For any mortals(!) that haven’t seen it yet, you play God. Not in a Sim City / Sims sort of way, (although there is some degree of village management) but you have your villagers pray to you with problems.
The Black and White in the title refers to your conscience. Y’see, each challenge can be completed any way you like.
Foe example, early on in the game, a woman prays to me, because her brother is sick and lost in the woods. She has a stone that I need, and will give it to me if I rescue her brother. Now obviously, I could do that… could. So instead, I pick up a nearby stone, drop it on her house and throw her in the sea. The brother also goes in the sea.
The other aspect of the game is rearing a creature to help you. I taught mine to shit on houses and eat people
Anyone actually play “white”? It seems more of a challenge, and less fun?
I’ll have you know that I have raised the most benevolent tiger in recorded history, and that he is much loved and praised by my followers. He’s a pretty good fighter, too, and has proven his valor in battle against the foul gods of darkness many times.
Yeah, Black and White is addictive, to be sure, and much fun. The creature AI alone makes it worth the asking price.
Pure good is hard. Pure evil is hard (probably harder than pure good). Easiest way to play is a bit evil. You see, pure evil requires that you actively kill and torture your own villagers, or at least never help them out. Pure good requires you to never ever use your powers to kill people and destroy things (other than the enemy temple), but is doable because you can use miracle flock and stuff to impress villages.
The way I play is to be very good to my own villages but I do sometimes burn a village down in order to lead them to the light. Usually sacrificing their children to provide the mana too. My temple’s slowly growing horns and spikes.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the title refers to the remarkable coexistence of impressive creature AI, beautiful engine, and idiotic actual gameplay design.
Training the creature is great fun–work at it, and you can train the giant bugger some nice complex tricks. I had my cow well settled into an exercise routine on Land One of gathering rocks, putting them in a pile, and then disassembling the pile by hurling them all into the ocean, well away from any villagers. Then doing it all again.
The game engine itself is simply beautiful, zooming smoothly from eagle eye’s view down to extreme closeups on villagers going about their lives.
The villagers, on the other hand, are such worthless whining idiots that they make sliding into the dark side very easy. I think I lost all interest in looking after their wretched lives when I had an entire village almost die off. Because they had ceased breeding on their own. Why? Because I’d created a few breeder disciples to help them get started a couple generations before. And when god does things for them…they stop doing for themselves. I just don’t respect people who have no idea what to do with their sex lives unless a giant hand comes down from the sky and physically pushes them against members of the opposite sex.
And the progression of the land levels has made me boggle and swear in amazement that a piece of software can be so brilliant on the one hand, and so badly designed on the other. I left the main plot alone entirely after some hours into Land 3–being forced to play without my creature, well…ugh. The instant action lands more than make up for that, though, and when you just want to work with your critter (the shining strongest point of the game), a minor bit of file-editting will let you roam about a land with zero enemy deities harassing your efforts. (And the upcoming patch is likely to include a “sandbox” mode which will make the same thing possible without having to change any files about, I’ve heard.)
Does this quote, taken out of context, amuse the hell out of anyone else besides me?
After reading what you guys have said about B&W and reading about it in PC Gamer, looks like I’m gonna have another software purchase this weekend. <sigh> And I was hoping to wait till Pool of Radiance 2 came out to buy more games…
I had to quit, because it was pretty much like raising a child and/or having a second job!!! I just can’t seem to dedicate that much time and effort to a game anymore…maybe I’m getting old.
If y’all wanna see a snazzy MPEG that shows some stuff from the game, I found this one on FilePlanet: Black & White Trailer Be warned, the thing is a 22+ meg download.
