Creatures... A legend on PC. You´ve gotta love ´em or either hate them. There´s no way in between... Let´s start with the preview.

The idea of Creatures is bringing artificial life into a game. The player can educate the Creatures (Norns) and explore the whole world they live in. The first three versions of Creatures were only available on PC. In these version, you could also learn your Norns to understand words and talk. The GBA version lacks at this point. Since there´s no way of entering words on your GBA, you can´t learn a language to your Norns. This is a minor disappointment...

When talking about graphics and sound, this version isn´t really different from the PC versions: a very colorful world and Norns who keep shouting things you don´t understand...
The only really annoying aspect of the game, is ´Sprite´. Sprite is (as it says) some kind of feary, which was implemented instead of a normal arrow. You´ll have to give orders to your Norns using this badly drawn figure. It makes the game look like half of it was made using a very large budget, and the other half was copied from ´Little Snow White´.

Apart from teaching your beings and explore the world, you can also try to mate them... Yes, there are both male and female creatures, and yes, they feel attracted to each other (or: they totally hate each other). By breeding Norns, Other Norns with different attributes can be created (different faces, better health, intelligent, etc.). There will also be some other races included in this version, so don´t be surprised if there will also be sub-races available to mate with.

Multiplaying options include trading Norns, so if you can´t raise one well it isn´t nescessary to let him/her die. Something which sometimes might be tempting...

Reviewed by: Dennis