Spore arrived in Belgium, workaround for @ sign on mac

After years of salivation, dreaming and projecting, the mother of all games finally arrived. I just walked into the Fnac of Leuven in Belgium and bought the galactic version for 64,99 euros (the standard version was 54,99 euros). My collegues warned me that I was expecting so much from the game that I could be nothing else but dissappointed. However after the first few hours of play I'm still very excited by the game. It could very well be that Will Wright and his team created another master piece.

Installation on the iMac went smooth. Registration didn't succeed. First, the bug that prevents entering the @ sign on a belgian / belgium keyboard was not solved yet. Just pressing the key with the @ sign doesn't work. A workaround is to use another key shortcut. Type the option ⌥ key and the ` key (that's the key left of the enter key and above the shift key on the right, the superscript is the £ sign). That resolved entering the email addres but then Spore refused to register. Trying a previous account created with the Spore creature editor also failed. Probably, the Spore servers are overwhelmed. Lukily, you can start to play. My seven years old son claim: "dad, this is much better then runescape" !

UPDATE: sunday 7 september 2008:19u30, I got an confirmation mail from EA stating that my registration was successful.

Unboxing Wii Mario Kart

My children love playing Mario Kart on their Nintendo DS. Therefore buying them Wii Mario Kart was a no brainer. It will predictably be a hit with them. I preorder the game and an extra Wii Wheel at Game Mania and today I got an SMS alerting me it arrived. I was in the neighbourhood of the shop, so here are some unboxing pictures:




Official release of the game is foreseen for tomorrow 11 april 2008. Some predict shortages of Wii Mario Kart already. So if you consider buying the game, you better hurry to the shop.