I bought Black&White in February. I tried installing it about half a dozen times, and each time uninstalled it because the stupid thing wouldn’t finish loading, despite having the suggested 128 mb of RAM. I bought another 256 MB of RAM recently (the Sims and Zoo Tycoon are to blame for that) and decided last night to give it another go. It finally works!
But I lost the handy little user guide that explains how to play the game. I’m working my way through the little tutorial- which I’m having difficulty with because I have a poor sense of direction (the angel telling me 10 times that “the stone is near the ravine” isn’t helpful since can’t find the friggin ravine)- but I think that I’m going to end up needing more help to train creature, learn to perform mircles and so on, so…are there any good sites out there with info for new users that you’d recommend?
Not coming in with any site suggestions, but a tip to SAVE NOW before you go any further, before you claim your being if you can. There is no way (there might be a patch by now, feel free to correct me) to skip the tutorial next time you start over, and you might find it easier to just reload an early save.
Don’t worry about progressing at the moment, spend lots of time training your being, experimenting etc. There is no hurry. Save often with different file names and try different solutions to the quests etc, most of them have varied solutions. Search the village thourougly, you can zoom into the houses even. You might find useful stuff.
Main advice? Toilet train your being. Just do it before he grows so large that he poops in tonnes. They can easily wipe out half your village that way. Don’t forget to let us know when we can completely hijack this thread with tales of our own creatures
I find the most fun combo is a good-aligned creature and an evil god. My creature stays at home playing Martha Stewart and I rampage around the countryside throwing lightning bolts at other god’s villagers and hurling rocks. I don’t sacrifice people for prayer power though. That’s about the only thing I don’t do.
There is a patch to take care of the tutorial problems; it’s available on the game’s website.
Wish I had some suggestions, but I have to say I lost interest in the game pretty quickly. I do remember that the payoff for being “good” to the guys who want to build a ship and leave the island is weak. I regretted not smashing them all with rocks or drowning them.
The ship quest is hysterical, it’s a great point at which to save’n’test … give them different things and so forth. Watch and listen closely, there are loads of tiny in-jokes all over the game, for example on the sailing ship etc.
My advice: go to the options screen and set all the keyboard shortcuts to whatever you’re comfortable with, and use them. I’ve found moving the viewpount around with the keyboard is much easier and faster than using the klunky mouse-only movement interface. Also, the ability to program hotkeys to take you to specific spots on the map is extremely useful. Save the mouse for manipulating objects and casting spells.
One of the most satisfying things for me was teaching my creature (a cow) to perform miracles.
When I wanted to convert a village, my creature and I had a great double act. I would set fire to everything with fireballs and my creature would run around casting the rain miracle to put out the fires.
I found the game very one-dimensional at first but I later found that that was a reflection of the way I was playing more than the game itself.
The epiphany for me was watching my 6 year old son play. I always played good and my creature turned out good (and boring). My son’s creature turned evil because the punishment and rewards that my son handed out were always too delayed or inappropriate so the creature would learn the wrong things.
The best bit for me was when my son accidently knocked down a villager’s house and a lightbulb went on above the creature who immediately ran around demolishing every house in sight.
Is there anything cooler than when you can’t find your creature anywhere, and you search around for ages and finally find out that he has fecked off to breakdance with the natives at a nearby village?
Allright, what the heck is with this game??!! I found it hard to move about the island in the first level, and I never made it to the later level. It takes too long to find the quest points to advance. Basically, the game was too unwieldy for me to play for very long.
How?? I’ve taken your advice about the other keyboard commands ( I can push “c” and find out where my idiot creature is? great!) but although I’ve seen a start-up screen that suggested you can bookmark locations, I can’t seem to find a command to allow me to do so. I think I’ll end up being able to play for more than 30 minutes at a time if I didn’t have to spend most of the game looking for locations…:rolleyes:
Look at the FAQ’s which has all sorts of nifty little hints and keyboard commands. Plus if you get stuck you can cheat by reading the spoiler parts in the walkthrough.
On the Mac version you press control and a number to set the bookmark. Then, pressing that number key zooms you to the bookmark. PC ought to be similar.
Only problem is that I like to move about using the numeric keypad - which means I’m only left with 3 keys available for bookmarks.
And yes, save often. I just had to restart level 2 when my cow appeared in level 3 and refused to do anything but kick down buildings. No amount of discipline stopped it, and it refused to go where I told it. Arrrgh.
[sub]knew I shoulda bought Castle Wolfenstein instead…[/sub]
I believe that location hotkeys is accomplished by pressing control and a number to set a location, and then just typing that number to go there.
On my computer I set the movement keys to be similar to those for a first person shooter - ASDW for translation, QE for rotation, and RF for panning up and down. Of course, this means commands which used to use those keys than had to be remapped to something else.
