Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year, Spore needs no introduction. Will Wright’s evolutionary blockbuster isn’t cited for release until early September, but publisher EA has released the Creature Creator segment of the game early to garner some not-really-needed interest. A free trial is now available from www.spore.com/trial . The question is, will Spore live up to the hype? Not long to wait now…

Both Mass Effect PC and Spore are to use SecuROM as copy protection for the retail versions. The controversial anti-piracy software requires an internet connection to connect to an EA server and verify every ten days. Derek French, technical producer at Bioware clarified the news,

“An internet connection is not required to install, just to activate the first time, and every ten days after. You can be completely connectionless for nine days and encounter no problems playing Mass Effect. And you don’t need the disk in the drive to play.”

While PC security and privacy issues aren’t at stake here, this will obviously pose a problem for those that haven’t got round the clock internet access and It also flies in the face of EA’s claim that Spore can be played as an offline game.