I’m a huge fan of the SimCity series of games, having cut my teeth on SimCity on the BBC Micro.  I wasn’t particularly good at it (being around 11 or 12 years old) until around 4-5 years later, in 1993, I started playing SimCity 2000 on the Atari ST, at which point the gameplay became isometric as opposed to top-down.

Anyway, that’s all largely irrelevant.  I bought, with no small amount of trepidation I might add, SimCity Societies when it was released in 2007, and thought it was ok – so long as you don’t expect it to be a proper SimCty game.  SimCity 4 was the last proper SimCity game, released in 2003.

Then in 2008 came Spore, in the same simulation vein as the SimCity and The Sims series.  Again, an ok game – until you get immersed in it, and then you realise it’s brilliant.  But that brilliance isn’t matched by EA’s apparent commitment to customer care.

Setting aside EA’s decision to use the perennial gaming evilnasty SecuROM without disclosing the fact, and setting aside EA’s decision to limit the game to 3 installs before having to call EA customer services, there’s still reason to be annoyed.

After reinstalling Spore recently, and patching to the latest version, I realised that randomly-generated names, including planet names, were all ‘BAD_DATA’.  It’s not much fun trying to figure out which planet BAD_DATA you should be travelling to.

After three or four reinstallations of Spore, I started to suspect the patch of breaking the game – something I initially ruled out because it seemed so unlikely.  To cut a long story short, the patch process manages to delete a critical file (called NameGeneration.package).

There is a different version of the file for each game locale (found in the ./Data/Locale directory), but the patch only deletes the one in the folder relating to the current system locale; in my case, en-gb.  It is easily fixed by copying the file from another locale directory, such as en-us.

But why don’t more people have this problem?  Because it doesn’t occur if your locale is set to en-us.  Presumably the patch deleted en-gb/NameGeneration.package, but instead of replacing it with the new one from the patch, it copied it to the en-us folder.  Hence players in the US probably wouldn’t notice a problem unless they use a different locale.

This same problem has been reported by several people after applying patch #4.  Why didn’t EA fix this problem in patch #5?  Who knows.  It’s even more of a mystery that they didn’t fix it in patch #5.1!

Maybe they’re still scratching their heads, trying to figure out the problem.  That’s worrying, since it’s been a problem since mid-2009.

Or maybe EA just don’t care, because only non-US players are affected…