The Spore the merrier?

What ought to have been the paragon of a mass-market launch for PC gaming has turned out to be a nightmare for consumers.

We've put a man on the moon, and we still can't make it easy for normal people to play the games they want to play on a personal computer. Not even Electronic Arts, with all its resources, has been able to publish a flagship title without leaks. Literally speaking, that is, with thousands of gamers choosing to download pirated versions of Spore in the wake of overly restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues. In many cases there have been problems getting the game to run in the first place.

In summary, you may install Spore onto a PC a maximum of three times before your copy becomes void, and you're only allowed one account per household. The DRM code that Spore uses to restrict usage has been crashing PCs. Hence people are using up installs getting the thing working. On top of all this, EA has chosen to authenticate Spore online. We guess, if you're not online you can't play Spore.

CNET's Dave Rosenberg has attacked EA's DRM approach as offensive, ludicrous and pointless. We'd like to add that no wonder regular folk continue to view computer games with scepticism - an entertainment area reserved for geeks who must be the only people nerdy enough and unsettlingly smart enough to get along with games in the first place. Sometimes smart people need brighter people to make it easier for the rest of us to understand how this nonsense can possibly be entertainment.

Makes your hands hang down by your side, it really does.

Here's a posting from an EA forum that ought to put anyone off buying a PC game every again:

"I did wonder how you were supposed to "De-authorise" the key if the OS has failed to boot up. It wouldn't be the first time I've booted up to see "Cannot find [insert random name here].dll" and the computer has refused to boot any further. Trying to replace it using the repair console just results in another dll it can't find and so on till you get fed up. The only cure is a total re-install of the OS. Unlike Win95, XP will not install over the top and leave all your installed programs and settings intact."

Err... Wii Sports anyone?