What a wonderful night to reminisce!

YAY! LONG-WINDED POSTS!

So, I gathered up what I had with me and decided to take some pictures of my old creatures loot. I have some more at my mothers house including boxes and the blueberry beanie, as well as the original colored C1 disc...I have NO IDEA where I even got this red one. Anyway I wanted to share some pictures from the guide since I always enjoy looking through it. The thing is pretty thick and covers lots of things about the game, genetics, creating custom content, caring for norns, the biology and genetic makeup of norns and tons of other things.

Here's what I have with me at the moment:

 

Yeah that's right! It's the OFFICIAL GUIDE! (like anyone published a non-official one..)

Along with the Creatures 2 disc, the Lifekit #1 disc from creatures 1 and a strange red and black version of the original creatures disc. I still remember driving home from computer city with the lifekit box in my hands. I was SO excited and I couldn't stop looking at the art. Anyway, moving on.

there's a lot of little cute drawings in the book of norns, ettins and grendels.

Some more norn art.

There were little tutorial-type images and explanations, along with Lucy of course.

Explaining systems and organs.

A lovely picture of an Ettin handing a norn an apple.

This was my favorite, they actually listed Creatures developers resource, Albia 2000 and The Norn Underground. They also mentioned creatures webrings and news groups from the time. 

Onto the videos: 

Creatures 1 Intros <3

And Creatures 2 <3



Okay, okay. I've never been a HUGE fan of C3 but here's that one too! <3

Eggs in the Sky!

I've noticing my norns walking into walls forever more often and just brushed it off as them being stupid. Saw one of my norns continuously walking into a wall. Opened creature view to see what see what trying to do exactly. What the...OKAY. She's staring at a glitch? There's an egg in the sky?

So I was like..."What the hell" and went searching for it... 

Laughed a bunch then my eye twitched as my brain dug out information from YEARS ago. There was something I remembered about this from long ago.

From the Creatures Wiki: 

If you are running heaps of COBs (and/or heaps of creatures) in your Albia, occasionally you will experience the bug known as the Egg in the sky. Basically, a small egg-shaped object appears in the sky far above the Statue of Nornity.

The most common cause of the sky egg is a pregnant norn failing to lay an egg after the termination of her pregnancy. The norn will revert to her post-laying state, but there is no egg to show for it, and the egg in the sky appears. The player can use a COB to force the female to lay an egg even after reverting back to pre-pregnancy state, and the baby will generally be born healthy. However, the egg will remain in the sky.

This is not so annoying in itself, but all norns have an abiding fascination with it, and will attempt to walk towards it forever - sadly to the detriment of their health. 

Mutant love.

I finally have a day off of work and I can take a little time to do the things I love. Decided to check up on the Fishing Cactus development blog to see if anyone had answered my question about mutations. Awesomely enough there was a little discussion going on when I got back. :)

It looks like we'll be getting mutations. Maybe not many on release but some at a later time. Looks don't always play a part in mutations as we know and Andrea seems to be focused more on the visible mutations. He wants them to look good, which is awesome and shows he's pretty concerned about the quality of the game. The non-visible mutations I think will be easier to implement, simply because It's more about chemical reactions happening inside the norn which no custom visible queues. 

So this norn has a mutated gene, this gene misfires when the norn eats food. Say....something like starch is converted to alcohol. You will end up with a very drunk norn who stumbles around the world most of the time. However these animations should already be in the game if norns are getting drunk from drinking hooch (or something similar). 

I'm assuming these mutations might already be a given and the more far-fetched mutations are what Andrea is concerned about. The physical ones. I would be blown away if there were a good amount of physical mutations apart from pigment. A limping norn? Sounds awesome to me. Maybe even more extreme things will make an appearance later on. It's so exciting!

I really hope we can get lots and lots of wonderful mutations! :) 

YES. Santa '97.

YESSS. I got the Santa 1997 Norn sprites! Thank you to Ghosthande over on the Creaturetopia forums! Ghosthande linked me to this site, so if you are interested in the female Santa Norns as well you can get them there! 

LOOGIT HOW CUTE SHE IS WHEN SHE SLEEPS. I'm excited what the mixes will look like when she starts breeding. I love the little yellow spots on their legs and the yellow colors combined with the red, it's so lovely. The other norn over there is Kitz. As you can see she's enjoying a donut. The vendors I have in my word were created by the late Steerpike who made amazing COBS. You can get them still at Spotling's Norn and Grendel Paradise in the Steerpike's COB's sections.

....AW CRAP. MY SANTA NORN JUST TURNED INTO A BUNNY NORN. WRRYYY.

DAMN YOU DOCKING STATION! WHY YOU NO CONNECT?

apparently you can't register anymore and the servers are really..unpredictable. *sigh*

offline mode it is.

I'm trying to figure out Creatures 3/DS. I know a bit. I am picking it up again because I'm curious and people seem to be making some really cool things for it. When it came out I hated it. It played weird, the norns looked like crap to me, they didn't even make me feel anything for them and they were so stupid and boring to watch. Previous norns would travel, break away, have more prominent individual personalities. These new norns just crowded together and repeated actions over and over and over and over and plopped out eggs which would hatch and do the the same thing over and over generations upon generations! WHY ARE THEY NOT MOVING FROM THAT SPOT. WHY. I was spoiled by the beautiful art and charm of its predecessors, spoiled by the seemingly more intelligent, personable norns. 

Time to give it another go. I'm sure by this point the great creators of the community have re-designed and perfected the things that were less than desirable about the game in its original form. Come to my aid! AGENTS! SCRIPTS! BREEDS AND META ROOMS! GIVE ME THA POWAHHH.

Alright. So today I'm looking for some old sprite files. Spent time organizing my creatures folder and posted up some new norns. I still have more coming and I have yet to reinstall creatures 2. I'm just having way too much fun with creatures 1 at the moment. Ahhh, nostalgia. Usually I'm playing creatures 2 like crazy but I feel like Creatures 1 has so much charm.  I managed to find the Grorns and threw some grey horse norns in there. I didn't want to get too crazy because my game usually ends up crashing when I have too much in there. I was happy to find the Grorns though.

What I really want is the Santa '97 male and female. I love those sprites. asked on the forums over at Creaturetopia.org. A lot of people over there back up files since the community's websites started dropping like flies. If I have any hope in finding them it's in those forums. haha. Just need to wait to see if anyone has any info. I saw the santa '97 female was done by someone named Norngirl? I wonder if it's the same one over on the forums. If so I guess I'm in luck there! Actually now that I'm looking, I am 99% sure it's the same Norngirl. I'm looking at her storage since her site is down and I'm not seeing them there either. Ah well, maybe I be blind.

In other news I've dug up some older undead norns which I haven't seen around the web in a bit. The ones that can't walk or breed. YIKES. The green gal laying down in the picture above is one of them. I have to admit, I'm interested. I've been breeding walking breeding undead for a while now and I haven't seen one of these guys in a long time. Last time I saw one for download on the web was on Spotling's Norn and Grendel Paradise.

HA! speaking of Norn and Grendel Paradise, I found my old page on there: http://www.reocities.com/Heartland/Acres/2933/deathangel.html
DeathAngeL's norns! OOO GURL! Look at the majesty. lol. Tilda is on there too. The norn next to her (the banana norn male) his name was Jasper and he was a 40 lobed norn I bred.  I was so proud of him. For some reason, the file for him was never posted of him and I lost my copy. He's lost forever ;__; ONE DAY I SHALL BREED ANOTHER 40-lobed norn! Honestly, you'd think they'd be smarter but half of the extra lobed norns I've bred have seemed dumber, so who knows.

Alright well, I'll be around, updating, lurking, EATING KIT-KAT BARS....seriously, they are so good.

Norn Extravaganza!

LET'S GO WOLFLING RUNS.