Customer Reviews

Creatures 3

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Norns, the cute creatures you take care of, are artificial life. Creatures Labs has made the first (and only, so far) publicly released game like this. Norns have artificial brains they use to think for themselves, a bloodstream, digestive system and everything. All they do is their choice alone, not like a ramdomized list of things to do. They have a world to roam around in, can get disease, mate, have children and die. Each norn can speak to you, using their immense vocab. One, when it's hunger drive goes up, it'll find what it needs and announces it. "Alice hungry for starch." Norns can say if they hate, dislike, like, or love eachother and have their own distinct personalities. They take good care of themselves through trial and error, and can remember things that've happened to them. Creatures 3 is by far the best yet, at a great price... It's been very succesful, I strongly suggest you use a search engine and find out a little, as that's the best way. Or their site @ creatures.com. Anyway, this game has a HUGE world to explore with top-of-the-line graphics and great smoothness, quick installation for it's size(11 minutes or so and you're ready to go!) Also problems are non-existant, unlike C1 and 2 that crashed alot. This game is also highly addictive and never gets boring, you'll look forward to seeing your favorite norns and their families every day. Age probably ranges 11 and up just since it'd be too difficult for younger ages. Don't mistake this for a kids game, it's quite interesting and complex. Many people have been messing with norn genetics to make cool hybrids. (like highlanders, named after the movie. These norns live forever.)The world they're in is ever-evolving, you can play with all the little animals around them and the game is full of neat stuff to explore. If you're interested at all, GET IT. (sorry for this thing's length, I love the game so much I get carried away...)

This is one of the best games ever! If you are familiar with Creatures, Creatures 2, or Creatures Adventures, get this! It is the greatest Creatures game ever! There are five main "rooms" in all: the Norn terrarium, the bridge, the desert/Ettin terrarium, the aquatic (or "fish") terrarium, and the jungle/Grendle terrarium. Ettins will steal machinery, and Grendles will steal eggs, and kill Norns. Both can carry sicknesses. I suggest starting out with the Norn family. Also, the Grendle and Ettin eggs will not hatch if you place them in the Pirahna pond. There are two of each egg, and they will come out at different times. There are three types of Norns. Thwo have two names, one given by Cyberlife, and the other givin by thenewsreaders in alt.games.creatures . The names are: Civit/Cow (the reason is quite obvious), Bruin, adn Bengal/Tiger. My opinion, is that the Tiger Norns are the cutest, and hardiest. Some disadvantages are that the appelets are gone. It is harder to find out if your Norns are sick, inject them with helpful (or not so helpful, depending on how you play it) chemicals, and to veiw the chemicals in their bloodstream. The system requirements say at least 32 megs of RAM, and a 200mhz CPU, but I strongly suggest that you have at least 250mhz CPU and 64 megs of RAM. Otherwise, it will run very slowly with more than four Norns. Some little helpful bits about the game: ctrl + shift + w will take you to the wolfling control. There you can set the game to fast mode. F1 will bring up the "Helpful hand." Left click to teach a Norn a name to an object. Right click to get information on an object, such as interesting info on a robin, or the function of a peice of machinery. ctrl + shift + c will bring up the CAOS input box. CAOS means Creatures Agent Object Source. Here are examples of what you can do with it: Type "enum 2 24 4 attr 199 next endm" to make pickups pickupable, so you can take them to your Norns. Type "enum 2 24 1 attr 199 next endm" to make the stone of knowledge in the Grendle terrarium pickupable. Type "meta * 1 1 1" to go to a different room. Replace the * with numbers 0 to 9. Play around with that one, and you may find a few interesting places...

I've just very recently bought Creatures 3 and there are some big differences in the system! First, the positives. The user-interface is SO much easier to use! You don't have to wait for your norn to discover new areas in order to explore the new wolrds. All you have to do is move your mouse left or right and you can scroll with ease! It also helps that you can now lead your norns to where you want them to go, instead of having to coax them to follow the hand. There's also lots to do in the world, like build machines that do things like detect pregnancies and so and, and you can now actually interact with Ettins (they're so neat, and have a lot more personality) and Grendles. The Norns are also smarter and have a much bigger voacbulary. The four echo-systems also have many new animals and plants that are fun to interact with, and the graphics are GREAT! Now for the bad news... Creatures 3 has completely eliminated the "kits". This makes it very difficult to know what's going on with your creature. You can't "see throught the creature's eyes" like you could in Creatures 2, and it's very hard to tell when they're sick, fertile, or what not. A lot of the new implements in C3 are kind of complicated, and take awhile to master. You also can't hatch one creature at a time, you get two instead, and the other thing is that the only facial expression they show is happiness. Overall? I have A LOT to do before I get even CLOSE to mastering this game (and I've owned C1 and C2!). The elimination of the kits make the game difficult, but a challange as well. C3 gives you lots of fun stuff to "tinker" with, and the graphics are absolutley wonderful. I'm very happy I bought this game, and I look forward to the challanges it presents. Hope this was helpful!

The creatures in this game, calles "Norns", are created by mindscape to be able to manipulate their environment, develop skills, learn languages, play games, but none of these behaviors is in any way pre programmed. For instance, in Creatures 1, the creatures were playing with a simple ball. they bounced it, and then ran after it and bounced it again. The creatures in C1 were not very advanced, but two Creatures figured out that they could get the ball faster and play more if they threw the ball to each other. This shocked the whole online community of Creatures, even the creators, as this kind of behavior is not expected of the creatures in C1. In C3, this is a tiny feat compared to what they can do. The programmers have taken a revolutionary step in not preprogramming the behavior. Furthermore, these creatures can have children, with genes inherited from their parents, and these genes mix, match and mutate to create a creature that just like a human, will never exist again.

Ahh.. but there's a challenge. There are two other types of creatures, just as smart as the Norns, and the Giant Grendels will eat the norns' eggs, and the small, crafty ettins will take apart your most carefully planned machines in a flash and run off back home with them. It's up to you, the user, to guide the vulnerable norns through evolution, until they can care for themselves.

This Game is a top buy, and I strongly reccomend it to New users and Creatures Veterans alike.

I had never had any of the Creatures games so when I bought I had no idea what to expect or what to do. Soon I figured it out and Creatures 3 is certainly the most engaging and interesting game I have ever owned! The norns think on their own and will tell you exactly how they are feeling and will respond to each other. I love all the breeds but my fav. is the beautiful Bengal Norn. The graphics are supurb and the machinery very useful...though I am still figuring some of them out (I have made quite a few mistakes with the chemical injection kit)I also find it fasintating that each terrarium has its own ecosystem. I have never seen a comp. game so intricate! Right away when you name your norns, you feel a special connection with them and have the need to protect them and care for them (I think part of it is because the norns are so cute). I will do anything to fend off Grendles(monsters that spread disease, steal norn eggs, and abuse your norns sometimes to death)from my creatures. I have also found that I like ettins very much and have started colinies. As a plus there is thousands of web sites out there with downloads to make the game even more fun. You can find objects everywhere and they really are COOL! Personaly I'm not that caught up with the "hack the game and create cool stuff" styl that people seem to have or the "create mutant norns for the fun of it" styl but I guerntee this game to be a BLAST!!! However I do not recomend this game for young children such as 3rd graders or below, Creatures Adventures or Creatures Playground would be mpre approriate. As a wonderful addition now the Docking Station has been released opening up a whole new on-line world with a cute new breed I may like even more than the Bengals! ^_^

When I first played Creatures 2, I was frustrated by the complicated user interface. If you have played "Creatures 2" and you are thinking that " Creatures: 3" would be the same frustrating game, prepare yourself for a nice suprise.

So what's this game about? Basically, you are to take care of a bunch of creatures called the Norns. You are to protect them from the virus infected Grendels that may kill them. Apart from that, explore the giant spaceship wth your Norns and help build machines to protect the Norns.

Firstly, the interface for "Creatures:3" has gone for a MAJOR makeover. Gone are the days of having to get the attention of your creatures by waving your "hand" infront of it. Now you can simply carry your creature or lead it to the location of your choice instead of having it follow the "hand". Even first time users of this game will easily learn how to use the simple and user-friendly interface.

Teaching your Norn words could not be any easier! Just turn on the learning machine and leave it to auto mode to teach your Norn how to speak. No more frustration of teaching your Norn!

Secondly, the graphics for this 2D game is out-of-this-world! Each distinct habitat found in the spaceship has it's own design. The background for each of the habitat looks real cool.

Thirdly, " Creatures: 3" has three completely new species of Norns! The cow patterned Civet Norn, the beautiful tiger like Bengal Norn and the plain yet pretty Buin Norn are the new Norns in this game. Better still, these new Norns are much more intelligent that the Norns featured in the previous two games of the "Creatures" series-good news to die-hard "Creatures" fan.

As each creature in the game has it's own unique digital DNA, each has it's own personality. Since it has it's own DNA, you can "chemically-engineer" your Norns to make them stronger or inject all kinds of weird chemicals into them !

The only flaw of this game is that you have to guess the properties of the medicine and chemicals found in the game. The manual included did not explain much about the chemicals.

Overall, this is a weird yet addictive game to play, with its biological accuracy and beautiful graphics, this game should attract anyone of all ages.

Don't think this is a virtual pet game. The creatures are infinitely more complex than that. They're so complex that the creators of the game cannot know what might happen then. And that makes it an exciting game. "None of the behavior you see has been specifically programmed" says in the creatures' 1 manual. And it's true. You may think this is a children's game, but that's not true. Ok, children may love the game, but adults can use it too. In my opinion, this game is the best game of the history of humanity. Don't you see? We've made *real* animals!

I got this game a year ago, and it was the first Creatures game I had ever bought. I had been reading reviews for it for a month, and bought it. When I installed the game and started playing it, it was great!! The Norns were very cute (even if the only facial expression they showed was happyness), the Ettins stole almost every object on the ship and brought it back to it's home area (the ettins are my favorite creatures to watch, I caught it stealing some machinary and told it to drop it, and it just looked at the screen and made a big, cheezy grin at me), and the grendles are horrifying! The only bad things about this game are the creator, it lets you put new objects you download on the internet in the game, but you need something called bioenergy...and...um...the power ups. (note: many creatures users at the creatures newsgroup disliked the power ups in Creatures 2. Creatures Labs didn't know when to stop :-D) I am looking foward to the Docking Station add-on Creatures Labs will be releasing for free! (You don't need Creatures 3 to run it, but it docks with it if you have it.) If you want to buy this game, I recomend that you buy the Creatures Trilogy in the game. It includes C1, C2, and C3 all together! Get this game, or the other game, now!

The basic idea of this... I say game but I use the term loosely...is to raise a little family of norns. True they aren't as cute and endearing as the C1 norns, or as graphically clear as the C2 norns, but they have been vastly improved in all other respects.

Saying C3 isn't very good because it's not like Diablo and suchlike is like saying Myst isn't very good because it's not like Tomb Raider, in other words,it's madness! As virtual pets go, these are the most advanced and life-like I've seen yet (and I've seen a few!!)

Truth be told, I don't go a bundle on the creature graphics. The backgrounds are just beautiful, but the norns look rather unclear. If you compare them to C2 norn graphics you'll see what I mean.

The only thing that can be improved is the clumsy interface. The creators, Creature Labs (Mindscape are the publishers) have tried valiantly to incorporate the 'kits' (science kit, health kit etc) in the game more by moving them to a certain area. Unfortunately they just haven't pulled it off. Bring back the kits in the next one CL! I also preferred the graphics from C2, but the personalities of the creatures are just what I like. (The Ettins actually build and steal stuff instead of wandering aimlessly about like in C2. The Grendels search out and kill norns, just like they're supposed to)

This 'game' appeals to many different types of people. The caring and nurturing type enjoy the pet aspect, and the science buffs will appreciate the complex genetics and biochemistry of it.

It's probably a good idea to find out something about it before you rush out and buy it. There are loads of sites out there, even I have one! Things are constantly being developed for download and as it is so expandable, it can stay fresh for ages.

PS. CL are rumoured to be making another edition of creatures, in full 3D this time. Creatures 3D will most likely be the end of the series.

First of all like everyone else I'd like to say the graphics are superb !I just got the game a little while ago and I have to say I have enjoyed it. I'm more or less stuck in the game though because my norns and I were doing pretty good I was taking care of them, learning how to communicate when grendels found there way inside my world after a while my norn learned to defend itself and killed a few grendels but many of my norns were badly hurt one of my favorites named Freddy is intensly ill and I still have not be able to find the medical bay.Then ettins broke in and started trying to steal my machines and my baby norns turned up M I S S I N G. I went to the crypt to check if any norns died without me knowing . They didn't die just turned up M I S S I N G! Don't get me wrong it all it is a very creative and neat game . But it's not like Creatures Adventures or Creatures Playground . Those games are all about having fun and your norns die because of old age not because of another creature. It's either you train the norns to fight the grendels are the grendels hurt your norns sometimes even kill them. The it's a bit violent because the grendels hurt your norns and that's why I rated it four stars instead of five. Once again it's a great game just more for ages 9 and up. But I recommend you buy I gurantee you'll have fun!