Friday, October 21, 2016

Get Ready for Absolutely Nothing Exciting

I kind of want to play C2 again, but first I wanted to run a fairly vanilla C2 world with stock genomes (that is, the ones that come by default with GOG Albian Years) to just get a feel for how creatures act by default before I start adding script fixes, better genomes, etc.

I don't understand the inner workings of C2 even a percent as well as I understand DS, and maybe that's part of what is drawing me to it. I haven't even played it seriously in so long that I don't think I even remember the surface workings of it. At the very least, maybe that will make things interesting.

Unlike most of my worlds though, where I try to view each creature as an individual and give them all equal time in the spotlight, this time I've decided I'm not even going to bother naming the creatures unless I feel like it. I'm also not really planning on interacting or intervening with the creatures unless I feel like it. Basically, it's kind of up to the creatures to charm me enough into wanting to care for them; I'm going into this rather indifferently.

I don't really have a lot of hope for this run going anywhere interesting, but I feel like I should document what happens anyway, for science or something.

The only cobs I injected were the Game State Controller to gain access to all the kits, and the Puffer Fish, because I'm not terribly keen on losing creatures to the seas. I then grabbed some random eggs and got started.

After hatching I realized I had two females of the same breed, so I exported one. That left me with six creatures total: one pair of Golden Desert Norns, one pair of Pixie Norns, a female Emerald Norn, and a male Hebe Norn.
 I flipped on the learning computer and let them just chatter away. There wasn't a lot of point to trying to teach nouns in this crowd; the creatures would all be looking at different things and get different ideas of what I was trying to say. I pushed the doozer a few times but mostly just sat back and watched them mill around.

These two ran off into the corner to have a slap fight before rejoining the others. They still seemed pretty angry though.


 Not too long after, the pixie norn collapsed, probably due to never caring enough to eat, but getting slapped around couldn't have helped either. I guess I wasn't really willing to lose one just yet, so I injected him with the liquid food/defibrilliant combo just to keep him going again. After all, I'm not going for survival of the fittest here, just kind of getting to know the default genome.


This really just seems to be the place for slapfight showdowns.
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Oh, look who's down again. I suppose it's possible the first collapse did enough organ damage to make him even more vulnerable.

She seems way too happy about this. 

I kinda feel bad for the guy. I'll probably save him again, but if this happens a lot I'm not sure I want to spend half the game just injecting liquid food into everyone. It's really hard to teach anyone to eat in this crowded space, but no one has bothered to leave the incubator level either and I don't know that I care enough to move them manually. These creatures are going to have to do something more charming than hit each other and starve themselves to break me out of this apathy. 


7 comments:

  1. I've been interested in playing Creatures 2 again myself, since it has my favorite aesthetics in the series and a lot of my favorite breeds (particularly MerNorns). Plus there's a lot of little touches it has that are missing from C3/DS.

    But the fact remains the creatures are pretty abysmal at taking care of themselves. Considering I'm the sort who prefers to just watch his creatures, that's something of a turnoff to say the least.

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    1. Oh man, mernorns! Those were some of my favorite breeds too. Lots of really fond nostalgia wrapped up in those.

      If I actually continue digging into C2, one of my goals is to eventually improve their self-care abilities, but we'll see how far that actually goes. Knowing me, I'll get distracted by something else new and shiny within the week, heh ._.

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  2. Oh my goodness. The C2 angry faces! For some reason I forgot about those, so I had a good laugh when I saw those pictures. I remember how terrible the Norns seemed to be about basic care, too. Like Grendel Man said, I've had some desire to play Creatures 2 again. I just always have the worst luck with losing worlds to crashes, so this series should at least make me feel like I'm playing vicariously! Now to just catch up on all of the entries, which I'm excited about!

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    1. I'm actually pretty surprised I haven't had a hard crash yet. I've been backing up the world file regularly just in case though. I'm can't imagine this world is all that interesting, but I'm glad I can provide what little vicarious enjoyment I can!

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  3. Hah, I actually just touched on this in an ancient blog post of yours, but the default genome in C2 has lots of issues with eating. I resorted to teaching a single norn at a time, exporting, then ultimately importing everyone to live together.

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    1. Hah, that sounds like probably the only real viable way to go about it. I ended up getting so lazy with this bunch I just stick them with liquid food on occasion.

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    2. Well.. it wasn't all that successful, at least not for survival purposes. It did keep me interested in Creatures long enough to discover Lis Morris and her work on improving norn genetics as well as the community as a whole, so it wasn't a total loss.

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