Black and White

Pros • It's good to be God • Laugh out loud funny • Beautiful graphics • Unique and innovative	Cons • Can't skip tutorial if you start over • Awful interface • Inadequate manual
Bottom Line While a few unfortunate design choices prevent the game from being perfect, it does have a wonderful, undeniable charm that no gamer should miss it. I've been playing computer games for approximately 17 years now. I've easily played over a thousand titles throughout the years, yet nothing I've seen can compare to Black & White (B&W). This is not to say that it is the best game I've ever played, but it is unique. And certainly in this day and age where too many games have a been-there, done-that feeling to them, being unique goes a long way.

The premise behind B&W is a grand one. You are a god. You are summoned to a tiny island when a mother, fearful that her child is about to become lunch for Jaws, appeals to a higher power to save him. Being the benevolent kind of god that you are, you save the little fellow (o.k. you have no choice in the matter) and in so doing you win your first group of believers. From this point it is your decision if you wish to win more followers by being a kind, gentle god helping to satisfy your potential believers’ desires, or an Old Testament vengeful sort of guy who figures a little fire and brimstone is just what the little heathens need. And that is part of the beauty of B&W, it truly is your choice of how you wish to play the game.

Shortly after becoming god you are given a quest to complete where your reward is a creature. You will initially be offered a choice of a cow, a monkey or a tiger, however as the game progresses more creature types can be unlocked.

When you acquire your new friend he is just a baby, needing all the care and and attention a baby requires. You will need to teach your creature everything from what to eat (wheat or villagers?) to where to go to the bathroom. As he grows, you will be able to teach him more complex behaviors such as how to perform miracles. For training purposes, you have at your disposal three leashes, the leash of learning, the fluffy leash of compassion and the spiked leash of aggression. Each one is fairly self-explanatory. Combining the leashes with a good program of rewards (rubbing his belly) and punishments (slapping him silly), you can soon have your creature behaving just as you would like him to. Once again it is your choice good or evil. One interesting point is that your creature does not have to have the same alignment as you. In one game I was on the side of good, whereas my cow was black hearted with a penchant for eating children.

Your creature plays a very important role in the game. Your goal is to raise him up to be able to help out with all the mundane micro-management that goes along with god work. This includes teaching him to help the villagers out with lumber, food and breeding (don't ask, but I had a monkey who loved to run around making breeders). He can do these things by physically doing them (i.e. farming), assigning villagers to do tasks (i.e. make the villagers farm) or by performing miracles (i.e. using a food miracle). He also can be taught to do important tasks such as calling your worshipers to your temple to worship you. It's important to have your worshipers actively worshipping you so that you have enough belief points to cast miracles. It's kind of an amusing thought to have your giant cow herding everyone up to go to church. He can also be invaluable in helping you convert villages to believe in you by either helping them out or terrorizing them (ah, nothing screams "I believe in you" like a villager with a fireball whizzing over his head).

The other role your creature will play is the part of a fighting machine. See, good or bad, you've gotten it into your head that you should be the one and only god on your island. So to put the other gods out of work, you need to convert their believers and beat-up their creatures. Fighting can be done in two ways. You can just send your creature over on his own to get the job done, or you can control him during the fight. Both have their good and bad sides. If you fight yourself, the controls are awful but more on this a little later. If you send him over on his own he may not do what you want. I sent my monkey (who is extremely sweet) over to fight and I found him with the other creature having a dance party! When I looked at my creature's information I found out that he liked this creature and was now his friend. All this while I had chained him to the other creature with the leash of aggression. Kids, go figure.

In single player mode, you progress through the five different islands by clicking on silver or gold scrolls. The silver scrolls are reward scrolls; this is where a believer will ask you to complete a task for them. The rewards are usually things like learning a new miracle or getting more believers. How you accomplish the task will determine what your reward is.

Gold scrolls are story scrolls and are necessary to progress through the game. These are more complex things, such as converting a village. The gold scrolls form a story as you progress toward the ultimate showdown with the god Nemesis.

In addition to the single player game, there are also skirmish matches that can be played against the computer or online. You use the creature you have trained in the single player game in the skirmish mode as you vie to win the hearts and minds of the villagers on the map all while kicking some rival god's creature's butt.

Beautiful to look at, B&W is graphically one of the most gorgeous games on the market to date. The fully complex 3D world with day to night cycles and weather patterns is truly a sight to behold. Players can even select an option where the game will set up the weather pattern to match the current weather conditions of where they live. This is done through information the player supplies about where they live and then the game finds the information through the web. I didn't try it myself, but it sure is an intriguing idea. All this graphical goodness does come with a price however. That would be that you need some serious horsepower to run this baby. If you don't have the recommended requirements I would think long and hard before buying this game.

While this game is unique, engaging, endearing and a whole lot of fun, at times it’s extremely frustrating. This is due in large part to a very ill conceived interface. To say that this interface is awful is an understatement. Movement is a nightmare. Rather then try to describe this atrocity (it's so bad mere words can not do it justice,) I'll just say that that thankfully the controls are fully customizable. A lot of players have found that switching to a standard WASD configuration with a mouse look made all the difference in the world. Sadly, even with this configuration, fighting while controlling the creature is still awful. The default is to l-click on the other creature's body to hit it, l-click on the ground to move and r-click to block. This is just not enough control. Most of my fights ended up a frenzied click-fest with me having little idea what I was doing.

The two other gripes I have with this game go hand in hand, the tutorial and the manual. The tutorial isn't awful. In fact it does a fairly good job of explaining how to play the game and control your creature. The problem comes when you decide you want to start the game over and you find out that there is absolutely no way to skip the tutorial, which incidentally takes a couple of hours to complete. It would have been a much better design choice if the tutorial had been separate from the rest of the game. After going through the tutorial the player has a sense of the basic controls of the game, but shortly after the tutorial ends he will discover that there is still a lot he doesn't know how to do, such as build a village. Turning to the manual gives little to no help as this skimpy thing imparts little wisdom on the complexities of the game. While I would like to think this was done so that the player had to discover the depth of the game, in my heart I feel it was done as a way to sell more strategy guides.

While a few glaring flaws keep this game from being perfect, the bottom line is I had a great time playing it and can easily see myself still messing around with this game a year from now. This would be mainly due to the endearing quality of the creature. I strangely feel a very strong maternal instinct towards my monkey (don't tell my children). I find myself telling him out loud what a good boy he is while rubbing his belly or explaining why I have to spank him. I feel proud of him when he learns something new. And a lot of times I just like to watch him roam around the island laughing at his antics. For a computer game to be able to make me feel all that I think it has to be pretty special.

Paula Reaume

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