Product Description

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12246 in Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts
• Model: 14146
• Released on: 2001-03-28
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 95
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: .31 pounds

Amazon.com Review
If you've ever wanted to play god, Black & White should definitely be on your short list. This highly anticipated game takes the concept literally, letting players navigate and influence a lush world using only the "hand of god" as an interface. Players can use the hand to uproot trees, hurl rocks, rescue (or punish) followers, and control all aspects of the camera as it zooms, dips, and swerves over the completely 3-D environments.

The game gets off to a slow start, but things pick up once players get to choose their creatures. Creatures are giant animals that serve as your physical link to the mortal world, and they have a sophisticated artificial intelligence that lets players teach them how to act. In the beginning, there's only a cow, ape, and tiger from which to pick, but the choices expand as the game progresses. And for a limited time, Amazon.com customers can download a bonus creature--a magnificent horse. Click here for details.

Ultimately, creatures grow, and their appearance gradually changes to reflect both their tendency toward good or evil and the treatment they've received from the player. Deny the animal access to food and it will lose weight. Pet it each time it eats a villager and you'll soon have an evil juggernaut that strikes fear into people's hearts. Most of the game's fun comes from spending time teaching your creature and simply watching the crazy things it does of its own volition. Best of all, players and creatures don't have to have the same alignment, making it possible to be an evil god with a glowing, beloved, benevolent creature. It all depends on why you choose to reward or punish the creature.

Unfortunately, Black & White tries to be too many things at once, and there is rarely any real focus. It's difficult to enjoy training a creature when villages need protecting, villagers need direction, and buildings need to be built in order to expand the player's influence and ultimately win each level. It wouldn't be so bad if the villagers were half as smart as the game's creatures, but they require a lot of micromanagement to work efficiently. The single-player campaign gives players plenty of time in each mission to overcome these shortcomings, but prepare to spend many long hours administrating your holdings for every hour of pure joy that Black & White is capable of providing. --T. Byrl Baker

Pros:

• Great graphics and animations
• Exceptional creature artificial intelligence
• Plenty of keyboard shortcuts, greatly simplifying the complex camera controls

• Managing villagers and buildings can be a chore
• The manual is completely inadequate considering the complexity of the creature AI

Amazon.com Product Description
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.

DailyRadar Review
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 remap 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.

Customer Reviews

Black and White Reactions. (Advice on whether to buy.)
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!

Amazing
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.

Don't Miss the Point of B&W
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.)