For my first guest post on Mac Fan Boy, I decided that I needed something to set the scene of the sorts of things I’m interested in, while trying to keep things Mac related; although I haven’t been told by x5315 that I need to keep things Mac-oriented, I think it might be best considering the name of the blog!

I’m a gamer (not so much any more, but still at heart), and I’m a recent Mac convert after using Windows and Linux for all of my computing life (and thus all of my life!). I’m also pretty excited about Spore, and Spore Creature Creator was released a few days ago. They’re offering two different forms of it: a limited parts demo for PC and Mac, and a full version for just £5 available for digital download from the EA online store.

My wonderful MacBook meets the requirements for the game, and so, thinking it might be fun to play while on the move, I installed the Mac demo. It ran really well, so I wanted to purchase the full version for Mac. I was hoping that by purchasing it, I would get an unlock key - which is true - and links to download either the PC or Mac version - which is not true. So far, EA are offering no full version of the Spore Creature Creator for Mac. The digital download only provides you with a PC version.

Naturally, I wasn’t impressed. This was typical EA, particularly as the online store was also having issues and is counter-intuitive in many places. I bought the game anyway, and installed it on my gaming rig. I noticed that in the ‘package contents’ of the Mac version (context click on an application and choose ‘Show Package Contents’) there was an exact replica of the Windows program files folder (executable and all), and also some Mac application called ‘Cider’, and plenty of mentions of Transgaming, who make Cedega, amongst other things.

So the Mac version of Spore Creature Creator (and perhaps Spore itself? Who knows) just uses Cider, which I believe involves Cedega in some way, which in turn is a fork of WINE (which just released ’stable’ version 1.0). So I thought perhaps I could install it on my PC, and then copy across the files and run it, and Cider should still work. So I did this, and it half worked - more parts were available, but not the full 100% of them (more like 50%, when the demo normally comes with 25%). Not quite sure how this happened.

So in conclusion, despite my attempts to rectify EA’s rather pathetic Mac support, the only way right now to play the full Spore Creature Creator, is through Boot Camp, or possibly VMWare Fusion - which has limited experimental 3D support for virtual machines running Windows. In the end, I chose Boot Camp, and it actually runs worse than under Cider.