i can't go to hell - i'm all out of vacation days. i watch space rocks and yell at computers for my day job. probably too old for any of this

 

i think i might be burned out on internet social. it's hard to keep doing it. it's hard to even maintain the amount of attention i'm already giving it

 

i am the cause of most of my own problems

 

furthermore, capitalism must be destroyed

 

birdsona: ?????

 

🌎 Ontario, Canada


webbed site
egrets.ca/

Hey does anyone else remember that evolution themed game developed by Almanic and published by Enix in the 1990s? The one where you start the game is a weird little fish and evolve into different creatures through the various eras of Earth's history?

Box art from E.V.O.: Search for Eden

Wait no, I'm not talking about that one, I'm talking about the one they published two years earlier for the PC-98 and never released in North America: 46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinkaron (4.6 Billion Year Story: The Theory of Evolution)

Title screen from E.V.O. The Theory of Evolution

I've been watching @wuest start to route a speedrun for this the last few days and this game is, technically speaking, absolutely fucking wild.


To give you an idea of how many places this game goes, you start the game as this weird little lumpy green fish in a tide pool and by the end of the game, you're fighting the planet-devouring space devil in space. A few things happen along the way.

At the beginning of the game, you are a weird green fish
Anyway, some things happened along the way and now you have to fight the space devil

The narrative is absolutely buck wild, your literal antagonist the whole way is literally Luficer trying to corrupt the earth's development.

There are aliens.

There's a Tyrannosaurus who's actually kind of a cool guy.

This happens..???

Gaia granting you the power of... fish, I guess?

But maybe the coolest thing is the game has a bunch of really wild bad endings. Okay, so every time you evolve a stat beyond a threshold, your position on a little evolution grid moves around and you change to a different form, right?

If you move far enough to the very edge of the grid and then evolve in that direction again so you move off the grid entirely, you become so hyper-specialized within your ecological niche that you just kind of stay there and don't progress any further. That's a game over. Most of them that I've seen are kind of neat. Some of them are absolutely wild.

In one bad ending, you're just gnomes.
Yes, gnomes are a valid evolutionary path that happens.
Or you can just become a library dragon who lives in the woods and teaches wayward humans stuff. Honestly I think this one is the only good ending and the game should give you a gold star if you get here.

Anyway, game is just this weird little bizarre artifact that can be directly traced to the better known E.V.O. game and I just think it's this weird, fascinating little thing, and can't wait to see a run develop for this thing.


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in reply to @SomeEgrets's post:

yeah, being published by Enix, it definitely has a bit of Dragon Quest DNA (no pun intended) thrown in the mix

unfortunately that includes the fact that its composer was Sugiyama, but he's dead now anyway, so...

but that's definitely a very good ending

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