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[jhxmt]

Couldn't find a thread anywhere for these games - feel free to point me in the right direction if I'm mistaken! 

The Creatures series were a series of artificial life simulation games that were released in the mid-90's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_%28artificial_life_series%29).  I thought they were quite popular at the time, but given the number of blank looks I've had whenever I mentioned them this may not be the case.

Three games were initially released (Creatures 1, 2 and 3), and then re-released a bit later (as 'The Albian Years' for 1&2 and 'Exodus' for 3).  There was also a slightly more kids-oriented game released called Creatures Village.  The re-releases are all currently available on GOG (The Albian Years, Exodus, Village) and, at the time of this posting, are all 50% off for the next 15 hours, so you can get each one for $2.99 a pop.

The premise is relatively simple - you hatch eggs into creatures (called 'norns' primarily, though there are other species as well) and raise them, teach them and train them as you see fit.  Kind of like a very highly-developed Tamagotchi.

Very highly developed.  The Creatures series simulates genetics for each of your norns, brain lobes, sensory connections (so their sensory receptors can pick up a 'flower' smell and trigger an instinct that causes them to expect a 'flower' in the direction of the smell, for example), chemical balances (if they eat nightshade, say bye-bye) and a whole host of other systems and processes that make the game incredibly detailed and, to some extent, can lead to some fun emergent behaviour.  After teaching your initial norns an approximation of 'language', and teaching them that eating carrots will make them feel less hungry while eating nightshade will make them less living, it's quite fun to sit back and just watch them interact with each other and the world.  It's quite fun to see a new, childlike norn announce that they are hungry, and see one of your highly-trained adult norns respond with "eat carrot".  They learn from each other.  It's amusing.

The community base is still very strong (almost two decades later), and a whole host of third-party mods and support have been produced by fans - everything from sound fixes to entire new norn species (you can inject different genomes into your world to hatch new breeds of egg).

If you haven't seen the games before, do take a look - they're interesting toys.  If you have seen them before - well, like I say, 50% off at GOG at the time of this writing. 

[Roundabout Lout]

There is a thread, but I can't find it, Creatures is too common a word for a gaming forum.

I still have the original Creatures CD, never got far enough to see emergent behavior. I should remedy that.

Always felt like those green ugly creatures were lonely, so I usually let my norns associate with them. I think it taught them to be rude? I can't quite remember. Was pretty young when I played this.

[Ozyton]

You can't find it? It's right there on the second page

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=107919.0

As someone who has... technically never played the games, which one should I start with?

[JWNoctis]

C3+DS can be a good choice, especially with mods like C1toDS and C2toDS basically porting the worlds of earlier games into them, and LOTS of others ranging from hoverboard to healthcare package to new metarooms to community developed breeds. I did mod that once a few years back, and it's fairly easy.

And AFAIK, C1 is the only game truly created by the original creator, Steve Grand, and is considered the best by many, so you might wish to try that too.

Also there is a mod for DS which allows offline world creation, if you need to do that.