CCSF Blog Carnival 1: In the beginning

Today is the first day of the CCSF! I've already sent in my two things, and might be sending in another thing or two. I also signed up for the blog carnival event, and have been mostly unsuccessful in keeping things short. So hopefully you enjoy my ramblings though, I know I enjoyed writing them. Anyway, today's prompt was basically how did you get started with Creatures and are there any fond memories.

I got into Creatures through the PS1 games years ago, though Creatures DS was the first one I played in the main seris. If I remember correctly, my mom brought home the original ps1 game at some point and I tried playing it. I thought it sucked so I shoved it in a case with some other games. Fast forward a number of years to 2008ish and I tried playing the game again. This time I gave it a fair shot and thought that it had potential, even if it was a bad game.

Creatures Caves looked a little different in 2013.

I thought that a sequel might have improved on a few things. So I Googled it and found Creatures DS. I also found the CCSF website and found that there was still an active community. I vaguely remember thinking that the community was going to die at the time, so I didn't really join the community. I then played that game on and off before joining the community in 2012 or 2013.

What first intrigued me about the games was the creatures themselves. I've always played games like Monster Rancher and the Petz series, so cute norns were a natural next step. The promise of an evolving population was to interesting to resist, even if that evolution usually turns out to be fertile creatures with useless mutations. The mountain of mods didn't hurt either and the only other modding community with that level of creativity I'd seen at the time was for Elder Scrolls series. For as small as this community is, it has an impressive amount of creative people doing things with the game! There's still amazing things like the Garden Box and CFF/TWB creatures coming out every few years. The Garden Box alone reshaped how I played Docking Station, and the CFF norns helped get me back into genetics after a lull.

Most of my creaturey memories are from DS. I still remember back when I knew even less about genetics then I do now. My first attempt at the Stinger Norns failed horribly. I couldn't figure out why my Stingers were dying. They were getting the necessary nutrients, but they were still hungry. I think I got angry and gave up before I figured out how the hunger for whatever chemicals and stimulus genes worked. I also remember that they were red, angry Hardman Norns with grendel tails, the most original genetic breed ever.

All but one of them are from 2010.

I also remember the first time I used the genetics kit to make something. I was breeding Vampyre grendels and bred an adorable blue grendel with draconian arms name Ayuka. For whatever reason, I loved this little grendel, and watched over her carefully. Unfortunately, her genome was a mess and she ended up dying being adulthood. So I wrote down her moniker, downloaded the genetics kit, and figured out where the lifespan and death receptors were. A few tweaks later, and I had an adorable grendel who couldn't die named Balmora. I used the inseminator on her a few times and she had a few babies. Sadly, the world most of those babies were in corrupted and I was unable to save them. Their mother survived though, and she's still around even five years later. She's as close as a virtual thing has come to a pet as anything. The only ones that come close are Petz I've had for almost as many years.

And I'm going to be cheesy and say that my last fond memory is the community itself. This community is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Since 2013 quite a few close family member have either died or nearly died, and that's on top of my own failures at various things. The Creatures community wasn't the only thing keeping me going during all of that, but it certainly gave me something positive to look forward to. Things have gotten better since then, and the games and community have continues to be a (mostly) positive thing in my life. So thank you Creatures community and thank you to the two coordinators for this year's CCSF! If the interesting Blog Carnival is anything to go by, we are in for a fun CCSF this year.