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Black & White is a role-playing game unlike any other you've
played before. You play the role of a deity in a land where the
surroundings are yours to shape and its people are yours to lord
over. Be an evil, malevolent god and the natives will worship you
with fear in their eyes. Play as a kind, benevolent god and they
will worship you with love in their hearts. Your actions decide
whether you create a heaven or hell for your worshipers. Then
select a creature from the land to act as your representative in
the world. Raise it to gigantic proportions and teach it to do
your bidding--whether the animal grows into an evil colossus of
mass destruction or a kind and gentle giant is up to you.
Progress through the game's rich storyline performing powerful
miracles to battle other deities and become the world's supreme
god.
Review
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Like a long-delayed, over-budget Hollywood monstrosity, we
feared that Black & White was going to be one of those epic
projects that simply couldn't live up to its billing. Instead,
Black & White is one of the most compelling, beautiful and
impressive pieces of code we have played in a long, long time. It
is also insanely addictive. It combines the city-building of Sim
City with the animal-raising of Tamagotchi, yet it takes those
two passive activities and throws in some good old-fashioned
Godzilla vs. Mothra monster fighting. Finally, someone has
allowed us to raise our own enormous, ass-kicking, crap-throwing,
carnivorous chimp! It takes a serious machine to run it, and the
chintzy manual doesn't provide you with all the information you
need, but if you own a halfway decent PC, then you should damn
well own Black & White. Black & White is not a game for people
who don't like to read the manual. There are some wise guys here
at Daily Radar who regard the manual in the same way they
regarded the apple in their lunch boxes at school -- that is, as
sheer junk. But if gamers are to succeed in a game as unorthodox
as Black & White, they will need some patience and a willingness
to learn. The manual is only so much help on this score, and the
Good in us thinks that's because the game is so deep -- but the
Bad in us suspects that it's so they can sell more strategy
guides. But no matter what the reason, on the other side of the
learning curve is a fantastic experience.
The comparisons to Populous are immediate and obvious. Peter
Molyneux has taken the inspiration from his god-building game (in
fact, there's a little taken from all of his earlier games here,
from Magic Carpet to Dungeon Keeper) and turned it 3D. The goal
is still the same: Players must encourage their believers to
worship them so that they may in turn smite the non-believers.
The single-player campaign features a battle against the current
god-in-residence, Nemesis. Players must gather their strength,
manage their villagers, cast some miracles and generally knock
the other deities out of the god business. However, there is one
thing in Black & White that is genuinely new.
The addition of learning, complex AI creatures is a brilliant
addition to strategy games for several reasons. First of all, it
brings some personality and a face to games that are often fought
between tiny little units on a tiny battlefield. Second, most
strategy games have bumped up against a technological limit in
terms of sheer numbers. Both 2D and 3D fighting games reach their
maximum number of units well before the end of the game. There
are, after all, only so many things the computer can keep track
of. But Black & White defuses that problem by having a single
unit, your creature, grow and become more powerful as the game
progresses.
But beyond the strategic importance of a single, massive unit is
the fact that these little buggers are just so... endearing.
There's nothing quite like taking your little baby tiger out for
his first raw villager, his first tipped cow, his first crap in
the neighbor's yard. And seeing mommy's little snookums grow up
into an enormous black-eyed beast of remorseless evil that
strides the land like death incarnate is just so, well,
heartwarming. It is also possible to play the game on the side of
Good, creating powerful versions of Ned Flanders that bring
happiness to the other villages and help them water their crops
and gather their wood. And, golly gee, that's swell too.
Even if Black & White did nothing more, it would earn its place
on your shelf just as a monster creator. Without exaggeration,
the learning AI in this game is simply beyond what has ever been
attempted before. In the coming months and years, Black & White
will remain the standard by which all AI is judged. Just as
Half-Life is the bar over which all shooters must jump, Black &
White simply raises the bar for intelligence over every other
game ever made. You can teach your creature to do just about
anything, and it will learn and imitate. There are even stories
of advanced creatures that will play tricks on each other --
without being told to do so.
But even if molding a creature in your own image isn't
sufficiently god-like for you, the strategy elements are deep and
interesting. Players must encourage belief, either love or fear,
in the little villagers. And the more villagers believe in them
and worship them, the more power players have to convert the
unfaithful. B&W uses a sphere-of-influence system that limits the
realm in which the player can interact with the world. Move
outside the sphere of influence, and your hand can only move, not
grab or touch anything. Your creature thus becomes your
ambassador, trained by you to be good, evil or something
pragmatically in between.
Getting those villagers to survive and flourish can be tricky,
though, and players not keen on micromanaging may have a tough go
with Black & White. Desktop gods need to constantly keep an eye
on their villagers, and sometimes satisfying those needs can be
frustrating and distracting. Evil gods can naturally ignore the
suffering of their denizens, but risk eroding their own power
base in doing so. We played two different scenarios at the same
time, one as good and one as evil. And to Lionhead's credit, we
weren't able to find a significant advantage in playing one side
over the other.
There is a significant advantage, however, in having a decent
system to appreciate the game's visuals. In addition to the AI,
B&W boasts a simply incredible engine. Players can zoom all the
way out to see the entire island, or zoom all the way in to see
individual villagers blinking. The streamlined interface takes
some getting used to, but gamers who never grow comfortable with
the default can re the keys to a more comfortable WASD setup.
Even the inside of the temple uses an entirely different engine
where players can check on mission progress, save or load games,
get help, or go to their creature cave to read up on the little
guy (or put their own custom-made tattoos on him).
And your creature will sport those nifty tats when you take it
online. Once you have registered at Black & White's homepage, you
can take your creature online and play several different
multiplayer games, including cooperative mode and clan play. Or
you can play a quick skirmish game against the computer or a
buddy over a LAN.
There are so many little features in Black & White that we could
go on and on talking about them. For example, the game can be
synched with your mail program so that it names your villagers
from your contact list, and if you get some mail from someone on
that contact list while playing the game, the little villager
will let you know. When you register at Black & White's homepage
you can tell it to match the weather in the game to the weather
in your part of the world. It also supports the Immersion
TouchSense technology, so with a compatible force-feedback mouse
you can feel the creatures rumble when you pet them, or the trees
snap when you grab them out of the ground.
We could ramble on about the millions of tiny details in this
game that make it so unique, such as the fact that the eight
different ethnic villages (Japanese, Aztec, Norse, etc.) have
their own cultural dances and music. Or the fact that your
creature can blush or break dance. Or that if you get close to
your village in the morning, you'll hear the roosters crow at the
sun. Or even the fact that unlike most videogames, Black & White
is the sort of thoughtful and intelligent game that recognizes
that actions really do have consequences. It is for these and a
lot of other reasons that we think Black & White will likely be
the best PC game we will play this year. -- DailyRadar Review