that I cannot save any games or start and save any new games because the single file that links ALL your game saves is corrupt, and they have done absolutely nothing to resolve that.

Secondly, how pathetic is it that I have to disable half the hardware on my pc to run it? I know they started coding it like 6 years ago, but does it only work on six year old pc’s or something?

In fact, apart from SLi, under which it flat refused to run, I ran the game fine for around 70 hours on dual cores with hardware accelerated sound, which really just adds up to EA not knowing what the fuck they’re talking about.

I’m off to download the cracked, DRM free version of Spore now so I can install it without fear of losing an activation trying to get the game working in the first place.  Kinda wish I’d done this as a road test before buying it and saved myself the money in finding out what a flakey pile of crap it is.

Ok. It doesn’t suck. But I’m not a happy bunny with it at the moment.

I actually started writing a mostly positive and enthusiastic review and was going to bitchslap some of the naysayers that seem determined to hate the game… but then Spore kindly corrupted my game saves and I can neither continue any of my five or six games on the go nor create a new one. I’ve lost somewhere around 60 or 70 hours of game play - I know this because it was several DAYS ago that I achieved my ‘50 hours play’ badge.

It is also exhibiting numerous other bugs. Here’s a list in no particular order:

• Crashing to desktop randomly. Looking at the resources, it seems to have a huge memory leak.
• Won’t import most of the hundred something creatures I made in the Creature Creator before Spore came out. Those it will are listed as owned by Maxis, and not me.
• Some of the creatures I’ve created in the full version show up on my Sporepedia page with no image at all, and some flat refuse to appear despite the fact the game insists they’re uploaded.
• Some games just bug out… after sacrificing all my game saves to restart, the first game I played, EVERY creature I encountered in the Space stage were the same creature, but not affiliated with each other. Imagine how ridiculous this is gonna be? You are allied with the Deceptilow empire, the Deceptilow empire and the Deceptilow empire - but are at war with the Deceptilow empire and the Deceptilow empire.
• Sometimes you’ll spend ages creating a vehicle, space ship or building that is still well under the complexity maximum and it’ll refuse to save it without telling you why. Basically at this point you have to start ripping off parts to see what it disagrees with.
• Also, it doesn’t work with SLi at all, you have to disable one of your video cards, and it doesnt work with hardware acceleration and you have to disable your sound card down to software only.
• There are other bugs I can’t think of atm but I’ll add em if and when I do :p

So at the moment, my enthusiasm for Spore is at an all time low. Which sucks, because I’ve had it on preorder since 2005, and salivated at every teaser video, screenshot and preview since. I have been so up for this game it’s unreal, so to have it and be currently hating it hurts!

Of course, the other factor is that it’s an EA product. Soooo, that means absolutely DIRE support from a bunch of morons. :/

So, putting aside for the moment that it’s a buggy piece of crap that I can no longer play, I’m still going to give a basic overview of my thoughts and experiences so far, which might not be quite so positive as they would have been now I’ve been forced to step away from the game and had time to reflect on it properly;

Cell Stage: Cute. Very cute! And quite difficult, really. But I guess when you’re no more than a shapeless lump of jello in a pond full of some fairly fearsome and spikey lumps of jello all fighting for the same food sources, life is going to be a bit tough. It’s also very short. You can play through it in under 8 minutes. I know this, because I have my ’speed freak’ badge for doing just that. Essentially, your goal is to eat and not be eaten.

Eating food collects DNA points which, once you call a mate, can be used in the cell editor to add new parts to your evolving blob.

Eventually, you develop a brain and are invited to slap legs onto your blob and move onto dry land. Once you get that invite, collecting food no longer offers you any additional DNA points, so it’s not that open ended in that there is no point to continuing on, albeit to perhaps mop up any parts you haven’t collected for completeness. In theory you can play forever, but there is zero incentive to do so.

Creature Stage: I have mixed reactions. It’s arguably the most important stage of the game in terms of the evolution and direction you intend to take your creature on for the rest of the game, but it doesn’t work quite how I expected it to.

You see, the parts you use each have their own traits and abilities but those bonuses don’t stack, so you are only as good as the best part for that trait you have. And you’re forced to have certain parts in order to even progress.  This sucks. It means that a lot of people’s creatures are going to end up looking much the same, despite the almost unlimited variety you COULD produce with the versatile editor.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more vexed I am about the way that creature stage works.

It means that you just cannot progress with some creature types at all - you can never make a creature that you’re happy with for it’s looks, because there’s no way to ‘win’ the creature stage unless you can either ally or defeat enough species on the stage.

The further you go inland, the more evolved the species you meet, and the harder it is to impress or extinct them. Even if you systematically befriend or defeat all the easy, early stage creatures and amass enough DNA to evolve, you cannot remain true to your fluffy bunny design or whatever without having to compromise in some way to get the parts necessary; if you’re trying to be a pacifist, you absolutely MUST get all four abilities, because later stage creatures will demand all four or a combination of all four before they will ally with you.

It’s less critical if you are going all out attack on everything you meet assuming you have at least one attack, but then you have to consider that each time you use an attack there is a short recharge delay before you can use it again, so the chances of winning a fight are drastically reduced as you get one attack in per three or four from the rival creature that has far more moves than you do.

So you have to sacrifice your looks for functionality. Sure, you COULD revert back to your fluffy bunny design right at the end of creature stage, but that means you can’t be true to your evolution.

Is it a valid criticism? I suppose you could argue ‘well, if you want to survive, you have to adapt!’, but the problem I find with that is, as I mentioned before, all the interim stages of evolution between your first land creature and it’s final state before Tribal stage end up looking mostly the same, because you have to compromise on your feet, hands, mouth parts etc to get the traits needed to ‘win’ the level.

Besides, I don’t remember ever seeing a Discovery Channel documentary charting the evolution of fluffy bunnies from carnivorous fighting machines!

As for playing through the stage itself, it’s pretty fun, if you ignore how shallow it actually is. Many laugh out loud moments, and oozing cuteness all the way. The game play, beyond the actual creation and evolution of your creature, is pretty shallow. It comes down to button mashing fights to kill off your rivals or a sort of ’simon says’ game for impressing your allies. Again, it’s all about earning DNA points by eating in order to build up your creature.

Once again, I found that there isn’t a lot of incentive to continuing in this stage unless you’re particularly enjoying yourself. Yes, you CAN this time earn more DNA - albeit at a vastly reduced rate - for continuing to eradicate and ally other species, but I found that my creature was already as complex as the game allows by the time I was able to move on anyway. Likely, though, you certainly won’t have every part you could by this stage, so if you want to hunt them all down for completeness, then I guess there is more game play to be had.

You need to be completely happy with your creature by the time you leave this stage, as it’s the last time you can make any physical changes.

Tribal Stage: Probably the least developed and potentially most pointless stage of the game, the nests of critters have now evolved into villages, and your goal is to ally or eradicate all the others. It’s not a lot different from creature stage in terms of game play; button mashing fights or a simon says game of playing didgeridoos, horns and maracas to impress other villages, and collecting enough food to buy your upgrades and support your tribe. The point, really, is that how you play through the tribal stage dictates your evolutionary path and the nature of your people in going on to the civ phase.

When you progress enough to enter Civ stage, there really is nothing left to do on Tribal stage, since everyone is either your ally or dead. Sure, if you want, you can carry on collecting food, dancing round the fire and exchanging gifts with your allies. But there’s no point to it, since the only thing you take with you from tribal stage is reputation.

Civ Stage: Frankly, you can play through this faster than you can tribal if you just go all out against each new city that pops up, and if you don’t do just that, it goes completely the other way and the other nations develop much faster than you can and it becomes very hard to dominate. Same goal as tribal, though this time you must dominate the entire planet. Again it’s just a means to an end and the only thing you actually get out of this phase is reputation again.

Space Stage: It is quite mind blowing how huge this is in scale. When you first leave your home planet and solar system and see the mass of stars around you, and then zoom out… and out… and out… you realise you are a teeny spec on the arm of a spiral galaxy which has many, many thousands of star systems, each of which usually has multiple planets, each of which supports its own set of creatures, plants and features which are doing their own thing; some are barely at the stage where they’ve grown legs, some are tribal stage and you can go watch them duke it out amongst their tribes like you did a few stages back, some are at civ stage, and yet more are right up there with you - or further along - and zipping around in space ships trying to conquer new worlds, make allies and enemies.

It made me chuckle the first time I saw the scope of it; bloody Settlers - Rise of an Empire has a cap on 200 npc villagers because it’s ‘too complex’ to do more (how is 200 people an Empire?!) … and Spore pulls off a few million that are each evolving in their own way.

One of the most criticised aspects of the Space stage is that it’s just not the sandbox we were lead to believe it was. You don’t get time to play around and experiment because every 10 seconds you’re called to some mission or disaster. When you finally do get some time, the darn planets around you have evolved to sentient life and you can no longer populate the systems without eradicating them.

Also, as soon as you start encountering other civilizations around you you start getting demands for cash tributes in the amount of tens of times what you are currently earning, and not delivering brings about war, so it gets exponentially worse as everyone around you starts beating the crap out of your planets. Which is pretty unfair anyway, because apparently you’re the only civilization that has an entire one ship. Seems everyone else can bring an invasion force to your planets but you have your one main star ship to defend, as well as building up your empire, trading spice, running missions and everything else you have to do.

In other words, the balance is way off. And it doesn’t much seem to matter how you come out of the other four stages as to how things go down in Space either. I’ve been everything from a religious herbivore to the nastiest warrior carnivore and it always pans out much the same.

If you do ever get to do ‘the full works’ on a planet, its very cool. You have to balance the atmosphere and temperature to be able to support life, the first tier of which helps stabilise the planet. When you bring the ecosystem even further into line, you can add a second and third tier of animals to bring it up to the perfect ‘T3′ type planet.

There are also a ton of other collectable tools that let you do cool stuff, such as painting the terrain, sky or sea, reshaping the land with one of various tool types like Gear Mountains or Chocolate Swirls. You can even designate a planet a creature sanctuary and keep a zoo there

One thing I found really cool, though actually I’ve seen a bunch of complaints about it on the Spore forums, is that I actually met my own species out in the galaxy! They were at a space faring stage themselves, but were based on an earlier iteration of my creature from creature stage and had evolved a different route, were a different color and wore different armor. And had no special affinity for allying with me… in fact they proved a very tough nut to crack. What made this especially neat was that during creature stage, I had encountered a UFO which had sucked up one of my pack members with its abduction beam and zipped off. Presumably to use my little creature to populate an ecosystem of their own somewhere just like you spend much of the space stage doing yourself. From there, it had obviously gone tribal, civ and space faring itself, but along a different path to me. Very darn clever!

I suppose the way to think about it is that everything up to the Space stage is essentially a giant character creator before the ‘real’ game begins. That might sound like a negative, but it’s really not. It’s very in depth if you think of it in those terms… but a bit shallow and pointless if you think of it in terms of four of five stages of a game :p

Like I said, there’s a lot that’s cool about Spore, but I don’t feel like elaborating much more atm since I can’t play it and it’s ruined everything I’ve done so far.

Oh, and of course a review of Spore wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the ridiculously draconian DRM system that it installs on your computer that gives you three installations ever before you have to go buy another copy. So bearing in mind I’ve already been told to reinstall it once by support, I’d already be down to one left. If I install it on my laptop, thats it… I may as well throw the DVD away. No wonder Spore is looking like it’ll be the most pirated game ever. The irony, eh?

And finally… despite the creature creator allowing multiple Spore accounts, and despite the Spore manual spelling out specifically that you can have multiple Spore accounts, it turns out you can actually only have one Spore account per activation key, meaning that no, you and your family can’t have your own games, you have to share one account. EA maintain it was a ‘misprint’. The rest of us call it misrepresentation.

Aside from being pissed off at Caligari - who are owned by Microsoft, btw, and I’m perpetually pissed off at them, so I suppose piling new hate on them doesn’t make any difference - I’m pissed off at Mozilla, too. I installed Firefox 3, which initially seemed great… except it has caused some very weird problems in Windows that don’t even correct themselves if you completely uninstall Firefox nor if you do a system restore to pre FF3 state.

The problem is that, seemingly randomly, mouse clicks will simply stop working… for anything. I mean, hyperlinks aren’t clickable, windows cant be brought into focus with a click, shortcuts or taskbar items cant be clicked on. The only way to get it working again is to alt+tab thru the applications list. Which wouldn’t be so bad, albeit dowright annoying, if it wasnt for another little issue… it can happen on the Windows Login Screen itself… soooo, I can’t click my user name to put in my password and log in.

Rapidly learning a bunch of Windows shortcuts I never had to know or use before. :/

How do I know it was down to FF3? Because a bunch of other people have experienced the same problems, as detailed on the Mozilla Support Forums

Along with all the video courses. And that really, really, really pisses me off. Because it’s just about exactly one year ago that I dropped $700 on buying it - and then discovered  the gaping flaws in it that essentially negated my reason for buying it in the first place.

I cannot describe what I’d like to do to Roman with a pair of pliers right now.

Still, for the rest of you that didn’t just get royally fucked up the ass by Caligari, it’s great news!

Personally I couldn’t get it to download any of the training videos. It still wanted me to pay between $59 and $79 each for them… yes, imagine if you had bought every one of their dozens of training videos, which were still on sale up until yesterday, along with Truespace?! How much money did you just get fucked for then?!

Fortunately, I’m not in the habit of paying for instruction on how to use the software I just bought due to the manual being woefully inadequate, or I might well be headed for Caligari HQ right now with those pliers.

Anyone got any good experiences of any UK broadband providers? I was with Virgin, who are fucking shit. And then I moved to BT. Who are even more fucking shit. So any suggestions for my next move appreciated!

Sometimes, venting on a blog pays off!

Following my last rant, the manager of my local SpecSavers called me to offer his apologies and a new and free pair of glasses.  It seems head office got involved and were interested to know about their spontaneously imploding lenses. Supposedly they have no other reports of this happening ever. Which I guess makes me about the unluckiest person alive to have it happen twice…

On the plus side, though, I can see again now, albeit through a much sturdier non frameless design that hopefully won’t try to blind me!

Or: SpecSavers… Blindingly Good Value! Yeah, I could have had fun with a title for this, although the content is far from amusing.

Like many people, I wear glasses. That might well be something to do with sitting at a computer monitor for most of my waking day. Which is also why when I do buy glasses, I spend a lot of money on getting all the extras, like scratch resistant coatings, uv filters etc.

So I’m all the more pissed off, then, about the build quality of SpecSavers glasses and their attitute towards their shoddy products nearly blinding a customer…. TWICE.

The pair I was wearing up til yesterday were a rebuild of an identical pair. They are of a frameless style where the nose bridge piece connects directly to the lenses. In the first weeks after I got them, the connecting screws would come loose regularly, and since they use a special nut that no normal person would have a tool to tighten, I found myself going back to the SpecSavers store several times to have them tightened back up.

So one time just after one of their staff tightened them back up, I was out walking and a gust of wind picked up, I heard a crack, and felt a blinding pain just under my eye. It transpired that the edge of the lens around the screw had shattered, and very nearly into my eye.

Obviously I took them back to SpecSavers, and they made me a new pair. As well they bloody should.

The new pair seemed better - they didn’t keep loosening. However, the other night, I’m sitting doing nothing more strenuous than watching tv when I hear a pop, and again get a searing pain right near my eye. In fact, this time it drew blood. The EXACT same thing had happened - a razor sharp shard of lens had just shattered out from around the screw.

So I just went back to SpecSavers to complain. Their response to their obviously fundamentally dangerously defective spectacles shattering the exact same way and nearly blinding me twice? ‘They’re out of warranty’. What could they do for me? I could buy new spectacles from them.

So beware, folks. If you DO choose to save a bit of money and go to SpecSavers, make sure that you lose your eye within the first year, ok?

When I dig out the original pair, I’ll post a side by side comparison picture of the two pairs to show just how identical the two shattered sections are, and maybe a nice closeup of the razor shard that embedded itself in my face just to the side of my tearduct. It’ll be the same photo I send to BBC Watchdog and Trading Standards. Like I say, there is obviously a fundamental problem with the design and build of these glasses - the lens is obviously under a lot of (inward) pressure, as I can attest to with the force that glass shards were flung into my face both times.

So to add to my growing list of problems (the main one being lack of job and income), I can’t see now, either. Life can be so fun, sometimes.

Hey. I’ve been playing around with the mission editor in Hunting Unlimited 2008. If you have it, by all means have a go at them!

Hunting Unlimited 2008 User Missions

In a new series, I’ll be giving you tips on how to take advantage of ridiculous company policies to screw with people!

Know someone who runs a Cafepress store? Want to f**k them over? Maybe you’re a Cafepress store owner jealous of another store’s content? Maybe you don’t know them at all, are in a shitty mood and just feel like screwing badly with someone? No problem!

All you have to do is tell Cafepress they’re infringing on your trademark. It doesn’t have to be true. All you have to say is that, I dunno, you own the word ‘banana’ or something. Quote some random number as the trademark reference for authenticity. Don’t worry, they won’t check, but they WILL take down the store owners content, thus hurting their business, ruining a product line and labelling them an IP thief! Simple!

Tune in next time for more fun ways to ruin someone’s business!

Also, this tip can be used another way, to screw with Cafepress themselves, albeit at the expense of a lot of innocents. But don’t worry, Cafepress have only contempt for their customers too! The only downside is that you have to do a quick bit of research, because they’ll want the offending products listed. Sticking with our previous example, find, say, a thousand products on their stores that infringe on your fictional ‘banana’ trademark, and send them a take down list of all of them.

Tip: if you use Firefox there are plugins that can harvest the link addresses for you - run your search on all of Cafepress, compile an instant list of links to offenders, and hey presto!

That should keep them amused for hours! Maybe days!

Bitter? Moi?

So I’ve had a Cafepress account for, ooh, a week now for a site I’m working on. My second ever design included the word ‘Caution’ on a square yellow background, just like every caution sign you ever saw anywhere in the world. (It was actually incredibly specific, too. There’s like one in 10,000 people that could even qualify to buy the darn thing as a tshirt! It said ‘Caution - Long haired head banger. Whipping and spraying likely to occur’).

Cafepress pulled it and pointed me to a ‘guess what you done wrong’ FAQ of the myriad of reasons they might possibly pull a design. So I asked them what the hell?

They responded by saying that the word ‘Caution’ is the trademarked property of some company I’m not gonna bother to name because I don’t want to give them any publicity. Well, as you and I both know, but apparently Cafepress don’t, that is impossible because you can’t just trademark common words.

A five minute Google reveals that the trademark is specifically for the “use of the word ‘Caution!’ inside a diamond shaped box resembling a traffic sign”, and there even seems to be some stipulation as to what products they can claim infringement on. (Added to which, it seems the trademark only covers use when the word and design is used together and on its own as described - any other wording in the diamond would invalidate the trademark).

Which is not really surprising when their design is actually a rip off of one of the variations of a popular internationally recognised warning sign.

So, here’s a warning from me! (I might put this on a Cafepress shirt…)

Caution!

Cafepress will remove your
legitimate design from your
store without even
investigating the
validity or legality
of any infringement claim.

There is a serious point to this, though. It’s surely very risky to put your original designs on Cafepress at all? Because potentially, someone could steal your design and claim that YOU infringed them, and since Cafepress policy is (and I quote) “In order to best protect ourselves from risk, we must take all allegations of infringement seriously and take action in removing the content from our site.”. Really. That’s their customer policy! The mind, boggles, doesn’t it?

They will just comply with the first person who complains, however dodgy, unlikely and downright false their claim is, you will be completely screwed. In other words, any competitor with a grudge, or any shady character who decides they’d quite like to use your idea will be able to scupper your business, invalidate your product and rip your IP off with the full tacit agreement and complicity of Cafepress. Or, like in this case, some sad litigious moron with too much time on their hands who obviously just scours the internet looking for people he can piss off with false claims because he feels like he has some god given right to any and all use of a common everyday word. *waves to Jim*

Don’t get me wrong - I’m totally in favour of protecting your IP. But this is not what their policy is doing. This is complying with and accepting as fact a malicious false claim that labels their innocent store keepers as content thieves. You would think that if I could find out the exact nature and numbers of these Trademarks in well under 5 minutes and establish that there is absolutely no validity to the claim, they might have enough respect for their customers to do the same before accusing them of a crime.

In fact, Cafepress policy amounts to ‘everyone except our customer is always right’, and suggests that they will actively aid people in committing a crime - after all, that’s what it is… there are laws about falsely and knowingly claiming infringement (and this moron knows exactly what his own trademark covers… how can he be in any doubt?) - against their customer to cover their own asses. So it seems that if you’re a Cafepress customer, the odds are very much stacked against you.

It doesn’t seem that common sense even comes into it - this is a word in the dictionary, people. You’re telling me that if I use it in ANY context it’s a trademark violation? You don’t have to be a lawyer to realise that Cafepress look ridiculous even regurgitating this crap like they believe it.

If I actually were doing something wrong, I’d be the first person to apologise and amend it, because as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been on the receiving end of real IP theft and it’s not fun.

Anyone have experience of any of the other companies that lets you do much the same as Cafepress but doesn’t roll over the first time someone falsely claims infringement? Of course, I expect T&C’s etc… I don’t mind a bit of red tape, but not a kangaroo court that takes at face value without investigation any ridiculous complaint.

Preferably one that requires a DMCA takedown notice being formally issued (which would obviously fail because there IS no infringement!) instead of a complaint from some fat guy in his moms basement on the back of a cigarette packet.

I’m actually really glad I found out the dangers of using Cafepress before I put any proper original designs up that I’ve spent ages working on instead of just a humorous slogan, because this site I’m working on will be heavily merchandise based. As such, I need a good alternative to Cafepress to take my business, please!

But you know what? If I could be bothered about this sad moron and his abuse of the law to attack my integrity with false claims, I’d bloody well register the word ‘Caution!’ in a triangle traffic sign and go into direct competition with him. Give him a little education on how far his ‘ownership’ of the word actually extends. But frankly, it’s a lame brand and lame products from a petty little man. So I won’t be bothering.

Instead I’ll change the word to ‘Warning’ because frankly I only used ‘Caution’ cuz it fit better. Like I’ll be impacting his business with a frickin tshirt that only a long haired heavy metal fan going to a concert could wear anyway…

[EDIT] I’ve just had an email from Cafepress saying that they made a mistake and will reinstate my designs. Whether that was my scathing blog or my scathing email, I dunno. :p

Letting the rant stand for now because (a) I’m still pissed off, (b) I’ll still be looking for another company to take my business to and (c) it takes a while to do that much ranting!

[EDIT 2] LOL! I just received another email from Cafepress saying that they wont be reinstating my designs and they sent that last email to the wrong person. Add ‘incompetent’ to the list of things you can say about Cafepress. Unless there’s a trademark on that word too, of course. So the rant will definitely be staying!