Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The copy protection PREVENTS YOU FROM TAKING YOUR SAVED GAMES (your "profile") AND PLAYING ON A FRIEND'S PC! The system requirements, or indeed, no advertising materials whatsoever make no mention of SecureROM. There is also no mention that EA lets you only "activate" the game 3 times. What this means that when you install the game, you must activate it before playing. This leaves you with 2 activations left. The problem with this is that the game can go into "activation required" mode for a number of reasons, one of them being adding hardware. EA has never mentioned what kind of hardware, so it could require activation every time you add a printer, a scanner, even a BluRay drive. If you upgrade to Vista (or switch back to XP), that will require another activation. If you have to take your computer in for service and they have to reload it, that will also count as one of the activations. Everyone knows how bad spyware and viruses can be, and because of this DRM, you face the prospect of having to rebuy Spore in addition to the cost of getting your computer reinstalled. If you beg EA and fax in your proof of purchase, they MAY grant you one additional activation for a total of 4. After that YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PLAY THE GAME ANYMORE. You agree to all this in the terms and conditions during the installation process. Once your 3 (maybe 4) activations are all up - you will own a $45 piece of plastic that is completely and utterly worthless. Even if you're ok with all that - part of the copy protection PREVENTS YOU FROM TAKING YOUR SAVED GAMES (your "profile") AND PLAYING ON A FRIEND'S PC (who "activated" with another key). This is just plain stupid. As for SecureROM? It is bad software and has affected many people's computers in the past in very negative ways (crash when trying to burn cds, etc). There are literally thousands of people complaining about SecureRom on the internet. There is also an almost complete lack of anything positive about SecureROM. Don't take my word for it - go run a few searches. I've had problems with SecureROM in the past (a game would refuse to run if the CD drive was connected via USB). I emailed both the Vendor and SecureROM - each company will tell you to talk to the other and you will get NO SUPPORT for any issues. In the end, I figured out it didn't like USB CD drives. Because of SecureROM, I was not able to play the game on my subnotebook (no built in drive). I had to mail the game into the vendor for a refund because the store wouldn't take it back. It took them 3 months to send me a refund.