Blog Carnival Day 1

Dunno if I'm posting this at the right time but oh well!

So, it's the first day of the CCSF and that means it's the first day of the blog carnival! Here's the prompt for the fist day:

"How did you get into Creatures in the first place? What game did you start with? What intrigued you about it or was the most fun? Do you have any special or fond memories?"

Certainly an interesting topic to kick off the CCSF blog carnival! The story of how I came to play Creatures is actually quite an interesting one.

At this point, the only game in the series I've played is Creatures 1; obviously, this was the one I started with. In fact, the first time I ever played it was on its original CD when I was still a teensy little kid. It was one of the few games we had on our family computer and my older siblings played it a fair bit though I was still too young at that stage to play it properly on my own. I couldn't tell you exactly what year that was because I was too young to remember it exactly but I'd estimate somewhere around 2002-2004?



Anyway, technology moves on, and so do people, and my siblings lost interest in the game and we got a new computer that couldn't play Creatures and I'm not even exactly sure where the original disc is nowadays. When my siblings stopped playing it, I never kept playing; I keep saying how young I was when we first played it and at that age I was too young to really care, or even remember it that well. However, my older siblings still remembered it, and when one of them bought the game on GOG near the end of 2014 and started to play it again for a little while; it caught my interest: though I had no clear memory of playing the game myself, and what I could remember was only quite vague, as soon as I started to watch my sister play the game again everything just felt so familiar, from the carrots to the lifts to the deathcap to those cute/annoying Norn sounds. It felt so familiar and so right, so I decided to give the game a play myself. I got a bit hooked and played the game non-stop for about a month before other stuff in real life distracted me from it. Ever since then I've kind of been in a state where I'd play it for awhile but something more important in real life would then come and eat away into my time to actually play the game.

So, that's how I got into Creatures: nostalgia for something I could barely even remember. Funny how the world works.

As for why it enchanted me and dragged me into Albia, I think it was just a matter of the Norns themselves. There's just something so calming about being in their world and their silliness always brings a smile to my face. And though I'm supposed to be *cough* a mad scientist I'll admit that after seeing their cute little faces and giving them cute little names I may have gotten a touch attached to some of these Norns. Just a smidge...

The genetics is what really got me really interested, though I didn't delve into this until after I'd been playing it for awhile, and even now I'm still probably the most incompetent geneticist who tries and often fails to create genetic experiments for the Creatures community to enjoy. And that's a perfect segue: another important moment in my Creatures journey was starting up this blog! For a long time I debated whether or not I should start one up - I doubted whether I could write anything interesting, I doubted if I would be able to find the time to actually write stuff. There were a couple of reasons that I considered starting this blog; firstly, I'd been regularly reading Jessica's blog Discover Albia for some time and I really enjoyed reading it and thought it might be fun to try writing one instead and creating more Creatures-related stuff to help be part of the community, and secondly because I'd started to dabble in genetics stuff and I thought that some of the ideas I'd started to play around with were simply too good not to share.

I'm glad I started it: writing about Creatures is almost as fun as playing it, and it feels awesome to share Creatures stuff that I've been doing even if half the time it's just me making stupid genetics mistakes and not that many people even read it.

Anyway, so that's the story of how I came to start playing Creatures! This was really cool to write and I'm looking forward to seeing what new content there is for the CCSF both for today and in the days to come.