This weekend saw the release of the long awaited game Spore. Seven years in the making and long hyped this weekend has seen ( at least in the UK ) a number of TV ad placements for the new game, several of which were spotted by my youngest son Ben who immediately decided his life wasn’t worth living without it.

A trip to Argos later and we were back at the house installing on the kitchen iMac. After 10 minutes or so the install was complete and we were ready to fire it up for the first time. Unfortunately when the game tried to contact EA’s licence servers it failed for some reason and just displayed an error message asking us to try again in a short while ! Ben was gutted as you would expect…

Over on the EA Forums for Spore I found a number of threads complaining about Internet servers ( authentication and licence ) being under capacity and failing to allow excited new owners to play. While we “waited a while” I decided to check a few other options to make sure the error was valid. Ben’s account on the iMac is setup as a Standard User ( not an Administrator ) and additionally has Parental Controls switched on. As a test I logged in as Admin, switched Parental Controls off and made Ben an Administrator then switched back to Bens account and tried again.

Hey presto, connection went through straight away and Ben was able to get down to the serious business of “evolving”.

A minor frustration and one I am routinely faced with in the world of Microsoft where the vast majority of consumer applications appear to require that the user is a machine administrator to run them, but not something I have come across in the last 4-5 years I have been a Mac user. I suppose it is fair to say that this is the first commercial game I have bought for a Mac which is a shame as it may well put me off buying further titles ( especially from EA ).

You would think that after 7 years of development a simple bug like this would have been spotted wouldn’t you?