Creatures 2 - A Rant

Hello everybody, I'm very sorry for my absence from the Creatures Community, but I essentially lost interest in the series. Yesterday, however, I decided to play Creatures 2 again. Creatures 2 is probably my favourite game in the series, it has much more depth than Creatures 1 and you are much more involved with your Norns than in the later games. There is one compartment, though, where Creatures 2 fails.

When Creatures 2 originally came out, it had many flaws, mainly the Norn genome, which was to put it simply, awful. Norns suffered from OHSS (One Hour Stupidity Syndrome), which made them forget everything they had learned and essentially made their brains to to mush. Norns also had sleeping and eating problems which lead to premature deaths. The game was also quite unstable and often crashed (this has only ever happened to me on Windows XP or Windows Millenium Edition).

Many users have released updates and stuff to help relieve these problems, such as the Canny and Nova Subterra Norns. Creatures Labs even released a genome upgrade to help combat OHSS. Unfortunately however, I believe that the game itself as a whole is flawed in many ways, even with these updates

Firstly, I have never managed to get a Norn to sleep without telling it to "rest" and slapping it several times. When the Norns do sleep, it is often only briefly, and not enough the relief the ridiculous amount of sleepiness and tiredness that has built up in their systems. I think it would have been better if the game had been programmed to "lock" Norns into sleep, so they could only awake when their sleepiness/tiredness have reached a certain levels.

Another problem I have with Creatures 2 is eating; you can literally surround most Norns with food and they will still starve. I try telling my Norns to eat, but they usually never actually "eat" the food, they often only look at it. What is the point of verbs when Norns rarely even understand their meaning? (Probably linked to the sleeping problem).

I have also found pregnancy and mating difficult for Norns in C2. Whenever Norns mate, their strength rapidly depletes, and they often end up so tired that whenever they go to sleep later their sleepiness/tiredness levels get stuck and won't deplete. Pregnancy is also difficult, as female Norns giving birth regularly get distracted and don't lay their eggs, which is extremely annoying in wolfling runs. Pregnancy is also tiring, and combined with all of those other factors, it seems as though premature death is pretty inevitable for Norns.

Well, rant over for now. I'm aware that these problems have mostly been solved in the  Canny or Nova Subterra Norns, but for some reason they still seem to suffer from problems in my worlds. Do I need to update Creatures 2 or something? If you have anything to say please leave it in the comments section.