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Game review: Black & White is an experiment worth checking out

TEH. BEST. GAMES. EVAR.By Andr'e Swartley

Issue #26Black & White
Developer: Lionhead StudiosPublisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: PCRating: T for Teen

Few game developers have r'esum'es as diverse as Peter Molyneux, current Creative Director of Microsoft Games Europe. A few games early in his career made waves critically and commercially-Populous and Dungeon Keeper spring to mind-but he did not truly blossom as an auteur until he founded Lionhead Studios.

The first game out of Lionhead, Black & White, was to be Molyneux's most ambitious title to date. In fact, I might argue that it is still his most ambitious game, which is saying something as Molyneux also birthed the outstanding Fable series.

What constitutes ambition, then? Let's make a list.

1. Genre classification: Black & White is equal parts "god game," real-time strategy, city builder, role-playing game, and virtual pet. Common sense dictates that so many competing play styles would fight each other, creating an unplayable mess. Not so with Black & White.

2. Interface: Being exclusive to PCs, Black & White can be controlled entirely with a mouse, also letting players create hotkeys on the keyboard for certain actions. Giving a player power to perform all of the actions in the genres described above with two mouse buttons is no small feat. The fact that the controls (nearly) always work is even more impressive.

3. Scale: The main action of Black & White occurs on a series of five islands. You can pull back the camera to a mile or so above the islands to watch the sun or moon sparkle on the surrounding ocean, thunderstorms rage over mountains, peasants in villages making large bonfires, and your giant creature (virtual pet) gallivant across the island. Or, if you wish, you can smoothly zoom all the way down to about one foot off the ground to watch grass and flowers sway in the breeze.

4. Innovation: Like it sounds, innovation simply means that a game allows players to do something completely new or do something familiar in new ways.

Black & White innovates one of the most important facets of any video game, the tutorial. A game this complicated needs to be able to teach you, the player, how to play it. Practically every moment of the first four islands is teaching you something new about the game.

To make all this teaching entertaining, the game opens with you, a nameless god, swooping down from space to the first island. When you arrive, two spirit familiars immediately greet you-a kind little man who drifts around on a cloud and a stunted red troll with bat wings. Their roles as the devil and angel on your shoulders are instantly obvious.

They teach you how to build villages and populate them with worshippers-a god has no power without worshippers, after all. You can generate praise from your worshippers by providing them with food, shelter, rain for crops, and general safety. Some peasants will beg you to find their children, for example, and you can scour the island to retrieve their children and drop them safely on the ground beside the parents.

Ruling by fear requires the opposite tactics. For example, picking up a villager and chucking him out to sea will prove to the other villagers your strength and wrath, forcing them to pray more desperately so others do not meet the same fate. The further you get into the game, the more attention both tactics require. Happy peasants become more and more difficult to please, and cowed peasants become fatalistic and apathetic. Remember, this is just one facet of the game!

Helping you on your path of generosity or domination is your creature, an enormous animal you choose and raise from a baby. At first you can choose between a cow, tiger, or ape, with each having its positives and negatives. The ape learns very quickly, for example, but the tiger grows more quickly in strength. The cow is an ineffective mixture of the two-a true jack of all trades, master of none. Raising your creature is the largest and most entertaining part of the game.

At first your creature is scarcely larger than the villagers. You must feed it, always remembering to save enough food for it and the people in your villages, and teach it. As with the worshippers, you have two methods of teaching available to you: positive or negative reinforcement. You will have to use both no matter what kind of god you choose to be.

Let's say your creature defecates (yes, it has to go to the bathroom) in the village square, causing the villagers to curse you and the creature for stinking up their village. You can use your hand on the screen to swat the creature for being bad. But then you must also show it where to use the bathroom in the future. Pick up one of the creature's smelly doots and drop it on the nearest wheat field, where it will act as fertilizer. Then leash your creature and draw it over to the wheat field so it can see what you've done. Then rub its belly to let it know you want it to go to the bathroom in fields from now on. You may have to repeat this exercise a few times before it learns the ability forever.

In terms of temperament, you also have a few leashes to use on the creature. One leash causes the creature to learn whatever you are teaching it more quickly, a rainbow leash makes it feel happy and playful, and a spiked leash makes it angry and irritable. As it grows, it will also watch how you care for (or terrorize) your worshippers, and it will do the same. Tired of dropping wheat into the village grain bin? Show your creature what to do and it will perform the task for you. In addition, carrying heavy burdens will build your creature's muscles as it grows. But if it eats too much of the grain (or villagers) itself, it will grow fat and lazy.

To progress through the islands, you will have to complete several objectives on each, from acquiring new villages by building new ones or wooing another god's worshippers to your side to growing your creature to a certain size or combating another god's creature. At certain points you will also be able to trade out your creature for a different one-a turtle, tiger, and bear come to mind. But beware that each time you switch your creature, it will become smaller and rather stupider, forcing you to spend even more time raising it back up to where it was.

The fifth and final island pits you against the most powerful god in the world and imposes an invisible time limit by slowly transforming your creature. As time goes on, your creature will grow smaller and further toward the opposite end of whatever good/evil spectrum you have chosen. Honestly, I never figured out how to defeat the last island despite the hours and hours I spent trying to do so. The problem is that once your creature is as small as when you began, it will no longer impress or be able to protect your villagers, making it much more difficult for you to gain followers.

As you might imagine, so ambitious a game had a tremendous amount of flaws and bugs, many of which involved the growth of your animal and did not become noticeable until hours after they had occurred. The save system was also an absolute nightmare, as it retained your latest creature no matter what. This means that if you save a game on the final island, but then start a new game, when you reload the final island, your uneducated baby creature would appear on the final island, effectively hornswoggling your chances of finishing the game. (To their credit, Lionhead addressed most, if not quite all, of these issues in Black & White 2.)

Black & White hit PCs almost a decade ago, but as I said earlier very few games since have come close to its level of ambition. Even with its game-breaking bugs, Black & White is still an experiment worth checking out.

Final Grade: B-

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