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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.

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.

Full of Regrets...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: April 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

What exactly is the requirement of this game??? I have a P-III 1 GHz, 640 MB RAM, and GeForce-II 32 video card and this game still performs like a crap! Auto-Save in this game cannot be trusted at all!!! When it says game saved, and 20 min. later when the game crashed, you will never be able to load to the point where it AUTO-SAVED! Instead, you'll have to start everything over... I don't how they've QA this game when I see some design fraud in the game saving. This is very easy to duplicate and they should of caught this before they ship this game out.

HORRIBLE HORRIBLE GAME

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: April 06, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is the worst piece of [junk] i have ever bought, not only does it take around a week to each level, you can't even cast miracles from towns that you convert!!! this was the most boring game I have ever played! sure its fun... until the second level where you start having to micromanage your towns which takes time away from your creature, then you teach your creature which in turn takes away from micromanaging your damn towns. you're probably saying to yourself "oh, but so many people have written good things about it" well im guessing that many of them haven't played past the intro.

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.

Don't Buy it!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: May 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game even with a patch not only still has many bugs, but once you install the patch many if not all could not run the game. You had to download runblack.exe or unSafeDisc to get it to even load. I had to deal with tech. daily, all they tell people is check your video drivers for update, directX is wrong, adjust the accelerator. I never was able to get Creature Isle to work. This game should have never hit the market. There has not been any mention of another patch to fix the still many bugs remaining. It's a waste of time. The only good note is that the Tech's. did reply pretty fast, even though their solutions were off the mark.

Ter

a huge disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: May 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

this could have been a really excellent game. it was so full of bugs though, it was unbearable. not only does it take 5 minutes to start up, but then it freezes all the time! and now when i try to load my games, the game starts over at the beginning. the customer support was awful as well.

Frustrating and Monotonous

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: June 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game has many serious flaws which ultimately make it unplayable. What it comes down to is that the villagers are too stupid to take care of themselves, which makes it impossible to create a self-sustaining village. Therefore you have to spend enourmous amounts of time telling the villagers to do basic things like chop down trees, harvest grain, and reproduce. That's right. They won't reproduce unless you tell them to, which means that you must constantly match boys and girls together to keep the village from dying out. This distracts you from doing fun and interesting things, like training your creature to seek out and destroy the enemy. After 50+ hours playing this game and still feeling like I was getting nowhere, I gave up in frustration.

Good luck getting it to work

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 10
Date: July 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game was a huge disappointment. I have no idea what it's like to play because at about 10 minutes into it, everything froze and it had to be reinstalled. The patches were no help. You'd think for the price, the designers would have made sure all of the bugs were worked out. I'll never buy another game designed by this company.

What a shame...it could have been fun.

Simulation, not fun

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 9
Date: June 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User

There is no gameplay. Also the bugs make it nearly unplayable. It would be a nice simulation, except that it really doesn't do anything after a few minutes.

Zero stars for this one, sorry.

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