C3: First Impressions

(February 2000)

If anyone is still interested in my ramblings about C3, here they are. :-)

Let's begin with some of the positive aspects: Creatures 3 is a very stable program and doesn't crash as often as Creatures 2. Unfortunately, DNA crossover errors still cause it to crash immediately after birth. I already had several stillborn, norns with no brain organs and missing a lot of other genes, too. And since C3 does not have an autosave function, I don't think that I would let it run on its own for hours. Unless the second update really fixed this error...

In general, the norns are very likable. They spend most of their time seeking for food and eating. If they don't find anything edible in the Norn Terrarium, they will wander around the ship looking for food.

The longer I play C3, the less ugly the norns appear to me. I like the pregnancy sprites. :) But even after installing the upgrade patches from Cyberlife, they still lack facial expressions. The graphics of the world are really great, especially the jungle and the desert. The fish terrarium is beautiful too, but my norns won't go there, perhaps because it is the last door on the bridge and they will have pushed one of the others before they find it.

Something I don't like are the missing applets and the full screen mode (I always run C3 in windowed mode in order to have access to the Windows start menu). To find out if your norns are sick or just drunk, I would recommend to download Lis Morris' Infirmary room, IMHO one of the best addons for C3 so far. You can use it either as a room or as an applet – great idea, thanks Lis. :)

Another point that annoys me is that C3 runs as slowly as C2 did on my old Pentium 200MMX. I have a K6-2/400 with 128 MB of RAM and one hour of gaming time equals about 30 minutes on the space ship. I admit that this is why I don't play C3 that often at this moment. I have only six norns in the world and removed a lot of the animals in the Norn Terrarium, but it's still very slow. The normal life span of a C3 norns is between five and six hours, so one generation lasts about 12 hours in my game. The import and export function is rather annoying in my opinion, you don't get a list of all available creatures but you have to scroll through your "inventory" of creatures like in the creator machine. All creatures must be in the "my creatures" directory to be listed. With many exported norns this is really annoying. A good thing is that you can see how old the creature is and what it basically looks like.

Injecting new objects isn't great fun either. You have to scroll through the whole list in the creator machine which will quickly run out of energy if you try to inject several items. The remove button doesn't always work, but perhaps the authors of some agents just did not include a removal script. There is no way of knowing this in advance.

At this moment, I don't have grendels or ettins in the world. I have removed the grendel and ettin machine via the inbuilt command line, the only way to do this if you don't want to start a new world. You can also throw a grendel in the piranha pond and watch it being eaten – I wonder who programmed those piranhas, he must have a rather strange sense of humour. ;-) BTW mine were always well fed during my first gaming hours.

Another thing I don't like very much are the machines, perhaps I'll get familiar with them later. The only working machine I have built so far is a superfluous device that makes the volcano break out continously. Of course I only activate it when there are no norns in the desert. ;)

But all in all I would say that C3 seems to be what C2 promised to be.