Black & White

Rating:
Summary: Single biggest disapointment in the last few years
Review: Makes me long for Daikatana.

An incredibly well thought out game engine and hyped concept done completely and totally wrong from the very beginning. This is not Populous et al. This is about micro managing every villager and being frustrated with the interface and lack of ability to change the environment or command your villagers to do anything but have sex, eat and work. The quests are incredibly bad and poorly thought out.

The graphics are nice over all but the villagers are done badly. The AI is 'neat' though it can be frustrating at times. You can't blame that on Lionhead. Its easily the best AI on the market right now. But that being said, we've got a long way to go. Still this is heads above the rest in the intelligence department.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Miss the Point of B&W
Review: B&W markets itself as a game unlike any other--in this case, a quiet personality test in a god game format. In this goal, it succeeds. In fact, looking through other reviews, you'll get two differing opinions--but the negative ones aren't holding much merit. Here's why:

-Gameplay--This game is not meant to be incredibly fast-paced, except for perhaps in creature battles. After that "expectation" is thrown out, and people take time to actually look and learn about the subtleties of the game (and there are a bunch), they begin to learn why the game is truly a "god" game, as well as the reason it's called Black and White. The biggest problem the game's authors seem to have is that a lot of the subtle cause-and-effect relationships of the game have gone largely unnoticed, usually by people who don't like the game. (Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and a difference between greed and need.) A player taking his/her time should be able to figure out of most of them.

As for the micromanagement issue, the Creature will do quite a bit of this for the player. It all depends on how you raise it. (For those people who say that raising the creature is difficult, I can't wait until you have kids of your own.) My Creature runs around feeding people and giving them wood, amongst other tasks--saving me the trouble of having to do it myself.

Finally, the manual for the game does not give a lot of help. This is a good thing. B&W is game to figure out for yourself. If they told you everything, it wouldn't be a very interesting game.

-Controls--I've heard claims of people having problems with them, but I'm guessing it's because they didn't actually look at the tutorial. (The tutorial, BTW, is claimed by these same people to be long and useless--neither one of which are true.) There are TWO ways to change the view of the game: the mouse and the keyboard. Using the keyboard, I've found, overcomes any interface problems assoc. with the mouse. In conjunction with one another, you can access anything in the game in any direction and distance you choose.

-Technical--EVERY game has bugs when it comes out. Period. (Diablo II, for example, as been out quite a while, and they're STILL working on fixing some of them.) Moreover, B&W fully admits it's a resource hog, so players complaining about this shouldn't be surprised. However, I've gotten B&W to run fine on a PII 333. The real bottleneck in the game is hard disk access, which only is a problem on the initial load and saves.

-Graphics--This game is beautiful, even on lower end machines. Just spending time looking at the beauty of the game is worth buying it--even at the "Low" detail level. (There are 5 detail levels to choose from, and this is #2.)

Personally, I wish I had an ultra high-end PC with which to play this game. Meanwhile, though, I'll still enjoy it--below the mandatory requirements.

-Game Faults--There are one thing this game fails miserably at: Target Audience. This game has a rating of "Teen," but no teen is patient enough to figure it out. This game is much more clever than that. Unfortunately, B&W goes straight over a lot of people's heads.

(Disclaimer: I don't recommend trying to run below requirements--it just happens to work for me.)

Rating:
Summary: Its pretty good once you get to know it better
Review: What is wrong with all of you people?? Boring? Pricy? Sucks? WHATEVER!!! its the best game i ever seen. Its fun by the way you throw people aorund, gather wood and stone and kill your villagers by throwing them into an ocean. They build a boat give them wood then they sail or kill them. The land is fantastic! looks so, so, so, so, so, so real. The zoom is good too. I think the guys who said this game sucks either never played it, or just wrote it bad and really ment its good so other people wouldn't like it.

Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: I agree with most everyone else here, the game is boring. You do the same the actions over and over again, get wood food, give it to villigers and let them complain. Your creature does nothing really except walk around and get hurt, mine learned how to fish like 20 times but hasnt even fished yet.

Rating:
Summary: Black and White Kicks *ss.
Review: This game is great. I have never liked these type of games. Mainly because I have the intelligence, focus of a monkey. But this game is the greatest. I have read all the articles on how the game was created and the AI in this program is nothing but the best. The technology and environments are probably some of the greatest around i've seen so far. Buy this, you wont waste your money.

Rating:
Summary: <<Insert Curse Word Here>>
Review: In short, this is why publishers hype games so early.

"Hey, I've got a great game idea! Let's make everyone else think it's great, so we can make a sorry excuse for a game and sell a zillion copies anyway!"

This game is fun for the first 2 hours. And if you beat the game, you know that's about .005% of it. After that, it's just the same old routine. Feed villagers. Give villagers wood. Put wood in workshop. Put scaffolds on ground. Give villagers more wood. Smack creature upside the head for doing something stupid that you've disciplined him for countless times. This goes on for hours and hours and hours.

I'm not sure how anyone could think this degree of tedium would be fun. One could spend less money and run around in circles in his/her backyard all day.

I'm currently trying to sell this game to a friend for $20. It's hard trying to say good things about a game that I hate so passionately to try to get someone else to buy it.

In conclusion, I will never by another game just because of what I've heard about it. I've learned my lesson. I hope this will help others do the same.

Rating:
Summary: Fun to look, not so fun to touch...
Review: Black and white has lots of "Wow Power", but almost no "Fun Power." The game is good in the sense that it is groundbreaking. The creature AI is quite interesting, and it is true AI. Your creature actually learns, and picks up your play sytle. It's quite wonderous, but you get the feeling that this is this technology is a prototype, not quite finished yet. The graphics never cease to amaze in their boldness and subtlety, from the bruises slowly healing on your creature, to the awesome look of the villages as you zoom out on your island during sunset.

The problem is that this game straddles 2 different genres (real time strategy and simulation) but doesn't deliver the best qualities of either! From a simulation perspective, this game is seriously lacking in creative outlets. You can place a few buildings, plant a few trees, and and put a few tatoos on your creature, but that is the total extent to which you can make these incredible worlds "yours". It's like lionead decided that "let's make a simulation game where you can look but not touch." If you are looking for the sense of building and accomplishment you can get from the Sims or Sim City, or Rollercoaster Tycoon, look elsewhere.

The real-time strategy aspects are similarly lacking in satisfaction. Objectives are hazy, and you never really get a sense of "competition". The creature battles can be won and lost with no consequences. Your people do not fight each other, and the gods don't really fight each other except to get the people to "believe" more. Once you go through all the work of extending your influence somewhere, you are rewarded with..... The ability to make it rain there. Wow.. At best you can use rocks and fire to kill the people that you need to win the game (no wait, why would I do that?)

The only real fun this game delivers is voyeuristic. Like in Rollercoaster tycoon, everyone has a name and personal statistics. They live and die, get pregnant, get hungry, and do some downright funny things. You can watch over them and help them with their little pointless tasks. It's cool to create a male "deciple breeder" and watch him stud around the village getting everyone pregnant, or watching a sick old man who's crawled miles from the temple to his house just as he reaches his front door then drop a rock on him. But this stuff gets old quick. Serious gamers look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: great
Review: I admit it is a little slow but the game iis great. You do little side quests to gain miracles that make it easier to win the game. Then you trainyour creater so it starts working for you converting villages and at the same timeyou are working to expand your influence so you can take over your other gods territories. finally the mainquest is so intense and hard to accomplish that you have to work on keeping everything in balance and destroy the other gods so you can get the creed and defete nemisis. Overall this game gives you over a 100 hours of exiting intense gameplay that will keep you asking for more.

Rating:
Summary: Black & White, or Gray
Review: After awaiting the release of B&W for over two years, I was, for lack of other words, disappointedly impressed. While the game has beautiful graphics, an incredibly intricate plot, and a totally new interface, I also found the amount of bugs, loading times on slower machines, and unlogical and hard to read manual took away from the overall enjoyment. I was most looking forward to the online playing, and it seems that from what Lionhead originally stated, and the release version are very different.

Rating:
Summary: Black and White Reactions. (Advice on whether to buy.)
Review: In over 20 years, I've never seen a game provoke such diverse response as this one. The five stars here reflect my reaction; you should not, I repeat NOT, use this as a gauge to whether =you= will like it. There are some simple questions to ask yourself before plunking down your hard-earned cash.

First of all, how good is your mouse? Seriously, I went from a good logitech wheel mouse to a cheap optical while playing this game and the optical mouse was dramatically better. I've also played it with different kinds of finger-pads, and with at least one (with the right mouse button on the side), the game is almost impossible. I can't even imagine using a trackball (but I haven't tried, so I don't know for sure). B&W uses a revolutionary gesture recognition system which is great once you get to using it--but not if there's even a slight hitch with your pointing device.

Second of all, how fast is your machine? B&W runs well on 800mhz, 32MB graphics card, 128MB RAM--but game saves take quite a while and there are some jitters. I wouldn't even venture this on less than 600mhz. Smoothness is key.

These two points can't be over-stated. If your hardware is not up to snuff, B&W will frustrate you. (Some reports have it that any sort of "odd" hardware will make B&W mis-behave but I haven't seen this.) Now, looking at the finer points:

What kind of gamer are you? B&W is not a fast-paced action game. There are some time constraints placed on you at various points, but mostly, B&W is more of an experience than a game in the traditional sense. If you're the kind of person who likes to "beat" computer games and drive toward the finish quickly, you won't get much out of this. If you can take pleasure out of the actions that you can do and the effects that these creates, you might find B&W very pleasing indeed.

In some ways, B&W feels like an adventure game. You have tremendous freedom to do what you want, but until you do certain things, the story isn't advanced.

Are you a casual gamer? This is less important depending on how you answered the last question. If you're a casual gamer who likes Quake, you may find the learning curve not worth the return. I spent several sessions doing nothing but learning how to interact with the game. I found this process interesting, but if you've only got a half-hour every other day to play, and you favor quick results, this probably won't work for you. I did find that once I learned how to interact with the game, I could leave it for a week, come back and pick right up again, though, which makes it less involved (to my mind) than your average RPG or adventure game.

If you're a casual gamer and playing the game at a leisurely pace, I suspect that you won't find any of the bugs some people are complaining about. The more interesting question in some cases is "Is it a bug?" I may have hit bugs while playing and just not recognized them. B&W is that kind of game.

What pre-conceived notions do you have going in? Back in '77 I was out of the country for a month, and when I came back everyone was talking about "Star Wars". When I finally saw it, I was, of course, disappointed, since no movie could be =that= good. No game could be all that this has been hyped to be. Worse for game author Molyneux, people were expecting "Star Wars" from B&W and got "Dr. Strangelove". (Both great movies but =entirely= different experiences.)

The key thing to enjoying this game seems to be deliberate pacing. The longer you take on each level--training your creature, getting your skills up, mining the world for all it's worth--the more enjoyment you'll get out of it. You'll have fewer nasty surprises and you'll have a "godlike" understanding to go along with your "godlike" powers.

But that absolutely requires you to be able to enjoy the very action of playing, and for you to set your own goals that you can meet while discovering things about it. Otherwise you'll just get bored or frustrated or angry.

Hope this helps! Above all, have fun! That's what it's all about!