SPORE Released 5 Days Early In Australia 179
knypha writes "Several sites are reporting that the much anticipated SPORE has been released 5 days ahead of the scheduled release date in Australia. I can confirm that SPORE is sitting on shelves in retailers and for the tidy sum of A$95.95 it can be yours. Why the early release exactly seems to be a matter of contention. No news if the game can actually be played yet or if the lucky early punters will still have to wait till the official release when EA allows for any validation process to occur. I guess EA could possibly be using the relatively small population to test the servers...or someone somewhere stuffed up!"
let us rejoice, for we are young and poor... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, you know it's great and all that we Aussies are getting it early. Too bad we have to take out a mortgage just to pay for the bloody thing.
The gouging the video game industry does against Australians is absolutely deplorable. The local EB games is still trying to flog off the Warcraft 3 Battlechest - part of which is almost 8 years old - for $110!! At current exchange rates that's about $95 US.
I order my games from the UK and even with shipping it's practically half price. The best part is you get around the stupid censorship imposed by Senator Atkinson.
With all of the BS we're forced to tolerate, plus the whole descendants from convicts thing, it shouldn't be too surprising that many Australians turn to "alternate channels" of distribution for their video gaming needs.
Re:Importing (Score:5, Informative)
Direct download from EA is £39.95, or £42.94 if you want to be able to redownload for 2 years instead of 6 months. 95.95 AUD is £45, so not that much of a markup.
Of course, if I buy a physical copy, I can get it for £28, or £30 if I want it (almost) guaranteed on release day, so you do have to wonder what EA are thinking with that download price..
Re:Ambivalent (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure if Aussies should be boosting that they get first crack at this game or shamed at revealing how much computer games cost down there...
haha... "first crack"... Is that a challenge? lol
Seriously though, I'm getting angrier and angrier at how much games cost here. I almost never buy retail anymore, and no doubt the games companies will blame it on piracy.
Re:Good luck to australian gamers (Score:2, Informative)
Just because no one likes SecuROM doesn't mean one is entitled to download the game for free.
Re:Importing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's so great about this game? (Score:2, Informative)
Cell stage was kinda hectic and reminded me of flow, didn't get boring before it was time to move along.
Creature stage got boring and fast, maybe next time through I'll try something aside from killing everything in sight.
Tribe stage was fun and gave me a surprising amount of challenge for easy difficulty setting.
And then I was designing a town hall for the start of Civ stage when it crashed, rebuilding that is going to be tedious as hell.
Re:Good luck to australian gamers (Score:3, Informative)
By buying it, you are endorsing the protection.
I'm so much against the notion that I should need to break a protection scheme on something I bought (it's legal where I live), that I refuse to buy it to begin with. They know what they need to do to get my money. Their move.
Re:Good luck to australian gamers (Score:3, Informative)
Then run it with wine in a chroot environment if you're worried about the control of your machine.
Spore will work in wine if you look on wine-patches mailing list for the setScissorRect patch and getStencilDepth. It hasn't been included in the main git tree yet because the code doesn't mimic windows behaviour exactly, but it'll make Spore work.
There, now you can play Spore without any worry of the DRM effecting your machine. You can also now play Steam games too so go knock yourself out and have some safe fun.
NOT 5 days early (Score:1, Informative)
It's only actually been released 2 days early as Australia has an official release date of September 4th.