Spore short review

Don’t be in a rush to beat spore, or you will disappoint yourself. This is true for most games, but spore is a series of small games. I’ve only made it to the tribal game so far, and here’s my quick summary.

“Spore has stopped working” under Vista fix

If you’ve just installed Spore to Vista and you’re getting a “spore has stopped working” error immediately on launch…

First, uninstall and reinstall.

After it’s done installing, stop.

Strike one for Spore

EA-Store Download Manager Installed, Spore Downloaded, Decrypted, Installed, “Play”, Black Screen, “Spore has stopped running”.

Under the game I found an exception report, which says “DasmX86Dll.dll was not found”.

Some Googling indicates people tried reinstalling, I suspect it didn’t like me putting it on my G: drive, LiveOne Care or Vista.

7 hours to Spore

I’m hardly giddy about Spore, my “hype-dar” is overloaded so I am basing my expectations on the creature creator, which sets them at very low. I dabbled with the Playable Prototypes but that just left me with the sense that Spore is likely to very “artsy”, Will Wright’s “The Village”; it feels like they had this good notion for a game but they couldn’t decide what they wanted to make. Hence the all-over-the-place hype and the carless bandying of words like “evolution” meaning “you get a handful of choices”.

Note I am being excessively sceptical, deliberately… I did, after all, get up at 6am in the morning to see if my pre-download had unlocked :)