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Over hours of playing Spore for our review, I came across a few bugs, but none were as disappointing as the major graphical bug I cited. Apparently, a graphics driver update will be rolled into the next update of Mac OS X 10.5, but until then, gamers with ATI Radeon 1900- or 1600-based hardware are affected. Open About This Mac... from the Apple Menu, and click More Info to see what kind of video hardware your system uses.

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If you're running with that ATI hardware, the Creature Stage and many other parts of the game move at an unplayable, 3-4 frames-per-second. EA's fix, to turn Lighting Quality from High to Low works to return to a fluid speed, but the visual hit disappoints.

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These example pictures don't show the change as clearly as playing in the game, but compare the surface textures of objects. Also, with low quality lighting, background objects pop into view more often and are colored darker here. High quality lighting lets them appear more gradually as you get closer; you can see fog obscuring distant objects in the high quality comparison. Overall, I've found few other significant bugs in my testing, especially compared to other recent EA/TransGaming ports. But this graphics issue taints a stellar game.