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?

Creatures 1 and the Curse of the Missing Files

Guess who finally has a laptop! I've moved my stuff to it from the old computer, and it all went very smoothly... or so I thought.

I booted up creatures, and everything looked fine, at least to begin with, but when I set my camera to view a different Norn... bam. Crash. No good. I was baffled - what had caused it to crash? Had I installed it wrong? Was the game incompatible with my new laptop?

I tried again a couple more times, and the same thing happened - if I switched to looking at a different Norn, the game crashed. I restarted the computer to see if that would help, but no luck there.

I was scratching my head for awhile, part of me utterly confused at what was going on and part of me scared that I wouldn't be able to get it all working on the new computer. As it turns out though, idiot me had simply left some of the save files behind on the old computer and that's why it wouldn't work. After porting everything over properly, it all works fine now. Whew.

In other news though, you're probably aware that the CCSF 2016 is coming up! Some pretty awesome-sounding events are in the works for it as well, and it looks like it'll shape up to be a pretty cool CCSF. I'm really excited to see what's in store.

New Life and Death in Albia

Today was an interesting day in Albia.

To begin with, all I had to worry about was getting my Norns to eat - a hard enough task, but nothing particularly gruelling. Though it was noteworthy that Dubby still hadn't woken up; if you can remember as far back as January you might recall that last time I played I was a little concerned that Dubby had been sleeping for ages. He still  hand't woken up and his life force was dropping rapidly; I don't know why he was sleeping for so long, and I don't think I ever will, but at this point I worried enough by his prolonged sleep that I gave in and decided to inject him with some wake-up pill.

He woke fairly quickly, and he's quite a good eater so it wasn't long before I was able to get him back up to full health. However, elsewhere in Albia...

Albia: A Place to Call Home.

To say, "It's been awhile since I played Creatures" is understatement of momentous proportions.

As I've previously mentioned, I'm a busy little chicken in real life, and since I wrote that update I've been spending a lot of my spare time writing fiction rather than playing creatures. But today on a complete whim I opened up the game, and honestly the feeling that seeing the world of Albia gave me is hard to describe. Comfort, happiness, excitement... none of those words quite fit, but they all do fit a little bit, in some small way.

Let's go off on a tangent for a moment: if you look at my past posts, you'll notice a pattern. A burst of posting here and there with large periods of inactivity sandwiched in between. And this is relevant to me opening up the game again today, and relevant to the feeling I got from doing so, for one reason: I came back. Even if I go away for weeks or months, I always end up coming back. Albia just draws me back in every time.

Perception Lobe: Neuron List

You might remember that the last post I did that was actually about Creatures was on brains. You might also remember that I couldn't find anywhere that had a full list of what neurons in the perception lobe corresponded to which perceivable thing, so I put together my own list based on Chris's information on CDR. I also never got around to posting that list because I wanted to test it more.

Now, I was about to carry out some massive experiment to confirm what my list says, but as soon as I opened up BrainViewer I realised there was a pretty obvious way to check my list:

Absence

I was meaning to get around to doing this sooner, but I never found the time. Amusingly that is exactly what I needed to get around to doing: posting about the fact that I haven't been posting much because I haven't had the time to. In real life I'm a highschool student and I have a part time job and I do a lot of extracurricular stuff so naturally I don't have an awful lot of time left to play Creatures. I really do wish I had more time to post stuff but my real life responsibilities are many and getting everything done in real life is stressful enough without trying to keep a regular blog as well.

However! I do intend to finish off a couple of things from my last post which I never followed up (hopefully in the next week or two but I can't promise anything I'm afraid), and I'm starting to think about what cool amazing thing I could do for Creatures' 20th anniversary, which although technically isn't until November (I think?), November also happens to be exam season in my country (fun times...) and the 20th anniversary is awesome enough that I want to be able to get something done for it without stressing about my exams at the same time. Haven't decided what I'll do yet but I'll think of something cool...

The other thing is that sometime within the next couple of months I will probably be getting a laptop of my own rather than having to use the family computer. Not having to share the computer should make it easier for me to post a little more frequently.