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3.2 out of 5 stars (507 customer reviews)

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108 of 115 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Black and White Reactions. (Advice on whether to buy.), May 2, 2001

By	Blake Watson "===Blake===" (Winnetka, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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!

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50 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, March 28, 2001

By A Customer

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.

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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Miss the Point of B&W, May 6, 2001

By	"ymemankcin" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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.)