About...

About "The Truth About Grendels"...

I created this page in early September 1998 for a number of reasons. I found that there was no comprehensive Creatures webpage out there that collected information about grendels in one place. This was especially important after discovering how much of the information that people "knew" about grendels was really just hype to make the game seem like it included some evil force to be fought against. Instead, many players were unnecessarily alarmed by seeing the grendel near their norns, when there are ways to make these close relatives to norns very compatible with your norn population.

This page was set up to collect and catalog as much as I could find about grendels in both games, and thus to provide a resource to the online Creatures community. Also, I began adding information about other aspects of the game, including FAQs and norns for download, as it became clear that these would be useful to people.

About Why I Bought Creatures...

Around April 1998, I had been interested in Creatures, since I like sims, but the cutesy factor had scared me off a bit - from what I'd seen of it, it seemed like it was about getting fuzzy-wuzzy critters to be your pets, play, etc., like a more complex version of "Dogz" or something. I read a daily 'weblog' called Robot Wisdom Weblog where the editor of it points out interesting URLs, newsgroup threads via DejaNews, etc. He was reading a.g.c for a while at that time, since one of his interests seems to be artificial life, robotics, and the like. In mid-May, he excerpted a few bits from a discussion on a.g.c about someone who'd downloaded some norns from the site Tortured Norns. This piqued my interest more than the other references I'd seen to the newsgroup previously, or other Creatures websites (I don't recall which ones I'd seen, but they were mostly sappy, low on solid information, and not very good, in my opinion). I read the thread that had developed, then found that website with a bit of searching.

I can't say I recall what my immediate perception of "Tortured Norns" was, but I eventually came away with the impression of it being part black humor, part challenge, and liked what I'd learned about norns and the range of their behavior, compared to the bland sites I'd previously seen that didn't go much beyond "aren't they cute". This impression was especially strengthened when I checked some posts by AntiNorn to a.g.c and found them to be helpful to game players as well as intelligently written. This also helped me to discover things about the game that the marketing had concealed - for instance, the hyping of C1 grendels as vicious when they really were forced by the game's programming to act that way, and not by their instincts at all! I also began to learn about some of the other "cruel" aspects of the game that CyberLife had introduced, like Cave Flies, the encouragement to poison grendels, and so forth.

Soon after this, I found a reference in the weblog to some cheap copies of Creatures at eBay, so I bought it, and began lurking on a.g.c in preparation. From there I found many intelligent and helpful websites about the game that I'd never seen before. This was the middle or end of May 1998, and I delurked there in July. (Thus a "horrible" site helped interest me in the game when many cutesy sites had turned me off to it!)

About Me...

As you might have seen from various pages around here, my name is Denise Voskuil, and I've been on the Internet since about 1992. I started reading alt.games.creatures in early 1998, right before I bought Creatures, and began participating that summer. I'm 28, and live with my husband and our four ferrets (which are rather like norns in that they get into everything when your back is turned, and are cute yet often frustrating). I enjoy other simulation games like Populous/Populous II, Civilization, and the Sim City series, games like Myst/Riven/Qin/7th Guest/11th Hour, Sam & Max, and other computer games. My latest obsession is Baldur's Gate, and probably EverQuest will be added to that soon enough. On the Playstation, I enjoy the Tekken series, the Crash Bandicoot series (especially Warped), Brave Fencer Musashi, Rival Schools, Pocket Fighter, Tomba!, Monster Rancher, Test Drive 4, and hope to find time to play Resident Evil 2, Final Fantasy VII, Parasite Eve, and others. I have some more info on a few computer and PlayStation games that I enjoy, on my personal homepage. With all that and wanting to be able to enjoy things like cooking, cross-stitching, reading both comic books and literature, watching films (Hong Kong and Japanese films are among my favorites)... Well, needless to say, don't be alarmed if I'm slow to answer E-mail or update this site.

Legal info: This page is © 1998, 1999 Denise L. Voskuil. These COBs, other files, and images are all © their respective creators. I am distributing them through explicit permission only. If you would like to post them on webpages or Usenet, or even just put an image up on your webpage, contact their creators and ask first. Do not link directly to any of them as an alternative to putting them on your own server. If you have problems with a file, contact the creator of it; I have given contact information for each. Title graphics were created by me, as were all grendel graphics that aren't screenshots (using LummoxJR's Nornpose). Green page decoration graphics are courtesy of Windy's Fashionable Page Designs, except for the base green rectangular button design, which is from Bimsan's Free Web Graphics.

Last updated April 7, 1999