Remember a couple of months back I posted about the Spore Creature Creator? At least, I think I posted about it -- or maybe I only did a Facebook status update. Anyway, the full game came out today, and I was out at Future Shop early to pick up what is certainly the most eagerly awaited PC game of the year.

Even though Will Wright's latest opus is a single-player game and can be played without the revolutionary online content-sharing component (the reason why they released the Creature Creator early), Electronic Arts still requires product activation before you can play. Unfortunately, they seem not to have learned from the problems with the European release and haven't provisioned enough server capacity to deal with first-day demand. Thus, this sight greeted me after I got home and installed the game:

In case you can't make it out, the error message reads: "The game can not start. The game needs access to the internet in order to verify ownership of this game. Please ensure that your computer is online and try again." Although this blog post should be adequate proof that my connection is not the culprit, I double-checked by visiting a site I would never willingly have visited previously, and yes, my worst fears were realized.

Here's hoping the slashdotting doesn't last forever!