Customer Reviews

Black & White

5 star:		(172)
4 star:		(77)
3 star:		(62)
2 star:		(77)
1 star:		(121)

 

 

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!

Okay, I'll admit it. I was skeptical. The game couldn't be as good as everyone says it is. Thanks to a couple industry connections I got a sneak peek at the game -- a day before it goes on retail shelves.

Well, it's better than excellent. This game is a classic. It really is.

Some highlights:

- Superb graphics. The ability to swoosh and zoom in on every little bit of the island is incredible. You can zoom over mountains, zoom into huts, zoom up into the sky: it's really amazing.

- Superb sound. If you have positional speakers, the sound is quite effective. Moreover, it's one of the few games where sound actually enhances the game: you hear splashes, can hear the villagers go about their business, can even hear the cries of the villagers if (heaven forbid) you choose to become an "evil" god and start tossing them willy nilly into huts, flinging them across the town square, or dropping them from dizzying heights. It's amazing.

- And, of course, superb AI: you're god and you choose a creature -- cow, ape, tiger -- to represent your god-like self. The creature -- with only minimal learning -- begins to adopt a personality. You pet it when it does good things (the creature giggles and laughs) and you whack it -- slap it back and forth -- when it does bad things (like, er, eating the little villagers, not that I advocate that ... ahem.)

- A fascinating tutorial. If it's your first time playing, you're guided along by dual consciences -- a devlish little red guy (advocating destruction) and a blissed-out, sandal-wearing little British gentlemen (advocating kindness and compassion). As you get your bearings, these two little creatures float about the screen and point things out ("Pick up the little rock here and bring it to the sculptor!" "Check the scrolls. Scrolls are good!" "Hey, get real, do you *really* wanna save that villager from drowning?") It's pretty entertaining just watching these two little avatars compete for your attention.

The tutorial shows you how to move -- which is a little difficult at first, but you can remap the key board keys -- shows you how to construct your "temple" (and takes you inside of it for a really whacked out view of *TOTAL* control. The temple contains rooms -- a save game room, a help room, a library room -- which, in turn, contain various "picture frames" that allow you to replay certain events, zip right to specific tasks, and more. The temple is pretty darn cool in itself.)

Aside from teaching you the finer points of the game -- movement, in particular -- the tutorial really unveils the incredible richness of the world -- and truly gives you a god-like feeling. The tutorial offers you several challenges -- a few are a little difficult since you're not familiar with the world and it takes some time to figure out how move about and find things -- but as you complete the challenges you come to understand the complexity of this game. The "cartoonish" of the Sim games suddenly becomes apparent as you play 'Black & White' and face some pretty interesting moral dilemmas. You can choose how to resolve each dilemma, but once you choose, you must of course face the consequences. Do the villagers worship you? Do they fear you? Do they respect you? Is there a more subtle (and perhaps complex) chain of events that is triggered by your individual "god-like" actions?

It's interesting, too, that it's possible to be a morally "complex" god. You don't *have* to be 100% good. You can throw in a little, er, terror to make the villagers stand up and take notice.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating that this game presents gamers with an "authentic" moral universe. But I understand -- and this only after a few hours of play -- that as far as "games" go, Black and White offers unique moral universe of its own devising -- with a specific set of rules and consequences.

For that alone, the game goes slightly -- ever so slightly -- past the idea of "gaming" and approaches the realm of sophisticated simulation. (It's better, I'll add, then the traditional "historic" wargame that attempts to very carefully model real world events. B&W is a game which creates a unique universe and then models it amazingly well -- both graphically and (yes, I'll admit it) emotionally.)

Maybe B&W succeeds so well because it offers (even more so than the "SIMS" simulations) the sophistication of truly *interesting* (and often unpredictable) artificial intelligence.

Or maybe it's the fact that the game encompasses a complex world that (taken on its own terms) offers a variety of subtle challenges not usually found in computer games.

But buy this game: it's fascinating.

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.)

Take a Tamagochi, Populous 3, and Starcraft and throw them all into a 3D blender. You get Black and White. It's hard to call this software a game. It's more like an experience, or like having a small world in an aquarium and dipping in your hand to put things the way you want them. I have only played this game for two days, but I am going to put Diablo 2 and Starcraft on the shelf for a long while.

Basically you get to help the little people in these worlds in whatever manner you see fit. If they need wood for a project you can get them wood, or smash the project so they don't need wood any more. Either way, the game doesn't care. Good and evil choices are made clear through two spirits that are your conscience. Good and evil choices also produce different results. The landscape changes over time to match your personality as a god. To top this off, you must select a creature. The artificial intelligence in this thing is better than any I have ever seen. It may not seem that way on the first level (it's mostly tutorial) but the AI fully kicks in for the second. You can teach your creature to do anything from watering trees, to uprooting them, to setting them on fire. Anything you want.

This game is for anyone. It's entertaining and fun, and highly innovative. I can guarantee you have not played anything like it (although little bits of Populous and Dungeonkeeper do shine through) My computer does meet the recommended hardware, but that is by no means a supermachine these days, and it runs extremely well. So don't waste anytime, this thing is flying off the shelves. Good luck and have fun!

This is a great game. I was expecting to be disappointed with all the hype surrounding it and the very long wait for its release, but I have to say I am suprised at how good this game is (so far).

Right off, the graphics are excellent. Sound and tutorial are excellent, and the touches of humor in the game have made me laugh out loud. Some people have complained of difficulty running the game, but I had no difficulty installing or running Black and White so far. I consider my PC only modest (550mHz, Geforce2) but I am very pleasantly suprised how well it runs and how playable this game is on my system (and grateful too, because I would upgrade for this game).

Some have also complained about the unintuitive camera control. I disagree. The default setup is to promote the feeling that you are a god looking into and manipulating this world, and that the cursor (a hand) is actually your hand in which you interact with the computer world. For instance, to move the view, your hand grabs the ground (complete with little puffs of dirt) and drags the view forward as you pull the mouse down. It works well. And if this doesn't work for you, you can always use the keyboard and hotkeys anyway.

It feels like this is the culmination of all of Bullfrog's/Peter Molyneux's "god" games...and that this is the final evolution of Populous, Dungeon Keeper, etc. All the good things are kept, and features that were not feasable previously are here.

I have not got very far in the game, and even so I am very impressed. The interactivity with the game world is amazing. One of the first things I did was pick up a villager and accidentally threw him. He little kicking body flew out over the village and disappeared in the distance. Then far out a tree shuddered and slowly toppled. WOW! I bust out laughing, my 4 year old started laughing, kicked me off the computer and started trying to grab every villager he could while they started scattering.

It's been said by others, and I'll just reiterate all the same beefs: way too much micro-management can make this game seriously tedious after the first 40 hours. I mean like extreme, hang yourself with a noose tedious. While it's fun to play god, it's not that fun to have to continue to constantly, constantly build houses and tell people to farm for food when they're starving. If this applied in real life and everyone waited for God to build us houses and give us food, civilization would have ended a long long time ago.

I also thought that it was totally misleading to have a save game feature, thinking you can try different things out and then return to the way THINGS WERE (like most games), only to load your saved game and realize your alignment's completely changed and anything that's happened to your creature stays the same too. This really ticked me off when I saved, then accidentally left the game on while fixing dinner. After half an hour, my fully grown ape had been killed by the comp's creature at least 8-10 times, and had shrunk every time he'd died, so that when I came back he was 10 percent of his original size. When I noticed how small my creature had gotten, I figured no prob, I'll just load the save game and get him back to his full size. But nooooo, he stays the same size, leaving me with the immensely crappy prospect of facing another 15-20 hours getting him back to full size. I mean give me a break, no way I'm gonna spend that kind of time JUST to get him back to the size he was. Ridiculous.

I bought B&W the day it came out, played it like crazy for a week, (and loved it during that time) and haven't touched it in over 6 weeks. A shame, because it is perhaps the single most creative game I have ever played. Graphics and sound are stunning, and the creativity to come up with some of the gameplay was outstanding. This game has enough pros to kill a donkey, but its very few cons are REALLY negative and ruin the whole thing for me, and from the looks of most of these reviews, ruined it for a lot of other people too. Replayability? What's that?

This is not so much a review, but simply information that I am suppying to those who may need it. I played this game a few years ago, and I liked it, although I didn't love it. Since then, I have gotten a new computer, which is a Dell with Windows XP. I decided I wanted to play again today, but found that I couldn't run the game. You must have your color palette set to 256 colors in order to run this game. In new computers like mine, you are not even given this option. To find out if this is a problem for you, go to the "Display" area of your "My Computer" file. Click on the "Settings" tab. If you are able to put your settings to 256 colors, you will see the option right there. If you can't find it anywhere, you are in the same boat as me, which means that your computer is too advanced to run this game.

Boy, I really, really wanted to like this game. It has SO much potential. Incredible graphics (among the best I've ever seen in a game). Excellent sound and voice acting. Great concept.

But boy does it fall flat. I gave this game a good solid week of playing, and I just couldn't get into it. Here's why:

1)The interface!! Despite lots of practice, I could never get 100% comfortable with the whole grabbing/twisting/zooming mouse work. I ended up setting it up for keyboard use, and that helped a little but not much. This really, really made playing the game frustrating.

2) Stupid "quests." I got tired of having to wait 5 minutes for my "creature" to walk all the way across the island to pick up something. Or slowly moving around every inch of the island just to pick up a sheep that I couldn't find. The leash interface is just stupid.

3) Too much micromanaging. I could never get my villagers to do enough on their own. You either have to spend all your time micromanaging them, or all your time training your creature. It's impossible to do both well. Every time I was building housing for my villagers or giving them food, my creature would eat one of them or poop on a farm or something.

4) The creature "training" is simply not fun. I would give him feedback but he never really learned from his mistakes. You have to give him the feedback IMMEDIATELY after he does something in order for it to register, which essentially means you're watching the creature at all times. And of course, if you're doing that, then you're not micromanaging the villagers.

There were lots more problems as well.

I really wanted to like this game. It is one of the big disappointments of the year. If you're into resource management games you'd be much better off with Alpha Centauri or even on of the Settlers games.

Buy Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape Torment instead.

I got to see Peter Molyneux demonstrate and explain Black and White in person at MIT in February of 2000. I was intrigued by the concept and what I saw looked great, so I've had nothing but positive vibes toward the game, and snapped it up the day it came out. However, I've got to be honest, this game isn't for everybody. This is the first 'god' or 'sim' type game I've actually ever owned, so perhaps if you're more inclined or experienced with this type of game, you might enjoy it more than I did. However, as an action and strategy gamer, I thought I was going to collapse across my desk and cry tears of boredom.

Giving B&W its due, you need only read the other reviews here. Yes, these graphics are amazing, as good as anything out there. The AI is at a whole new level, and there are things going on here that have never been seen before and it makes my head spin to think of how on earth they could have programmed them, like the gesture-recognition interface or the intriguing learning ability of the creatures. This is, no doubt, an amazing piece of art and technology.

That having been said, is it any fun to actually PLAY? For me, I'm afraid not. The game very quickly degenerates into an endless cycle of repetitive actions like moving trees and villagers around, all in the name of expanding your 'influence' to encompass other villages, at which point you have even more trees and villagers to move around. Add to this your basic lack of story (do this and this and this to defeat the bad guy!) or characters, and what you have is pretty much a colossal bore in the opinion of this gamer. It's far less Clash of the Titans than it is Competition of the Woodstackers. The micromanagement that you have to perform, and the complete lack of functions, interface, or information to make it any more reasonable, is just out of control. Literally. There are parts in the game where you can't even access the basic functions of saving and loading because those are in your 'temple', and sometimes you don't have a 'temple' yet. And this goes on for EVER, like hours and hours and hours. I read one forum post from an enthusiast who had spent (he said) about 20 HOURS of doing tasks like this to get through a level. And I'd have to say, embarassingly, my own experience is similar. He didn't spend 20 hours because he was a bad player; he spent 20 hours because the game is really that slow.

The whole Tamagotchi-meets-King-Kong aspect of the game, the Creature, is an interesting idea but ultimately fails to deliver. The Creature becomes yet another thing that's only partially under your control and which the game doesn't give you the tools to manage. Classic example: the Creature eats one of your villagers. This is generally a bad thing because you need those villagers to increase your 'influence', so you'd want to punish the Creature so that the behavior doesn't happen again. However, the game never says "Your Creature just chewed up a villager." Instead it says "Your Creature will eat that sort of thing more often." Oh really? WHAT sort of thing? And unless you were ignoring the other twenty things that need doing and happened to be zoomed in close enough to actually identify what the Creature was eating, guess what? Your Creature goes on scarfing up villagers. You get labelled by the game as siding with Evil and you suck, and none of it was your fault. Considering that there are only about ten possible things that the Creature can eat, including his own poop, you'd think that the game itself would be a little more informative, or warn you before it was about to happen.

Unfortunately, the game is just full of deliberate yet bad design decisions like this. You're informed of things happening only after it's too late to do anything about it. The concept that there is no interface, just a hand, sounds good on paper but is lousy in practice, depriving you of control and information. It's ridiculous that you have to move the camera for miles over to the correct place on the map and then hold the hand over the right building for a few seconds just to get the one piece of information that you want. Couldn't we have put that on the screen? It seems like some of the fixes to make this such a better game are entirely obvious, but were deliberately ignored. Even the game's manual is quite vague and seems to assume that the reader is already familiar with this kind of game, and omits a great deal of information that you'd have to be blind lucky to figure out.

Additionally, any claims that the game is some kind of psychological tool, or that your Creature comes out as a reflection of your personality, are just silly. The game basically makes its own call as to what's good and what's evil, and your own intentions aren't figured in at all. In some cases even your actions don't seem to be figured in to that judgment. There's some hype that this is a game of moral and ethical choices, and that is just not so. This game may be a first step in that direction, but this is simply a game of micromanagement; in some senses, it's almost kind to call it a game, period.

To wrap up, on the technical end I had no problems with this game on a 1Ghz PIII with 256MB RAM and a 32MB GeForce2. It has crashed once while I was multitasking, but other than that has been flawless, with some frame drop in extreme camera moves but overall seems well above 30fps.

Anyway, definitely put some thought in before diving in to Black and White. It's an interesting piece but it's not for everybody.

If you read all of the other reviews you will notice something...no one has gotten very far in this game. Why is this? Its micromanagement until you give up in frustration. Your people always need something, and they can't do hardly anything for themselves. You have to continuously build things for them, and they are never satisfied nor do they ever do anything to help. They die because they can't leave your temple to get food or rest, so you have to tell them when to do that. They complain if you don't make enough houses for them....and there are never enough houses. If you get ahead, they have more kids right away and then they want more houses. And this is only for one villiage, in the first scenario past the tutorial you end up with at least three to start with- each needing its own individual attention. So you give up on them and try to get somewhere in the game. Then the other gods are constantly telling you to do things for them. Then you need to convert villiages away from the other gods, but once your creature gets to the villiage he has been fried by lightning bolts and dies to be resurrected in your temple. So you tell him to go out again and you wait for 5-10 min while he runs back to where he once was. All the while you are getting nothing done so you have to micromanage your villiages some more, oh wait your creature is getting attacked again and has died. Send him out again, try and make some more houses, but you are low on lumber....cast a miracle, oh wait your worshippers need more food, go get them some from the stores (since they can't do it themselves), now cast the miracle....where is that creature now? And hey your ally has lost a villiage, but you cant get it back for him because it is in his sphere of influence. Go check your creature....hes died again. Lets look at his stats in the creature room.....he doesn't think you spend enough time with him, what a shock. I have played many games from first-person shooters to strategy games. This has got to be the first game I have ever gotten so frustrated with. I've played this game for over 20 hours and I've gotten nowhere except past the tutorial and 15 hours into the first scenario with nothing to show for it but a cow who can throw lumber into the stockpile. If you want to waste your time there are certainly more exciting game, and more rewarding experiences to have out there. Go find one of them. Even Daikatana would be more worthwhile and less frustrating than this.