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Spend a little more time!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 21
Date: May 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Black and White DOES have replayability, contrary to what other people said. It takes a little more time for the creature to learn actions than people with ADHD have attention span, which many of these people seem to have. A little time is all tnat is needed. Even though there are only five levels, the levels can be played over and over and can be played differently each time. I bought the game, and everyone else should too.

The Most Highly Anticipated Game Lives Up The Hype!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 25
Date: March 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I won't lie I've been waiting for this game for about 2 years. To kill time I've been playing other hits such as Counter-Strike and because I was so bored I played some Knights and Merchants. Well finally it arrives at my doorstep in the same old Amazon Box I love to see when I get home.

The interior: I open the box and boom there it is Black side of the box facing up. I immediately toss the amazon box and open up the front of the box to see what they put together. WOW! The black side of the box explains the evil. The White explains of course the good. The box was one of the coolest I've seen but then again its just a box. So I open up the box and theres this stupid AOL disc and then a bunch of registration stuff and then theres the CD. Sitting in a nice case. I open it up to suprisingly one cd! I don't know how they did it but they did it.

The Game: LET ME TELL YOU RIGHT NOW IF YOU DO NOT GO AND BUY THIS GAME YOU ARE MISSING ONE OF THE BEST GAMES OF THE YEAR. This game is already in the hall of fame in my book. I have rings around my eyes and I can't sleep. I give this game a 9.9 out of 10 because at first the sound didn't work then I restarted my computer and then it worked so that was kinda annoying and it did the same thing for my friend but oh well must have been the Direct X but it didn't give me anything about restarting my computer. Anyway buy it. I don't need to explain the details to tell you how good it is. You've seen the hype it lives up to it double. BUY IT!

All flash, no real substance.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: March 06, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I heard a lot of hype about this game and was excited when I finally purchased it. I can't tell you how disappointed I was. It's entertaining for a while, but that soon wears off as you're led by the nose through pointless, ridiculous tasks no god would put up with. Why should I as a god have to find some woman's sick brother before she'll give me a rock*? Why should I have to get that rock anyway? Oh wait...to get to the creature.

The creature is, by far, the most annoying thing. I don't want have to have a pet for a god game (and there's no way to run Creature-free). Least of all do I want a pet that I have to constantly monitor, else he'll forget to eat and sleep and thus die repeatedly--or begin doing things he's not supposed to do. No matter how many times I've punished my creature for eating a villager, he still goes off and eats them. Beat him every time he does it, he'll still do it.

Which leads me to my next problem with this game. It's pretty disturbing once you realize what you're doing--the game encourages you to slap around (rather violently at times) an anthropomorphized cow/monkey/tiger/etc. (and if you do it hard enough, bruises and scars appear on the creature). I'm not normally one to be taken aback by violence in a game (it's just a game, after all) but the level at which this encourages you to abuse your pet (all in the name of "teaching" it) is worrying.

Overall, I was bored within a couple days. The spiffiness of the graphics and effects soon wears off and all you're left with is a rather annoying and linear game which leaves you few true options but to plod step-by-step through the insipid tasks they have planned for you.

[* yes, you can destroy her house and take the but the point is you should never have to deal with such idiotic issues in the first place. This is billed as a God game, not a see-how-many-hoops-we-can-make-you-jump-through-to-get-to-the-next-hoop game.]

One of the best computer games of all time

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: June 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Black and White is incredible. ... It is very hard to get a 9 or 10 on the site unless the game is far and away unbelievable. To date, Black and White still remains at the top of the PC Games reviews with a 9.7!!! ...

I have owned this game since its release and have spent lots of time and energy making my "god" and "creature" exactly the way I want them. There's hardly anything in this game that you cannot do. Missions flood the game: sub-games, silver scrolls, puzzles, not to mention building your creature's mind with miracles you want him to know and do things you want him to do. The creature will learn from you. If you slap him after he eats a guy, he will learn, if you stroke him and say nice boy, he gets that evil gleem in his eye and it is rather fun. Plus, as if thats not enough, the game is basically "The Sims" plus more functionality. You control your people and the idea is to please them so that they worship you more. Which means you must take care of them. Listen to them, they are your power.

But this game. But it now. And clear your schedule for the next 6 months. You will be glued to your computer.

Black & White - Game of extremes

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: May 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Black - terrible user interface. Want to turn right? Then press the left arrow key... Want to look up? Then press the down arrow key. Geez!! What were they thinkin'? Some things are time independent, but a lot of the puzzles have to be done in the right order or they fail. If you make mistakes training your animal, then later on you are stuck with starting all over. No real story to speak of... still you must follow the puzzle line to make much progress... It is more a puzzle game (ala Myst) rather than a simulation (ala Sim City).

White - Good graphics. Reasonable sound. Good tutorial. Okay manual.

Added puzzle - it took me over a day to get the game to run on my Matrox G200 video card. Hint: The latest driver is the wrong driver. The unified driver is the right driver.

Holy mother of God

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: March 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This isn't a game, it's your new way of life. Be prepared to shun your friends, lose 20 pounds and turn very pale, because you won't be coming outside anymore. I am 10 hours into the game and I've barely scratched the surface. BUY THIS GAME.

Dreck

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: August 27, 2002
Author: Amazon User

There is one thing for which I can be thankful: it was relatively inexpensive. Perhaps this was a promising concept but it has been executed with such cloying banality and patronizing intrusiveness that I was frankly unable to make it all the way through the endless and insufferably irritating tutorial, let alone play the game. Or perhaps that was the game, for there is no exit from this tyrannical series of overlong and back-to-back cut scenes. Indeed, if you want to play the game at all, you must take the tutuorial. As for the much vaunted graphics, I found them muddy, uninspired, simpleminded, and just plain ugly. The buildings are largely dreary brown affairs and the inhabitants appear to have been carved from balsa wood and dipped in flour. The interior of the temple was reminiscent of a Chuck E. Cheese and the so-called "creatures" borrowed from cereal boxes. The two "advisors" (I particularly disliked these pompous little nits) were cribbed from an old Donald Duck cartoon and the little devil sounded for all the world like Fred Flintstone. As mentioned many times in these reviews, the movement controls are awkward and unintuitive and often simply don't work. I recommend reading the rest of the many negative reviews here; I didn't come across one complaint in the lot that I would not heartily echo. It seems that I am obliged to award this game at least one star but that's the only reason it's getting one. After an hour and a half struggling with this miscarriage, I had a roaring headache and wanted only to train my creature to hunt down Peter Molyneux and have him for lunch.

There isn't as much micromanagement as some say

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: April 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The game looks spectacular. I think everyone agrees, but some say there's too much micromanagement. This isn't necessarily so. For one thing, you don't have to pay any attention to your cow to play. He might die, but he reincarnates at the same level at the temple. All you lose is his location in the game.

When it comes to taking care of the villagers, there is a trick that's in the manual for some miracles. Get a wood miracle ready and take your hand over to the store. Your hand needs to be off the ground. To get the right height put your hand over the wall running through the middle of the store and start right clicking fast. Experiment. With a little effort, you can get 60,000 food or wood from a single miracle. Just get the right rhythm going with the right click.

The creatures do a lot of amazing and funny things, but if I were to sum this review up, I'd say you need to look at Black and White as sort of a toy with a lot of experimental qualities. The quest or missions are not the high point. The high point is the trip, the fiddling around with things. The game is sort of like a combination of Seven Kingdoms, Age of Empires and a few other things. It's a whole new weird world of it's own.

Good, but not good enough.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: April 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The game looks pretty good. Most people are much more impressed with the graphics than I am, but I don't think they were that hot.

This game could have been awesome, but a few things ruined it for me.

-Inability to skip the splash screens. -Irritating tutorial. -Virtually no options. -Complex controls. -Too many game types in one.

Not being able to skip splash screens isn't a major flaw, but all I want to do is play the game. Not stare at the B&W logo for three minutes. There was no way that I found to skip it.

I also couldn't find an easy way to skip the tutorial. Grated, the game needs one, but it didn't have to be as rigid and annoying as it was.

The graphics options are. well...missing. You can't adjust the resolution or the color depth or anything. There's just a vague "Quality" option, that adjusts god knows that. Since the game doesn't run very well on most computers, being able to tweak it would be a great advantage.

The controls are an example of what not to do in a game like this. They suck. Ground Control got it right. Homeworld was almost as good. Neither of them was as muddled or difficult to use as the ones in B&W. If you're a god, you shouldn't have to drag yourself along the ground, and having to adjust your tilt and rotation by clicking on the sides of the screen is ridiculous. Stick to Quake-like controls. They're proven, and they work. The last thing you should have to think about in a game as complex as B&W is how to move.

If this game had stuck to being just a God simulation/SimCity/Civilization type of thing, most of my other complaints would disappear. But as it is, they added a plot, and combat, which makes it just too hard to play. It is really difficult to move around efficiently enough to accomplish combat objectives.

My last gripe with it is that it doesn't have any good cheat codes. I never advocate cheating and then claiming you're good at a game - but often some cheats can pull an otherwise no-fun game out of the pits and make it entertaining. No such luck here. I think the game suffers more from arrogance on the part of the programmers than actual glitches.

This game isn't bad; it's just not what I expected. Make your own decision.

Consult An Animal Trainer Next Time

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: April 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I was really looking forward to Black and White. I had read a few things about it beforehand, and it all sounded pretty good. Civilization style management PLUS training an avatar! Woo hoo!

Well, as it turns out, they only gave you one way to train them... by hitting them. If you like what they do, you pet them, but when you don't, you have to smack them. And sometimes, you have to smack them hard. I played this game for about 10 hours straight when I first got it, and went to bed depressed. I woke up the next day and played for a couple more hours, and the same thing happened... the more I played, the more depressed I got. I'm not much of a blood & guts gameplayer, so I thought maybe it was just me being a softie. My roommate, however, feels no compunction about chasing people and things around and shooting them in lots of games... and he had the same thing happen. We were both moping around feeling like very bad people for hitting (yes, full blown open "hand" slapping) these very expressive creatures. It's not a matter of tugging on their collars or tweaking their noses, but you really BACKHAND them. Anyway, I couldn't deal with it, and stopped playing after about 3 days. I still can't imagine how Peter Molyneaux & Bullfrog spent 2 or 3 years making this game and obviously did not ONCE consult an animal trainer. Heard of Positive Reinforcement, guys? Yeesh. If I can get my cats to stay off the cupboards and tables, I can sure as heck get a hyper intelligent monkey to listen to me without hitting it.

If the characters were less well done, and didn't cry and look at you like they have NO IDEA why you are hitting them, it might be better. They really don't though. I wouldn't hit a child that [had an accident] in a corner, I'd show them where to do it until they figured it out. Took me all of two weeks to do with my 10 week old puppy. If only they'd given you a more patient option in B&W.

If you want to create worlds, stick with Civilization. If you want to train an animal, get a puppy. And if you're interested in sadism, get this game.

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