User Reviews (1 - 11 of 413)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

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

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 106 / 115
Date: May 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

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

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 49 / 51
Date: March 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User

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.

Micromanagement heck

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 70 / 90
Date: April 10, 2001
Author: Amazon User

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.

Fatal flaws ruin an otherwise winner

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 39 / 45
Date: May 13, 2001
Author: Amazon User

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?

Don't Miss the Point of B&W

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 31 / 33
Date: May 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

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.)

So close, yet so far...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 30 / 34
Date: June 11, 2001
Author: Amazon User

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 took it back.....

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 68 / 110
Date: April 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

They said this game would be groundbreaking. I wouldn't say ground breaking, I would say wristbreaking. There are plenty of virtual pets and quite frankly, I didn't see the pet do anything that wasn't a set feature. He didn't "learn" IMO, you just trigger a set of listed features. Also, his learning is quite simplistic and simple things that should be self rewarding such as sleeping, eating and drinking shouldn't have to be retaught IMO.

The RTS portion of the game is lacking. The resource balance, selection of buildings, simplistic and tedious villager job assignment are better done in other games with more options and less micromanagement.

The terrain graphics were nice, I have to admit, and the free form zoom is something I am looking forward to in future titles but with a better interface. The interface, while usable, is carpal tunnel hell IMO. Other games do a better job of scrolling, rotating etc.

The puzzles were pretty much found in any other "myst" genre game and completely detract from the game IMO. The trees puzzle comes to mind. The singing rocks puzzle is not really a matter of intellect but how well your sound card can reproduce the tones and how well you link the tones together. I didn't like Simon and I don't like the sound games because my music ear isn't that great and I didn't buy this game for a Simon type game. Follow the Yogi is pretty retarded, I mean really.

The "open-ended" portion of the game is just simply a lie. Its one big script that regardless of how you do things, you have to follow the script. The gold scrolls pretty much are a big clue that there isn't really a big variety here. For instance, no matter good, evil neutral, no matter how well or badly you do, your creature will be taken at the end of level 2.

Being good vs being evil is a no-brainer. It isn't a hard choice if you want to actually enjoy the game because being good offers no extra rewards over being evil, on the contrary, by being evil, you can do good and evil, so there is a total game imbalance there that will manifest itself early in Multiplay games.

Where is the gathering? I read early in a gamespot article that the developers almost had the gathering portion complete and this article was like #5 out of 13. I think the problem with the gathering, as with the multiplayer competitive play, is that creatures are going to be pretty much the same and then you will truly realize that the AI isn't anything special, just a continuation of a scripted story.

The multiplayer version of the game is simply a boulder toss. If you try to be a good god here, you are going to lose, its that simple. And whoever had the harebrained notion that taking a single player creature into a multiplayer game needs to be shot. How is it going to be balanced when your new creature is battling a 100 year old behometh? It wont be. Not to mention that in order to have a decent animal, you need to practice using the single player game which I have outlined above, is quite monotonous.

God forbid you have to start over and go through the tutorial YET ONCE AGAIN! Just the thought of going through that two hour tutorial again because I maybe would want to start a new critter sends me screaming with insanity.

I learned something. Go browse the web and look for reviews of Black and White. There aren't many. There are a ton of previews and every one of them reflect the "wow" portion when we all booted up the game. What is also reflected is that developers are doing more to please the reviewers by adding eye candy, interfaces that are "unique" and sacrificing gameplay IMO.

The best games on the market are those that have no pre-release Hype such as Kohan and Sudden Strike. Sure, every game has problems but a game should have solid gameplay so that when the eye candy wears off, you are still left with something that can entertain you.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe the public wants eye candy. This is the Era of little substance, lots of eye candy. People would rather watch TV than read a book it seems.

Here are some quotes from the EA board where you can buy the game: You play the role of a deity in a land where the surroundings are yours to shape Has anyone learned how to shape the surroundings? I sure didn't see that portion.

Progress through the game's rich storyline ... Sorry, but if that is a rich storyline, then the people who write for the National Enquirer are up for Pulitzers, at least they know how to entertain.

battle other deities and become the world's supreme god. *shrug* Never really saw that portion of the game.

I really wanted this game to be more open ended, drop the stupid puzzle quests, let the player make the story, add more conflict that is meaningful, reduce the amount of tedious micromanagement and simply give the player more options.

And for those of you who say, shutup, quit whining I can only say grow up. I am sure that there are people who love black and white and for that, kudos. But for me, its just a bad rehash of several genres. The only groundbreaking thing about this game is the lengths to which publishers will go to hype a game and release it too early. But we all know that EA has never done that before, right? *cough* ultima ix *cough*

herder.

Over hyped & over priced

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 37 / 50
Date: April 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The game was shipped too early. This, apparently, is known as fact. EA forced Lionhead to ship before the game was ready to make the current financial quarter and hence it is riddled with bugs. Some minor but also some MAJOR bugs, such as corrupted saves, "runblack has caused error in runblack.exe" meaning having to restart the game from scratch. Also, you should be warned that you need a serious computer to play this game. I have a P3 700mHz, 128MB RAM but it still judders and skips.

Black and White was also hyped at being the gaming equivalent of Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. It's not. I help my villagers; give them food and wood (which they ALWAYS want), take over other villages by impressing them and not frightening them, but because I've sacrificed a few people my temple and hand have morphed to 'evil'. According to the advertising the land would become blackened and scorched and the nights would become longer. It hasn't and they're not. The whole theme of being good and evil and everything in between is a joke. It is simply a tally of very good deeds and very evil deeds. If you are sometimes evil and sometimes nice you are neutral, if you are always nice you are good if you are always evil you are evil. Very simple. So the alignment is simply an aesthetic way to show you what you already know. And if I am so 'evil' why does my creature think I am 'good'?

Your creature was advertised as being the centre of the game: it's not. Micromanaging your villages is. They always want food, and as soon as you start expanding they always want wood. If you give them food and wood then they want children. When they have children they want more food and wood in an endless, maddening cycle. If you like micromanaging then that's fine, but if you do then your creature gets neglected. The creature AI isn't so spectacular either. You can get your creature to do anything you ask it to: just tell/show it enough times. Not really groundbreaking or a challenge to teach him. Sure its nice the first time but eventually it comes down to *shrugs* so what? Example: your creature dances. My Ape danced a sort of Brakedance, he also did a moonwalk. This was funny but what if I wanted to teach him to Cossack dance or a lambada? Can I make him dance a waltz arm in arm with one of the people from the village? It's impossible... The 'dance' you see is just a pre-rendered animation file... your creature doesn't understand what dancing actually means, it's only an action that is triggered when certain variables have the right values - just like every other game. What it is is a very pretty tamagotci.

In a game that was publicised for its openness and freedom you actually have very few choices: how can you take over a village, for example? Attack it with one of about 5 techniques (monster, fireball, rocks, lightening, throw people), be nice to it with one of about 5 techniques (give it food, wood, have monster be nice to it, put artefacts in it, send traders).

Granted there are a lot of really cool things in this game but it's more like a tech demo than a real game. Yes the physics rock, yes the creature is somewhat intriguing but in my book that does not constitute as gameplay.

A Brilliant Technology Demo

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 25 / 30
Date: May 24, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I looked forward to Black and White for months before its release. The day it came out, I went out and purchased it immediately. For an entire week, I played B&W relentlessly. It was at the end of that week that the novelty of the graphics and the control system wore off and I realized just what I was doing in the game. I was spending hour after hour casting spells, uprooting trees, and farming to support my villagers (they can do very little on their own). My creature was very good at watering plants and filling my woodpile, but I had to babysit even him and force him to eat and stay healthy. On top of coping with those problems, the game forces you to solve ridiculous puzzles and perform a multitude of mundane tasks (find sheep, play musical rocks, shadow a monk, etc.). Overall, I think that B&W had a great concept, perhaps too good (and broad) of a concept to be properly executed. My two star rating reflects the initial level of fun that can be had with this game, as well as the frustration that it dissolves into. With so many good games out right now (Tropico, Baldur's Gate II, AOE II, Europa Universalis, Tribes II, No One Lives Forever, and many others), I cannot see any reason that anyone should waste precious time and money on the stupendiously flawed Black and White.

Overrated

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 19 / 21
Date: April 24, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I really loved this game when I first got it. For about 3 days. Then you begin to see the bugs. Then you begin to see how scripted the game is. Open-ended? Give me a break. The single-player version is irritating and boring.

The multi-player aspect of this game is even worse. Even if you manage to find a game where the opposing creature hasn't been hacked using a trainer, there is simply no challenge. How to win? Learn how to throw fireballs well. The size of your town? Your "helpful" creature? Irrelevant. Multi-player is akin to the 8-bit NES game Duck Hunt. Scratch that. Duck Hunt was much more fun.

This game is a total waste of money. I do admit that it is entertaining when you first start it up... I was crazy about this game for a short period. Hence the incredible raves & reviews that are now littering the web. Give it a couple of months, see if they patch some of the bugs, and let the hype settle a bit. Most of the people who have spent any considerable amount of time with this game abhor it. No replay value, and very limited appeal the first time around. Good idea, poor implementation.

Oh and as far as the patches go... well the folks at Lionhead have apparently disappeared. A month has gone by since release, and no patches. I really wanted to give this game 1 star to drive the ratings down. But in all honesty, it is worth 2 stars of entertainment. Don't pay more than $10 for this game. Else, you will regret it.

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next 

Actions