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Don't Believe the Naysayers!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 15
Date: April 12, 2001
Author: Amazon User

People who say this game is a waste of time wouldn't know fun if it slapped them in the face. Although you need a powerful computer to run it, Black and White is one of the most influential games of all time. It is simply pure fun. I'm amazed that people have been putting it down, as most professional reviewers are singing its praises. Some people have been complaining about graphics, saying they're bad. This is totally wrong. The graphics on this baby are beautiful, and anyone who thinks a Playstation game looks better than it is terribly confused. If you've got a good computer, this is THE game to get. However, if you're under 600 Mhz, 128 RAM, and a good graphics card, you may want to buy the other classic god game, The Sims.

PROS: Fun, Fun, Fun! Great Graphics Amazing A.I.

CONS: Need a good computer

It might take a little, but it's worth it

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 15
Date: April 17, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Black & White is one of the best games made, both from an innovative gameplay aspect and from and artistic sense.

However, it does take some time and patience to learn it. Many say that the game requires a lot of micromanagement, which can be true, but you can also set up your villages and creature properly to make everyone self-sufficent. While your creature is on the learning leash, you teach him the miracles you want him to perform, where and when you want him to perform him. The creatures are extremely smart, and I am glad that Molyneux has seen the benefit that AI can bring to a game. Your creature can do every simple thing you can do, but in addition you can teach him to do complex tasks, such as moving trees from around the map into a small location to create a forest, and you can teach him to keep the forest watered so your town will have plenty of wood. You can also teach him to water the fields, or supply the town directly with wood or food through him gathering it.

The game can be played in so many ways -- it is up to you, the god, to shape the world in the way you see fit, for good or evil or anything in between. It takes some patience and actually reading the manual to learn how to get the game to run itself in the precise way you want things to be done.

Teach you about Parenting

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: December 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

What's that? A game worthy of the 100 hour gameplay award could teach us something? In my opinion, yes. In this game, don't be fooled, you play God. A God with limitations, a temple and a creature. You are limited to influencing a given physical space according to how many people believe in you. Your temple shows whether you are good or bad. Your creature shows whether you are a good or bad parent.

Granted, if you play this thinking of it as "just a game" and find out all the strategies and tips that do all the "right things" so that you win, then the temple and creature might not reflect your personality as much. It will reflect the fact that you are a perfectionist, perhaps nothing more.

To say nothing of the graphics and effects would be next to criminal, but they are of little importance next to the importance this game is to the gaming community in general. The AI of the creature resembles a child when you start out, so realistic, it's hard to be patient with. The gesture system for casting spells is a leap into a new domain for RPG and RTS games. And, yes, the graphics are fairly good.

If you play to win, so be it, but if you play to learn about yourself, then you may find out how patient a parent you can be when your creature at age 25 is still eating dung of the floor.

And I thought I was the only one who couldn't finish!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: October 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Wow. I had no idea that other people had such a problem with this game. I bought it when it first came out in 2000, and I thought it was fantastic. I played and I played, passing every tutorial, challenge and god that dared oppose me. And finally I was confronted by Nemesis, my ultimate foe...he challenged me for final control and domination, and I accepted. And my goodness, I wish I had never gone through that portal...

As another reviewer put it (and so well I think) "Black & White" is simply a "micromanagement hell." You constantly have to work: tending to your numerous and ever greedy people, trying to educate and spend time with your creature, trying to defeat other gods, passing challenges, fighting other creatures, trying to win faith and influence heathen villages, exploring, re-capturing villages, warding off other gods...I think you get the idea. It's simply impossible to do all of this. I played this game twice and eventually gave up because of its impossibility! Now I HATE giving up on a game and consider myself a good gamer and great strategist. BUT YOU CAN'T FINISH WITHOUT CHEATS OR SOME KIND OF SECRET, I DON'T KNOW! I feel embarassed not to be able to finish this game, it insults me. And I tried my hardest. If you finished without cheats I think you really are a god! I'll spit shine your shoes and chew your food for the rest of eternity!

Now back to my story...the final challenge: facing Nemesis. Firstly the jerk puts some curse on your creature, making it small and feeble and the opposite of you. Nice. Then he gives you a village (woohoo Batman!) for you to control. You now have to try and cure your poor creature by capturing villages and passing challenges. And I did that! And my creature went back to normal! Yay! But then it went back to being a tiny, stinky loser! BOO! And I have no idea why because I removed the curse! So I got over this and tried to take Nemmy's villages. Which I did, except for two which required so much belief it was scary! And then Nemesis starts winning back faith and making you look like an ass with his creature! So I kicked the crap out of his creature with fire and lightning and my creature! And it came back again and again and again! And Nemesis, although far out of range of his influence, could perform miracles in my territories! That B*****D! It was at this point I realised that there is no God (excuse the pun) in this game, and packed it in forever after my second attempt at the game 3 years later. The exact same thing happened and I felt like a gaming failure. So yes, I, the mighty gamer was defeated by lack of logic or faith or whatever!

The game itself was alot of fun, barring the last stage! I thoroughly enjoyed the actual playing and fighting those idiot gods. It really kept me entertained and busy. But the last stage was just horrid, disgusting! And what's with that "Future Room?" It always says "The future is still uncertain." What a crock of sh**! The future's always f****** uncertain nimrods! (Not you). It's just a game that will eventually frustrate you and p!$$ you off. I would recommend it to those who like playing old games on those Ridiculously Hard settings (like Duke Nukem and Doom). I just couldn't do it as a 12 year old or as a 15 year old. Maybe I could now, but I don't have the patience or energy to try again.

In short, "Black And White" gets 56% overall and 75% for fun. If you enjoyed it completely, I'm guessing you finished the game or cheated your way through. Perhaps my days as a strategy game player are numbered (though I've passed numerous strategy games on the hard setting since then, such as "Earth: 2150" and "Red Alert 2"). In any case, those who finish "Black & White" honestly deserve to be glorified in the eyes of strategy gamers, for they cannot be mortal or of this Earth. I wouldn't buy this game again purely because it's 1) Too old and 2) Depressing. So make your choice, but YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

I Love it

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: April 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is Great, I played it for about 7 hours straight until I was forcibly removed from the computer, My PC has a AMD K6 2 450 Mhz processor 64MB of ram and a Voodoo 5 and it ran near perfect as far as I can tell only complaint is it takes nearly a miute to save but thats not too much to complain about. The Graphics are amazing the Gameplay is Fairly easy to grasp, it only took me about 20 minutes at most to figure everything out, and I love the little pet.....though I feel bad punishing it so I've decided against that I encourage him to eat people and throw giant rocks at houses :) There is so much you can do in this game including throwning the annoying villagers into the ocean if they think they can make demands of their god....ok so maybe I'm a little twisted but hey this is a great game and I would recommend it to anyone, especially if you have dreams of ruling the world and being worshipped as a god.....or feared its up to you..... BUY THIS GAME

Black and White: One of the best games yet

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: November 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Black and White allows you to play as a god, and you rule through an animal, in the beginning it's a monkey, cow or tiger, and if you forfill certain challenges you can get other creatures, such as a sheep, for instance. The allows you to choose between beginning good or evil, which effects your followers as well as your creature.

Evil:
you rule through fear
your creature looks reallllllllyyyyyy cool

Good:
you rule through the people's will(they trust you and aren't terrorized by you)

your creature stays normal, but is a bit stronger than evil creatures

There are also some pros and cons I'd like to tell you about;

PROS:
Great Plot

Awesome Graphics

Amusing and Cool-looking creatures

Fun Challenges along with awesome rewards

An auto-save feature

The fact that you can choose what happens next

fun side games in the God's something( I forget, but you can bowl in a certain part!!!)

your creature can learn miracles to help your people, and to give it the upper-hand in battles or against rival communities.
CONS:
It's kind of hard to move around in the
beginning, takes a while to master the controls

If you do something wrong in the beginning or during a challenge, or make a bad choice, it could be harder for you in the future, or you could end up messing things up for you, your allies, your creature, and your people

It is very time consuming, but sometimes it's worth the time you put into it.

If you are not prepared or follow directions, your people can get screwed up badly.

If you don't have a steady supply of wood and rations, your people might leave you, or starve.

This is a great game. You definietly should by it. Thank you for reading my review.

Revolutionary? yes! Fun? well.....

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 18
Date: April 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Black & White is, without doubt, the most beautiful game I have ever seen. The graphics are stunning and the "cut scenes" are gorgeous. The basic premise and storyline is original and engaging. The character AI is very sophisticated. The interface/control system IS a tad awkward and takes some getting used to, but once you're comfortable with it, it's actually kinda cool.

HOWEVER......

... it's not fun. It's really quite tedious. The whole of the game is simply a endless routine of repetitive tasks. To "conquer" villages you perform miracles for the villagers until they believe in you... HUNDREDS of miracles.. and THEN once they believe in you, you still have to perform endless miracles so that they continue to believe in you. And these miracles require worshippers to "power" them. Which requires more villagers, which requires more miracles! The whole game becomes a never-ending spiral of performing miracles to appease the villagers so that you can perform miracles to get more villagers which require still more miracles ... and on and on.

In any Role Playing game where you have to "level" up a character, there is inherently a lot of "busy work" ie. going out to the forest and killing countless beasties to earn XP, etc etc.

Black & White is NOTHING BUT BUSY WORK! and at the end of it, all you have to show for it is a cow/monkey/lion/pig/whatever that knows where it should and shouldn't poop! (maybe! I've still not figured out to keep it from eating people!)

If you like The Sims, you will love this game. It is the same boring tedium in a much prettier package.

P.S. Am I the only one who feels geniunely insulted when companies "spam" the ratings before a game even comes out, so the initial ratings are really high? The first 20 or so ratings on this forum are so clearly the product of the EA Marketing Department that it should be an embarrassement!

Prototype of the future

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 15 / 25
Date: April 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

4 out of 5 stars for BLACK & WHITE?! Yep. Although everybody seems to go totally nuts about this extreamly hyped game, I still found it a slight dissapointment. This is mainly because it's a GAME. You can't have total freedom cuz' it's programmed. The AI isn't perfect cuz' computers aren't. Lots of people (influenced by the press) didn't want to see this as a game anymore but as another, perfect world. I myself went with the hype and that's why I'm a little dissapointed.

I've got absolutely nothing to complain about the graphics. They're in one word stunning. Highly detailed and the level of zooming is almost scary!

Sound is also right all along. The devil with a 'New York cabdriveraccent' and the saint with the very brittish accent... the music also changes when your more evil or less evil.

And then the game itself... it's just not all that fun. You just have to convert vilages over and over again. The so-called great submissions just really have 2 options (and not 20 like those gamemags say): helping the villager (9 out of 10 times by finding something) or killing him. You'll only really use the titan for converting and helping villages. Also it's very (too) easy to learn 'em things and he doesn't really do much unexpected things. The AI is to blame for that. Not that it's bad, not at all, but we human beings aren't capable, yet, of programming humanlike AI. And that's what bothers me most. I want the game to be more. But it simply isn't.

This game was a big disappointment

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 14 / 23
Date: April 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Well I sure hate to be a spoil sport, but I feel pretty much let down by Black & White. There appear to be several issues that I think bring this great concept down.

1) This is supposed to be a game where I am a god. As a god I should have a lot of control over the world. However in this game you are just part of the story and you have to follow the game the way the developers want you to. There are levels and "missions" in the form of scrolls that you have to accomplish before moving on, so basically I am just playing a role and trying to "beat" the game. This is not a god sim - it is an adventure game. Like another reviewer stated, if you want to have control, play the Sims.

2) The interface is very difficult to get the hang of, and it is mostly mouse controlled. I found doing mundane chores like unleashing my creature (you get a creature to teach), throwing stuff, and just moving around to be tedious at times. While moving, your perspective has a habit of changing which I do not like (at times I ended up staring straight at the ground for no reason).

3) About three hours into the game I got a Visual C++ Runtime library error and the game crashed. Now I can understand a bug due to my system hardware or something, but this appears to be just flawed code. In all the games I play, I have never seen a runtime error from code (I won't count applets here). Was this game ready for market?

4) I crashed and went back in. To my suprise I found myself all the way at the beginning. The game's Auto-Save feature had not saved anything (even though it said "saving" while I was playing). At this point I was too bored and frustrated to continue. Again I believe this game was not ready to ship. Instead of starting all over again, I gave up and went back to Clive Barker's Undying.

I eagerly waited for this game, and when starting it up it looked to be very well done. The intro sequence and graphics are awesome. But I felt this is a game that was a major hype turned letdown, and I recommend waiting until it is in the bargain bin before buying it.

Very Repitive and Slow

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 14 / 23
Date: June 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game and I am sorry that I did. The game gets very repitive and playing with your creatures isn't all that fun because you can't really make them do a whole lot. It is cool to watch them do there own things. Another problem with the game is that is gets really repititive after awhile. Converting new tribes to advance in the game gets boring after awhile, especially since it take awhile for each one, meanwhile, your followers are never happy and you always have to keep helping them, making the process even longer.

The pros to this game is that is has very different game play than any game I have played and the graphics are top grade.

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