How This All Began
So I'm about to get very nerdy and wax lyrical over an old game series I loved as a kid and am now reobsessing over almost 20 years later.
So way before I played any of The Sims games, I got a copy of Creatures 2 (the Cyberlife game, not the other one of the same name from the early 90's), it was a pretty fun game where you had to look after a gaggle of cute creatures called Norns, you started out with some eggs, you hatched them and when said Norns were about 30 minutes old, provided you'd made sure they got enough food, or had the gene that made them walk up against a wall and never turn around again causing them to constantly complain about boredom and hunger until they died, they'd be capable of breeding and then laying their own eggs, and the next generation of Norns would pick up some traits of their parents and there was a small chance of a gene mutation that could cause positive or negative effects, so for positive effects one of my favourites was colour mutations, I was particularly proud of the purple Norn I managed to get once (none of the base game Norns were purple unless you download a fan made species, there were just dark red, brown and a deep green variety in C2), I also managed a really pretty neon green one on another occasion, as for the negative I had a Norn called Tom who was constantly in pain, which gave 11 year old me some serious ethical questions to deal with, I didn't want him to be in pain and I discovered that with the Science Kit that some of my other Norns had found I could give him an injection every ten or so minutes and he'd no longer be in pain, which was all fine and dandy until it turned out his condition was passed down to his children and I wasn't able to juggle my time between injecting all of them, and most of them (including Tom) died in pain, queue childhood trauma moment. I then spent a bit of time injecting the remaining decedents of Tom with a shot of painkillers with a cyanide chaser (a kids game! For kids!), which successfully stopped Norns being born that lived their entire lives in pain, but made me feel like a terrible person, so when a similar mutation cropped up again a few generations later, I decided that my first plan had been the best one and that even if I couldn't save them all I could do my best, and amazingly enough after a few generations I stopped getting constantly in pain Norns anyway.
After a while I started doing Wolfing Runs, which are where you hatch a bunch Norns and then just leave them alone for a few hours to make their own way and let survival of the fittest take it's course (pretty sure the neon green Norn was the result of a Wolfing Run thinking about it), and as Norns are generally (well apart from the wall bonking ones and the ones with one hour stupidity syndrome) cleverer than Sims, chances are if you leave them for a few hours you'd come back to find several generations had passed, there were a few Norns still in the caves under the roots of the tree (I don't think it was ever officially given the name Yggdrasil but a lot of creatures players call it that because on Viking Mythology, the significantly less cute Norns live under the roots of Yggdrasil), a couple over on the island with the coconuts and some hanging out in the Volcano with the Grendel and Ettin (who are two other kinds of creature, Grendels were supposedly vicious, but I never really found that in Creatures 2, I found that if you taught them manners, or they found an Ettin early on who could be their friend they wouldn't actually get all that punchy), and maybe if I was super lucky some interesting mutations would have happened. Unfortunetly a lot of my Wolfing Runs at the time were interrupted by my parents realising I'd left the computer on and just switched off the screen while I went to my youth group and me getting a lecture about wasting electricity... Oops.
I basically played Creatures 2 now and then for about a decade until my disc stopped working not long after I moved in with Kev, but by that point I was more of a Sims person anyway.
I'd also briefly played Docking Station for a few years, which was an online companion game to Creatures 3, but I never really warmed to it all that much (I didn't find the Norns as cute) and I never actually had Creatures 3 itself.
So way before I played any of The Sims games, I got a copy of Creatures 2 (the Cyberlife game, not the other one of the same name from the early 90's), it was a pretty fun game where you had to look after a gaggle of cute creatures called Norns, you started out with some eggs, you hatched them and when said Norns were about 30 minutes old, provided you'd made sure they got enough food, or had the gene that made them walk up against a wall and never turn around again causing them to constantly complain about boredom and hunger until they died, they'd be capable of breeding and then laying their own eggs, and the next generation of Norns would pick up some traits of their parents and there was a small chance of a gene mutation that could cause positive or negative effects, so for positive effects one of my favourites was colour mutations, I was particularly proud of the purple Norn I managed to get once (none of the base game Norns were purple unless you download a fan made species, there were just dark red, brown and a deep green variety in C2), I also managed a really pretty neon green one on another occasion, as for the negative I had a Norn called Tom who was constantly in pain, which gave 11 year old me some serious ethical questions to deal with, I didn't want him to be in pain and I discovered that with the Science Kit that some of my other Norns had found I could give him an injection every ten or so minutes and he'd no longer be in pain, which was all fine and dandy until it turned out his condition was passed down to his children and I wasn't able to juggle my time between injecting all of them, and most of them (including Tom) died in pain, queue childhood trauma moment. I then spent a bit of time injecting the remaining decedents of Tom with a shot of painkillers with a cyanide chaser (a kids game! For kids!), which successfully stopped Norns being born that lived their entire lives in pain, but made me feel like a terrible person, so when a similar mutation cropped up again a few generations later, I decided that my first plan had been the best one and that even if I couldn't save them all I could do my best, and amazingly enough after a few generations I stopped getting constantly in pain Norns anyway.
After a while I started doing Wolfing Runs, which are where you hatch a bunch Norns and then just leave them alone for a few hours to make their own way and let survival of the fittest take it's course (pretty sure the neon green Norn was the result of a Wolfing Run thinking about it), and as Norns are generally (well apart from the wall bonking ones and the ones with one hour stupidity syndrome) cleverer than Sims, chances are if you leave them for a few hours you'd come back to find several generations had passed, there were a few Norns still in the caves under the roots of the tree (I don't think it was ever officially given the name Yggdrasil but a lot of creatures players call it that because on Viking Mythology, the significantly less cute Norns live under the roots of Yggdrasil), a couple over on the island with the coconuts and some hanging out in the Volcano with the Grendel and Ettin (who are two other kinds of creature, Grendels were supposedly vicious, but I never really found that in Creatures 2, I found that if you taught them manners, or they found an Ettin early on who could be their friend they wouldn't actually get all that punchy), and maybe if I was super lucky some interesting mutations would have happened. Unfortunetly a lot of my Wolfing Runs at the time were interrupted by my parents realising I'd left the computer on and just switched off the screen while I went to my youth group and me getting a lecture about wasting electricity... Oops.
I basically played Creatures 2 now and then for about a decade until my disc stopped working not long after I moved in with Kev, but by that point I was more of a Sims person anyway.
I'd also briefly played Docking Station for a few years, which was an online companion game to Creatures 3, but I never really warmed to it all that much (I didn't find the Norns as cute) and I never actually had Creatures 3 itself.
So a fortnight ago I was browsing the GOG summer sale seeing if anything I played when I was younger and enjoyed but never managed to finish was in the sale, and discovered that I could buy the entire Creatures collection (Creatures 1, 2, 3, Docking Station, Adventures and Playground) for under £5, so I did!
I tried playing a little of Creatures 2, but I seemed to have way more chance of hatching wall bonking Norns than I remembered, everything got way more interbreedy than I remembered (which come to think of it probably explains why it was so easy for Tom to pass on his constant pain problem, it was a bit of a Hapsburg chin), and I kept running into problems with Norns that had previously not been wall bonkers ending up in the volcano and getting obsessed with one side of it, even weirder Grendels and Ettins, who I'd never seen wall bonk were to! I've since found out that's a weird issue with the GOG version of the game and there's a fan made patch for it, but I've not gone back in to sort it out yet because instead I've become obsessed with Creatures 3 and Docking Station instead.
I tried playing a little of Creatures 2, but I seemed to have way more chance of hatching wall bonking Norns than I remembered, everything got way more interbreedy than I remembered (which come to think of it probably explains why it was so easy for Tom to pass on his constant pain problem, it was a bit of a Hapsburg chin), and I kept running into problems with Norns that had previously not been wall bonkers ending up in the volcano and getting obsessed with one side of it, even weirder Grendels and Ettins, who I'd never seen wall bonk were to! I've since found out that's a weird issue with the GOG version of the game and there's a fan made patch for it, but I've not gone back in to sort it out yet because instead I've become obsessed with Creatures 3 and Docking Station instead.
You can link C3 and Docking Station giving the Norns a much bigger space to explore, unfortunately the Docking Station server has been down for years so you can't trade Norns with random people on the internet any more (well you can if you upload them somewhere and said Internet people download them, but you can't do it smoothly in game these days), but I am still finding it a lot more fun that I remember (possibly Creatures 3 adds more than I expected).
So the first thing I did was hatch two Norns of every kind of the presets, which are much cuter than I remembered (there's some tiger patterned ones that are flipping adorable), and then got started teaching them words and behaviours and encouraging them to explore. About half an hour in one of my Norns met a couple of Grendels and we hit problem number 1.
Turns out Creatures 3 Grendels actually are pretty vicious, and they proceeded to beat my Norn to death (it's a kids game! For kids!), not only that they then proceeded to go out through the door my Norn had come in through, find the rest of my Norns and beat several more to death also (although they gave as good as they got, and eventually the survivors managed to beat the two Grendels to death also.
My tribe had really suffered though, I had to figure out a way to keep them safe!
So the first thing I did was hatch two Norns of every kind of the presets, which are much cuter than I remembered (there's some tiger patterned ones that are flipping adorable), and then got started teaching them words and behaviours and encouraging them to explore. About half an hour in one of my Norns met a couple of Grendels and we hit problem number 1.
Turns out Creatures 3 Grendels actually are pretty vicious, and they proceeded to beat my Norn to death (it's a kids game! For kids!), not only that they then proceeded to go out through the door my Norn had come in through, find the rest of my Norns and beat several more to death also (although they gave as good as they got, and eventually the survivors managed to beat the two Grendels to death also.
My tribe had really suffered though, I had to figure out a way to keep them safe!
Amongst the gadgets littered around the ship I found a cannon but I didn't really want to kill the Grendels if that could at all be helped, so I set it up, but kept looking for a better option, which I discovered about half an hour later when I realised that if you drop eggs, including Grendel and Ettin eggs into water, they won't hatch until you take them back out again, which seemed a much more ethical solution (I am considering downloading a fanmade additional room that I can safely lock them in so they can hatch into somewhere they can live their punchy little lives without hurting my Norns or Ettins, but in the mean time this will do).
I realised Creatures 3 will work quite happily as a background program while I'm doing other things, which makes it perfect for running a Wolfing Run while I'm doing other things, and look in on them every few hours to see how they're doing and see if there's been any interesting mutations, however the first time I tried this I came back to find only two Norns remaining.
I couldn't work out what had happened so I hatched a bunch of starter eggs and left again for a few hours. This time I came back and everybody was dead.
Annoying.
So I hatched a fresh crop of starter eggs and observed for a while, to my horror within a couple of minutes they started dying again, with very few making it to adolescence and none making it to adulthood. Hmmm. Then I noticed thy were sneezing.
So it turns out back several hours ago when my first crop of Norns ran into those Grendels they'd been passed a bacterial infection, and without me noticing they'd sneezed on all of the other Norns, and a lot of the food, toys and gadgets, causing a plague that just didn't seem to want to go away, and since it was so lethal it wasn't giving anybody enough time to develop an immunity. Well shit.
Fortunately I found an anti bacterial spray gadget hiding in the pile of stuff the Ettins had squirrelled away, and I was able to spray it everywhere and it seems to have done the trick.
I couldn't work out what had happened so I hatched a bunch of starter eggs and left again for a few hours. This time I came back and everybody was dead.
Annoying.
So I hatched a fresh crop of starter eggs and observed for a while, to my horror within a couple of minutes they started dying again, with very few making it to adolescence and none making it to adulthood. Hmmm. Then I noticed thy were sneezing.
So it turns out back several hours ago when my first crop of Norns ran into those Grendels they'd been passed a bacterial infection, and without me noticing they'd sneezed on all of the other Norns, and a lot of the food, toys and gadgets, causing a plague that just didn't seem to want to go away, and since it was so lethal it wasn't giving anybody enough time to develop an immunity. Well shit.
Fortunately I found an anti bacterial spray gadget hiding in the pile of stuff the Ettins had squirrelled away, and I was able to spray it everywhere and it seems to have done the trick.
For my next crop of Norns, I decided I wanted all cute tiger Norns, so that's what all my starter eggs were, I taught my starters to speak, how to play, where to find food, how to operate lifts, gadgets, doors and teleporters, and then I enabled the auto namer and left them to it, running Creatures 3 in the background while I do other things and checking in every few hours to see how they're doing and occasionally hatching a few new starter eggs to stop things getting too interbred.
No colour variations so far but around generation 10 I noticed that most of my Norns were now living to five hours old, which is usually the maximum age, a few hours later at gen 15 I noticed that some of the elderly Norns were still laying eggs, when usually they'd stop once they hit old age, around gen 20 I noticed an elderly Norn called Thorid, didn't notice anything special about her at the time, spotted her again a few hours later when I next checked, and figured I must have first spotted her just after she'd become elderly. When I fired up the game again this morning while I was having my breakfast I noticed Thorid was still alive, surprised I checked out her details... As of this morning she was 14 hours old and had laid 23 eggs!
I don't know if she's immortal or just very long lived, and it appears she's not passed on her long livedness or immortality onto her children, but I'm still finding her incredibly fascinating, to the point that I'm considering setting up a new blog to track her progress!
No colour variations so far but around generation 10 I noticed that most of my Norns were now living to five hours old, which is usually the maximum age, a few hours later at gen 15 I noticed that some of the elderly Norns were still laying eggs, when usually they'd stop once they hit old age, around gen 20 I noticed an elderly Norn called Thorid, didn't notice anything special about her at the time, spotted her again a few hours later when I next checked, and figured I must have first spotted her just after she'd become elderly. When I fired up the game again this morning while I was having my breakfast I noticed Thorid was still alive, surprised I checked out her details... As of this morning she was 14 hours old and had laid 23 eggs!
I don't know if she's immortal or just very long lived, and it appears she's not passed on her long livedness or immortality onto her children, but I'm still finding her incredibly fascinating, to the point that I'm considering setting up a new blog to track her progress!
Still no fancy colour mutations though.
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