Nope this is not going to be a long post on how to get Spore to work on Ubuntu, that might come later, I don't really have time at the moment for that - though I do enjoy the challenge I fancied the challenge of the game first this time. To be honest I wish I had gone to the effort of trying to figure out how to install it in Ubuntu as I probably spent about the same amount of time as I did in bloody Vista. I'm not a Vista fan but I have it on my machine for this exact reason - to play games I can't be bothered to mess about installing. Not that installing all games is particularly hard in Ubuntu, most in fact are rather trivial, but the newer games with sophisticated uses of graphics can be tricky.
Anyway, I was happy installing it, everything was going well. Then I got an error message saying that it is unable to install the graphics package. Hmm, so I tried retry... nothing. So I thought maybe this isn't too crucial (with the thought at the back of my head going "its bound to be"). So I continued on, I had another message like this... can't think what it was of now. Argh! So I navigated to the directory (sorry folder for you windows people) and noticed that the graphics package file and a bunch of others appeared to be zero file size... not a good thing. So I though, hmm maybe the disk needs remounting (i.e. taking the disc out and putting it back in). That resulted in no net gain.. still not able to read the files. So here I am thinking I got a duff disc. After a short rant and rave at the computer my lovely girlfriend reminded me that she kept the receipt ('twas a Christmas present) - so I always had the option of taking it back. Me being, well me, I persisted. Still nothing, so I though about copying over the files to the hard disk to see if I could install without the disc - this does not always work though. Of course, I still had the problem with my computer not seeing the files. So out pops my Power Book G4 (and good old MacOSX), of course Spore can be played on this system - but my laptop is not fancy enough for this. To my pleasure a quick look at the commandline told me that indeed the files weren't blank.. and quick copy over onto the local hard drive and a copy onto my Ipod to swap onto Vista on my desktop (normally I'd just have mounted the mac as an external drive over the network but alas I can't do that with Vista). All the files appeared. I followed the normally install procedure - all went smoothly. Annoying registration filled in and job done. Spore on my machine! Woop!
Seriously though, what the heck happened? I expect that something with the DVD must have been incompatible with my hardware or Vista. A bit of searching around (i.e. using google with the error message) suggests that I'm not the only one to have seen this issue! Oh well, at least it all works now. As for the game itself, WOW, its been a while since I was quite taken a back like this with a game... I should really stop writing this and get back to conquering the Universe.. or go and revolve... I'm not sure 
Oh and if you are wondering how you get this to work on Ubuntu... well there are a few guides out there: http://mydailytech.com/post/spore-on-linux/ and http://linuxoutlaws.com/spore look pretty interesting.
