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Creatures 2

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Creatures 2

Creatures 2 Cover Art

Developer(s) Creature Labs
Publisher(s) Mindscape
Designer(s) Toby Simpson
Composer(s) Peter Chilvers
Platform(s) Windows
Release August 28, 1998

Creatures 2 is the second game in the Creatures series, and the sequel to Creatures. The game takes place in Albia, centuries after most of the original Creatures world was destroyed by a massive volcanic eruption caused by the Lone Shee's spaceship (the Capillata). Released in September 1998, it was the second PC game in the Creatures series. It has a larger world, more complex norns and ecology, and introduced the Ettins, as well as the Genesplicer (which allowed two Creatures to be artificially combined into one).

This game is no longer available separately, but can be purchased as part of Creatures: The Albian Years. The background images for Creatures 2 are available at C2 Back. There is also a set of comic strips in the style of Creatures 2 called River and Petal.

Read the Creatures 2 Credits.

Gameplay[edit]

Creatures 2 Introduction Video

After creating a world, the player (represented by the Hand) starts at the incubator area in Albia, unable to move away from this area.

Upon opening the Hatchery, the player will be presented with six norn eggs. - three male and three female. The player can choose one or more creatures to hatch, teach them about the good and bad things in the world, including how to eat safe food, learn to Bibble or teach their creature Handish, and explore all of Albia, which is filled with many colourful Critters, plants, flowers, toys and perhaps even Ettins and Grendels. To interact with your norns, you can either pet them, slap them, talk to them, or push them in a certain direction. Creatures can mate with each other and lay eggs, which will hatch into creatures with a mixture of the genetics of both parents. There are Powerups hidden around the world that can only be activated by creatures. When activated, you can use extra kits, use the Splicer, select ettins/grendels or allow infinite scrolling without being tied to a creature.

There are a lot of third-party COBs and breeds or even new worlds made by the Creatures Community available which you can inject into your game. Creatures 2 was released with still some bugs in it, but the community developed patches and bugfixes, Better Albia is one of those. There is also a tool being developed, Albian Command which hopes to allow people to send creatures to each other through a warp-like system like in Docking Station.

Game Requirements[edit]

  • Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT4.0 (SP3)
  • Pentium 166 or faster
  • 4 X CD ROM or faster
  • 16-Bit sound card
  • 2MB 16-Bit colour SVGA display adapter
    (800X600 resolution minimum)
  • 16 MB RAM (32MB recommended)
  • 300MB of free hard disk space

Compatibility[edit]

The original version of Creatures 2 and its Albian Years counterpart will run on Windows 2000, Windows Millenium Edition and Windows XP, but not on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 10, although Deji has found a fix to make the original game run on these operating systems. The GOG Albian Years version is fully compatible with these operating systems, but due to broken APIs in Windows 8 & higher, the game suffers from severe lag when run at 1080px resolution, and menus and tooltips do not display properly. The game also sometimes suffers from a graphical glitch referred to as the Black Box of Doom - this can be fixed by either following this guide or using the DXWrapper fix.

Note: The Steam versions of Creatures 2 (and Creatures) do not allow for a custom installation location, which can lead to problems (see Split installation).

Fixes[edit]

There are several methods available for running the GOG version of Creatures 2 on more modern versions of Windows - Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 10. Please note that these fixes may not work on older versions of Creatures 2, and that they are a work in progress and bugs may be present.

  • DXWrapper eliminates game lag on Windows 10/11 and ensures correct display of tooltips and menus. Download it from here. This fix is already included in the Steam release of Creatures 2. If you experience problems importing or exporting creatures, a solution can be found here.
  • Creatures 2 Community Edition - A series of patches that improve the stability of Creatures 2 (v1.0.39-xp) on modern operating systems, fixes graphical glitches, and introduces new features such as the ability to increase or decrease in-game speed and an all-new cheat mode. It can be downloaded from here. This fix is highly recommended as it fixes the split installation issue found in the Steam release of Creatures 2.

Official breeds[edit]

For additional, fan-made breeds, see Creatures 2 breed slot list.

Interesting facts[edit]

  • In the initial Creatures 2 genomes, Norns have 771 genes, while Grendels have 547 genes and Ettins 597 genes
  • Nearly half of the genes in each creature control poses and appearance; the rest are concerned with biochemistry, organs and brain structures
  • The first creature in Creatures 2 was a Norn called Alice
  • A Macintosh port of Creatures 2 was begun by long time (Millennium/ Cyberlife) programmer and wise old sage Keith Hook. Keith took over the management of the Origin2 project and the port was passed to a contractor. Unfortunately this work was never finished and Mindscape lost interest in the project.
  • The Creatures 2 inside box art features a mysterious Norn that appears to have the limbs and hairstyle of a Purple Mountain Norn, but with a more modern-looking body and main head. It is unknown what this Norn was intended to be, though it could likely have been a "dummy" norn used to make sure everything in the world was to scale.
  • Creatures 2 was the first of the series to include a real ecological system, including seasons and weather.[1]
  • English Voice actor David Holt provided the narration for the Creatures 2 introduction video.[2]

History of Creatures 2[edit]

Creatures 2 norns were cute, if a little dumb

Creatures 2 was widely anticipated. It is likely that around 450,000 copies of the original Creatures had been sold by the time the game was released, and a huge following had developed behind it. Development of Creatures 2 began in Q3, 1997.[3]

Unfortunately, the Creatures 2 launch did not go as planned. The Early Adoption Program failed to deliver on its basic promise of being "early", and the game had several major flaws, the most notable of which was a deficient norn genome that lead to OHSS. Cyberlife was subsequently accused of gouging customers when they released a Life Kit with an improved genome (as well as other features) but neglected to release this as a patch to the original game until several weeks had passed.

In addition, documentation was considered scanty, especially by those who had owned Creatures - much appeared to have been reserved for the strategy guidebook, Creatures 2: Official Strategies & Secrets. This could be a result of tighter deadlines for the manual rather than than the book (considering Mindscape's requirements for translation, packaging and distribution) or publisher-related editing of the manual for simplicity. However, these reasons did not go down well with people who had just bought a $40 game only to find that the manual's instructions for getting norns to feed did not work reliably.

Overall, Creatures 2 was probably a commercial success (despite inadequate marketing, which affected subsequent games as well) - however, it could be seen as a strategic failure, as for many it compromised the trust between the community and Cyberlife. Much had been promised, and yet many users considered the only improvement over the original to be the graphics. Third-party developers were naturally less willing to work on a game that they did not really enjoy playing, and this probably affected the supply of COBs. Things improved after the development of the Canny Norns and Nova Subterra, but some people had lost interest by then, and it is impossible to say how many people would have become part of the community but never found out about the improved genomes and so grew prematurely tired of the game.

Related links[edit]

External links[edit]