Black and White: Have you played it?

Jaguar · March 31, 2002, 13:18

Black and White, is a sort of moody game. Sometimes you love it, sometimes its incredibly boring, sometimes it runs ok on your PC, sometimes it doesnt. Right now I like it again. Please share yor thoughts on B&W.

I love my new creature. This is just so funny I have to post it. I present to you, my courageous tiger.

General Ludd · March 31, 2002, 13:40

Yes, and it was a huge disapointment.

FrustratedPoet · March 31, 2002, 14:10

yeah i've played it and like Osweld i didn't think much of it. the first couple of levels were good fun 'cos you were focused on training up your creature. the creature was mind-meltingly stupid, of course, but that was all part of the fun. i don't think i've ever laughed so much while playing a computer game as i did the first time my creature picked up its own excrement and threw it at some villagers.

however, the game got far too much about the micro-managment of your settlements and doing the same kind of boring miracles to impress the opposition.

it was not a terrible game by any means, but i got bored with it very quickly.

Jaguar · March 31, 2002, 14:16

Once the story mode is over, it loses its fun. But then you can rediscover it months later. Thats what I did.

Urban Ranger · April 1, 2002, 03:04

Except for the creature, the game is just recycled Populus.

Dis · April 1, 2002, 03:41

horrible. I only played it one day. What a waste of money.

It's gotten to the point after this game and civ3 I don't even believe reviews anymore. I have to actually play the game before I buy it. So if I don't know anyone who has it, or the game has no demo, I don't buy it.

Dis · April 1, 2002, 03:43

and yes scanning the mountains looking for stupid sheep seemed silly to me. What kind of crap is that? Why can't I make the lazy assed villagers find the sheep?

The villagers are completely helpless.

Eli · April 1, 2002, 06:52

What FrustratedPoet said.

It's fun in the beginning, and it was also the first "good graphics" game I played on my new computer(after being stuck with P200 for 4 years) so I was a bit excited because of the graphics, but after a day or two it got boring. What a waste of a CDR.

Chowlett · April 1, 2002, 12:41

Quote:

Originally posted by Jaguar Warrior
Black and White, is a sort of moody game. Sometimes you love it, sometimes its incredibly boring, sometimes it runs ok on your PC, sometimes it doesnt. Right now I like it again. Please share yor thoughts on B&W.

I love my new creature. This is just so funny I have to post it. I present to you, my courageous tiger.

That's one helluva big cow.

Jaguar · April 1, 2002, 16:55

Yea, its full size. There was an even better scene I didn't get... My tiger was taunting that same cow, doing a "bring it!" hand motion, oblivious to the explosion beam that was coming down on top of him.

BTW, the huge cow is in the Valley of the Fear map. (yes, some people have decoded the way the game makes maps and made their own) You can download the map at bwcenter.com. It has a bunch of huge evil creatures that run around blasting your villages. My creature grew up there, so he isn't afraid of anything, as you see by the picture of him blasting the cow.

I think the reason B&W was a faliure was because they didn't add a map editor. That could have added a lot of replay value. With all the wierd things you could do with the game, it would last forever. You could teach your creature in a map you made for him.

Unfortunately, you can only do that if you have >20 hours to work on a map.

Bkeela · April 1, 2002, 22:37

I still like the game, although I don't play it as much as I did. I followed the development for about 2 years, and I can say it lived up to my every expectation. People who were disappointed by it simply had unrealistic expectations, and maybe such people should avoid reading reviews, for they are obviously gullible kids.

I agree they should have providided a map editor and had heaps more skirmish maps. The biggest downside to the game is getting bored with one particular map.

I actually feel like a game now...

Bkeela.

Dis · April 2, 2002, 04:10

I'm not gullible. I only buy like 3 games a year, and these are top of the line games I get much play out of. I have very few bad games I have bought. Star Wars Rebellion- that was my fault, I didn't know much about computer games back then. And Black and White.

What good are reviews for? Why bother to review a game? Reviews are supposed to be for people interested in a game to get an impartial review to see if they might want to buy a game. I'm finding impartial reviews hard to come by lately.

Grumbold · April 2, 2002, 20:07

It was games like B&W that taught me never to trust official review articles even when they all said much the same things. Too many journalists know nothing about what makes a good game, dont play the games they review for longer than 12 hours or just want to be upbeat about a game which is being lauded by others.

The creature training is fun and very well done if you enjoy that sort of thing, but the rest of the game was paper thin. I've no doubt that the ideas will develop into something more solid eventually (kind of surprised no-one else has jumped on the bandwagon yet) but this one was a failure imo. I just don't want to spend all day watching and poking a toon to encourage or discourage it. I'd buy Creatures 3 if I did. There are far more gadgets and activities in that game.

LotC · April 3, 2002, 01:06

I have to agree with many of the others posting here. BnW was great for the first day or two and then got boring as hell. It seemed like Peter Molyneux just took a bunch of great ideas he had implemented in past games, mashed them together and stuck them in a (quite impressive) graphics engine. I found it uncohesive, frustrating and downright yawn-inducing.

loinburger · April 3, 2002, 02:25

A friend of mine bought it, and got bored with it in a week. I saw him playing it when he first bought it, and the game looked kind of interesting ("Now how am I gonna get this cow to stop pooping on the villagers?"). I also saw him playing it a week later, and it looked hideous ("Hooray, another fireball has struck my village! I am so glad that my villagers are incapable of doing anything without my help! This is the most worthless game ever!") I'm glad I held off on buying it.

pg · April 3, 2002, 20:09

Quote:

Originally posted by Grumbold
It was games like B&W that taught me never to trust official review articles even when they all said much the same things. Too many journalists know nothing about what makes a good game, dont play the games they review for longer than 12 hours or just want to be upbeat about a game which is being lauded by others.

that's basically all i got out of b&w too. pitiful game, no strategy or skill involved in it. even the sims is better(but not much) imo. previews of games are always positive nowadays, and reviews are rarely negative, and usually at worst ambiguous. the only review site i currently have any trust in is firingsquad.

Grumbold · April 3, 2002, 23:18

Negative reviews exist, but its usually only the small budget games that get unfavourably compared to the multi-million dollar huge-team productions that are released earlier in the same quarter. If a producer spends serious money promoting a product everyone seems to line up to agree how wonderful it is - a bit like "modern art" imo.

B&W really lost its appeal for me when I discovered that enemy temples could be shattered by a couple of well lobbed rocks entirely cost free despite being almost invulnerable to divine fireballs, lighning strikes or any of the other impressive stuff you could only do with expenditure of hard won power.

Dis · April 3, 2002, 23:53

It was fun building the creature.

I had to use hot keys for spells if I remember correctly. For some reason I could never draw the correct symbol to cast a spell

. I understand why they wanted an interface like that, but the implementation could have been better.

I just didn't want to f*ck around with the villagers. I just wanted to play with the creature