Rating: 
Summary: Well Worth the Wait...
Review: What can I say.... Well, Awesome would be a start! This game has superb graphics, sound, storyline, etc. I was literally blown away!
Rating: 
Summary: Like a Ferrari in the repair shop: Beautiful but unusable
Review: "Black and White" has breathtaking graphics and is creatively brilliant. All that means nothing, however, if you can't actually play the game. Here are my experiences:- The game's performance has made it nearly unplayable. My machine definitely meets the suggested configuration for the game - Pentium III 500MHz, 128Mb RAM, Radeon VT 32MB AGP card I bought specifically for this game, Soundblaster, plenty of hard drive and paging memory, ALL the latest stable drivers, etc. Not the fastest machine in the world, but considerable greater than the minimum configuration, and even slightly greater than the recommended one. With all this, B&W has gone from fairly acceptable speed to a near standstill.
- The game began crashing every time I tried to save. I tried everything Lionhead suggested to fix the problem; what finally worked was deleting nearly all my saved games and starting over with an way early, probably non-corrupted game. OUCH.
- Bizarre bugs pop up in the game. In level 3, I was in the process of razing the final village when, suddenly, the game awarded me a victory, and the enemy temple disintegrated. The adversary god's wolf creature began wandering the land - but now he had MY name, and was randomly torching villages and beating up my newly freed creature. Was I fighting myself? Had I inherited another creature? Who knows? And this is only an example of the weird behavior found all over B&W.
- The technical support for this game is a mess. Installation docs give you EA's tech support website; go there, follow the links to the live online help, and they refuse to help you, claiming that EA does not in fact provide support for this game. But call EA, and they do claim to support it - even though they just gave me the same advice on the web site and ultimately could not fix the problem anyway. Some of the other "helpful" advice - defragment your dive, reinstall the game, edit the registry, etc. - is completely unreasonable to ask of an average consumer. I'm not installing a new OS, just a game.
- The documentation is a ripoff. Even with the info on the signposts, there are a lot of mysteries in this game that shouldn't be mysterious at all; for example, if you're going to provide a scroll with statisitics on it, at least the user should know what those statistics mean. We should have to do hours of trial-and-error to solve game puzzles, but not how to correctly build and operate a miracle dispenser. That is, unless you go out and buy the official strategy guide, from you know who.
I could go on, but the point is this: both we as gamers and Lionhead as developers have been greedy, and now we're paying the price. This game is, without a doubt, a $45 beta version. Lionhead should have tested it far more, but testing is expensive, and withholding a release is even more so - I know, I'm a veteran software engineer and project manager. At the same time, we as gamers need to realize that the level of complexity in games is going up, and we're going to have to pay for it. The days of $65 and $70 PC games are coming, and I for one welcome it, because you do get what you pay for. Unfortunately, with the current release of B&W, you don't get what you *thought* you paid for - a magnificent game that actually works.
Rating:
Summary: I Love it
Review: This game is Great, I played it for about 7 hours straight until I was forcibly removed from the computer, My PC has a AMD K6 2 450 Mhz processor 64MB of ram and a Voodoo 5 and it ran near perfect as far as I can tell only complaint is it takes nearly a miute to save but thats not too much to complain about. The Graphics are amazing the Gameplay is Fairly easy to grasp, it only took me about 20 minutes at most to figure everything out, and I love the little pet.....though I feel bad punishing it so I've decided against that I encourage him to eat people and throw giant rocks at houses :) There is so much you can do in this game including throwning the annoying villagers into the ocean if they think they can make demands of their god....ok so maybe I'm a little twisted but hey this is a great game and I would recommend it to anyone, especially if you have dreams of ruling the world and being worshipped as a god.....or feared its up to you..... BUY THIS GAME
Rating: 
Summary: One of the best games ever
Review: First I would like to say that this is a great game. It is rated Teen(13+) because of some volence and comic miscif. The basic plot is that your God and you are one of many gods that want to take over a fairy-tale land called Eden for good and and/or evil. You take cotrol of a small island vilage and these people worship you consantly and as more vilages are taken over your influence expands. The only reason a didn't give The game 5 stars is because it is SOOOOOOOO choppy and slow if you have a slow computer(and even if you have a fast computer)also it is incredibly buggy and EA Games does not have very many patches but if you have the recommend requirments buy away but I warned you...
Rating:
Summary: Great Game, but bugs hold it back
Review: Graphically this game is easily a 6 out of 5 stars. You can zoom out so far you see the entire island at once, and then zoom in so close you can see in detail fireflies dancing around your town. This is all done with an extremely intuitive camera control, which although it is tricky at first, quickly becomes easy and natural to control. The sound is also excellent, with great voice acting, and fun characters. The game play is great too, i would compare it to a cross between myst, starcraft, and the sims. It's definatly one of those games where to put it into a preexisting category you sell the game short.
Now the bad news. Easily the buggiest game I have ever played. I know it varies from computer to computer depending on your set up, but my computer easily smashes all of the requirements to play the game, but still the game crashes about once every 2 hours. Also i have yet to successfully load a saved game, as it has crashed every time. This means I have to depend on the auto save slot to bring me back, which leads to a great deal of frustration. I realize that it may have something to do with my setup, but i have heard similar complaints from other customers. Combined with advice on their tech support site that basically says its you not us, its very enraging.
So in summary, great games from all aspects, with a little bit from several genres, but more bugs than a brazillian rainforest, and if i were you i might wait for EA to release a patch to pick up the game.
