MacBook Pro and Spore

If you have 1 gig of memory or more it should run fine. It might be slow if you only have GMA X3100 graphics. As I see it, the graphics eye candy is nowhere near what you'd find in a game like Crysis.



From http://www.spore.com/what/specs_spore :


From http://www.spore.com/what/specs_spore


"# Spore requires at least the following:

# * Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher

# * Intel Core Duo Processor

# * 1024 MB RAM

# * ATI X1600 or NVIDIA 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100

# * At least 4 GB of hard drive space, with at least 1 GB additional space for creations.


# This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac).


# For computers using built-in graphics chipsets, the game requires at least:

# * Intel Integrated Chipset GMA X3100

# * Dual 2.0GHz CPUs, or 1.7GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent


# Supported Video Cards

# NVIDIA GeForce series

# 7300, 7600, 8600, 8800


# ATI Radeon™ series

# X1600, X1900, HD 2400, HD 2600


# Intel® Extreme Graphics

# GMA X3100

# This game will not run on the GMA 950 class of integrated video cards.

"

Spore is a very low requirement game. I wouldnt expect any problem.


I however found it to be tedious and stopped playing after about 10 hours.

Haha. I second that solomani.

I had a lot more patience when I was a kid so who knows. ;)


Spore has some decent parts. For example, the creature stage is fun for a while. The tribal and civilization stages are yawn.


The problem with the game is that it is both schizophrenic and very shallow. 5 stages with quite different gameplay? As soon as I was having fun in the Creature stage I had to move on. None of the sub-games are that enticing either. Tribal and Civilization stages fit the RTS game archetype, but they are very basic and not terribly good examples of an RTS. It doesn't have to be hardcore and ultra-complex. There are lots of rather uncomplicated games that do RTS better. Starcraft comes to mind. Still the gold standard and it is 10 years old!


The game is a cool idea and the graphics are very elegant, but it reminds me of Peter Molyneux's "Black & White". Great idea on paper, not so much fun in reality.

We just recently bought Spore for our 9 year old and had trouble getting it to work on our laptop Mac. I don't think we had enough memory. The graphics are quite amazing. Our Dell laptop had no problem downloading it. I would say that our kids are rather enjoying the game. Who knows how long they will remain interested, but I would say it is definitely geared towards children and not adults, so I am not surprised with the bad reviews here.