Black & White

The Good
First things first, you have to appreciate and applaud the developers and their vision in creating a game with a concept that almost every gamer has thought and dreamed about: Becoming a GOD!

Surprisingly stable for a 3D game, compared to a lot of 3D graphic games I've played, the details and animations of the graphics are quite astounding the first time around (I hate it when I get accustomed to the graphics the second time around).

The game starts with a very deeeep philosophical introduction cut scene on faith, gods, and all that, complemented with Indian (India) mixed music giving the "spiritual sense" to the already magnificent intro. For anyone that hasn't even thought about stuff like this, it may get you thinking...

Well, later on you meet the local natives (your worshippers) that celebrate your coming with hip-hop tribal dancing. These dudes and dudettes surprisingly dance better than most people I know! Two thumbs for the dance animation department!

You have 2 so-called advisors representing the good and bad side of your conscience which bears remarkable resemblance to the same advisors in the game Afterlife. They add some pretty good storylines but overall, they're practically useless.

Then comes your creature. You get to choose from the peaceful punching cow, the jumping curious orangutan (an ape from SE Asia, specifically the island of Kalimantan, Indonesia for you guys who flunked geography and common knowledge) and the tough kicking tiger.

Best overall highlight of the game is probably the process of teaching that stubborn creature of yours. Specifically in the area of magic, the process is long and you really have to be patient with the beast. But it's quite fun actually.

The Bad
Well, the game is very much playable and enjoyable. But unfortunately there are a lot of irritating features that should have been fixed the first time around. I really hate patches sometimes. Here we go:

1. If I have to go through that tutorial one more time, I'll explode! Of which I have actually. This is one major irritating feature, every time you restart the game, which I often like to do just to familiarize myself with the game, you can't bypass the introduction. So you have to waste like 15-30 minutes going through the tutorial process of learning the ropes that you already now the first time around. You REALLY have to be patient when playing this game.

2. If this was a city management game, it would be one of the worst in strategy games. Well, although it isn't it's not an excuse. The biggest problem is that there isn't enough information close hand. You have to go to the temple for detailed information, and every move you make is always in an animated approach that wastes a few seconds that kinda gets irritating in the long run. When your used to city management games where you get the information with a single press of a button, the animated nonsense Black & White provides is very much irritating. The technology isn't very advanced either. No battles between villagers, actually come to think of it, I was kinda of expecting something similar to Age of Mythology. That game represented more "Godly" power than this game, unfortunately. Come to think of it, those villagers are practically useless if you get down to it. All you need is your creature; he or she can do most of the job. The only use for villagers is if you don't have your creature, then you have to do things manually, directly or via villagers.

3. Teaching your creature can be pretty draining. Key word: Patience. I like the teaching part. It's the result part that needs fixing. The only bridge between what you teach your creature and the reality of what they learned are those stupid advisor comments: "Your creature will do this thing more or that less". There are some comments that really are useless: "Your creature will be more inquisitive or more curious and such". What the hell does that mean? Curious doing what? Inquisitive doing what? It would be nice that there is a detailed list of that your creature has learned and how often the creature will do it. For instance I taught my creature to poo on rocks, but sometimes he Poo’s somewhere else. A percentage rate of his patterns would be helpful. Sometimes I'm confused if I taught the right or wrong thing, or if I'm teaching the bloke anything at all. I really miss the whole "menu" and "commands" section in most strategy games.

4. When the developers said that you can choose any path you want, THEY'RE LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH. It actually is more rewarding if you follow the good path. There are more accessible spells and such that will help you big time. So statistically, is more profitable if you be a good guy sometimes, although it's quite hard to remain a good guy after you know the lighting spell.

In the last campaign, your creature is cursed big time. I didn't follow the "normal plot", where you’re supposed to capture villages in a certain sequence. Doing so, gets my creature permanently cursed, which I'm totally pissed about. So to hell with freedom of choice in this game!

The Bottom Line
Get all those !#!@$! patches before playing this game or you'll end up swearing like me all the time. :) I really miss those DOS games...

The Good
The hype surrounding this beast was HUGE and frankly Lionhead had no way of making it what everyone expected it to be. Which was a pity really because this has so much going for it.

Technically, Black & White is astounding. The complete freedom of movement, viewpoint and personal game-playing style has hardly ever been seen before and certainly not done to this degree. It's perfectly possible to zoom in to the extent that a sheep takes up the whole screen, and it's just as easy to zoom out so the whole island and then some can be seen. With such a difficult trick to pull off, it was always going to be hard to get the control system to work effectively with a fully viewable and rotatable 3D world. And, while not without fault, it does the job pretty much as well as it could have done.

The Gesture Recognition Technology is a neat addition (of course, that is ALL it is...) and works well for the most part. It's nice to be able to train yourself to swing the mouse around effortlessly to pull off the funkiest spells. To this day, I still haven't managed one of them though.

The AI is the game's biggest asset. The incredible intelligence of your creature; which can be trained, learns from experience, learns from watching you, learns from watching anything else, picks up habits, forms a personality, forms a physique, and pretty much becomes the physical shape of your style of playing; is almost too beautiful for words. Memories get formed so easily: I remember a time when I was spending hours teaching my pet monkey to play football. By the end it was having so much fun I was worried it was going to starve, so I stuck it in it's pen and went off to do other things. I was wandering around the land aimlessly after a few days had past in the game. My monkey couldn't sleep so, to my disbelief, he got up, looked around the village, felt worried, spotted the ball, clapped with enjoyment, rushed over to get it, took it to his pen and started kicking it against the wall for fun.

Wow.

That wasn't scripted. It wasn't "told" to do that by the game. It just did it. That's just...staggering. Oh and the graphics are good too.

The Bad
But OH NO! It all goes horribly wrong! After so many right ingredients, Lionhead suddenly undercook the whole thing. There is no game in Black & White!

Well OK there is. But not much of one. The fact is, the total freedom that you are presented actually becomes boring as hell after a while because there simply isn't enough to do. There is always something to be doing, but just not enough. Your jobs are always mundane and monotonous as hell. Sometimes you have to reach just far enough outside your influence to grab a tree and take it to your village store. Except you have to repeat this mind-numbing task about 50 times to get enough wood. Then you have to build a house with that wood so that you may expand your influence by a centimetre before doing the whole thing again. All so you can take over another village by impressing/helping them. For example...say...by giving them wood. It's enough to make you nail your face to the wall.

The spells are dire for the most part. Don't think on the levels of Populous-style carnage. There are no earthquakes and volcanoes here. In terms of attack: fire and lightning are pretty much your only options. The others are just boring.

Also, if you were a God, would you spend all your time fishing or chopping down trees for people? The extraordinary AI of your creature is almost negated by the abysmal AI of your followers. They don't do ANYTHING for themselves. This means killing them is one of the only satisfying options. This in turn unbalances the moral slant on the game because it is ten times easier to complete it being evil than being good.

I know I touched on this too but the levels are just boring. The worst of which is level 3. Not only do you have to spend something like 20 hours trying to overtake some cities with an absurdly high belief in another God and are miles outside of your influence; but they take away your creature! Are they stupid?! That's the whole reason anyone is playing this game!

The Bottom Line
It could have been the RPG to end all others. It wasn't, and this is a crying shame. It had so many things in the right place but Lionhead forgot to add a game with them. So we have a completely open-ended production with nice graphics, AI without peer, some clever tricks but...what are you supposed to DO half the time again? Er....

The Good
Training the animal and watching it interact with your populace can be fun.

The attractive graphics and ability to heavily zoom in (until single people fill the screen) and out (where single people are even rendered any more, being smaller than a pixel in size).

The idea of playing good and/or evil.

Some of the sub-quests are quite innovative.

The Bad
The animal is generally very dumb. There are a preset collection of things it can learn to do (well, or badly), but some of the essentials are just beyond its grasp (such as taking food up to the worshippers at your temple so they don't all starve to death).

The control method can be a nightmare with too many things to do and no smooth way of doing them, either using mouse or keyboard.

The camera is very clumsy. You go to a village in a valley and set the camera height a useful distance above ground level. Heading off elsewhere you either have to bother about with the cumbersome zoom out/zoom in functions, or watch as you camera smacks into, and drags itself up the face of a cliff, giving you a nice view of massive blurred pixels. Would setting height above landscape been so hard to implement?

The idea of casting spells through gestures: You draw certain shapes on the landscape to select one of your spells for use - unfortunately, like a badly implemented handwriting-recognition-system, the game very easily ignores you or selects the wrong spell, unless you time your drawing perfectly (and hope your machine doesn't start to chug at that very moment).

Saves later on it the game take way too long, and the actual playing on certain levels once things gets hectic really chews away at your processor and hard drive, making the game chug terribly, even on high end machines.

Lack of professions for the humans: The people in the game need food and wood to survive. There's a forester (that cuts down trees), but no profession that attempts to replace these trees. There's a fisherman and farmer, but no herder for the tons of roaming livestock, leaving you or your creature the task of collecting food within easy site and reach of the 'starving' populace.

Lack of information about opponents: You can be going ahead watering crops for some villagers to eat and the first thing you hear about one of your other villages getting burnt to the ground is some quiet whispering 'deeeeeath...' noises in the background. No major alerts pop up. This can be frustrating seeing as so much time is needed spent doing micromanagement stuff.

MAJOR GRIPE: The Auto-save is a very handy feature, but it does take a while (sometimes up to 30 seconds). Now, this isn't the point I have a problem with, and I really like having it on (mainly due to the frequency of crashes at the moment). However, if you happen to be doing something at the moment the auto-save takes place, once the save finishes the game assumes you have continued doing that one thing for all the time it took to save the game (i.e. 30 seconds' worth of holding down a key/mouse button). Doesn't sound too much of a problem, but I've had several occasions where, early on in a level, whilst innocently scrolling around my little part of the landscape, the game auto-saves, then when it comes back I find myself at the other end of the map with the opponent gods roaring at me for entering their territory, quickly proceeded by all my villages getting lightning storms smashing them to bits before I was even in a state to offer any resistance. Gah! I HATE that.

The Bottom Line
Well, it's a fun game for a time. Personally, I'm getting fed up with it due to camera/control problems, plus random crashes, and am glad I got it as a birthday present, and didn't pay out for it. However, if you liked Populous and want to spend some time watching how some people tried to code up a learning animal, either buy one of the Populous games and a copy of Creatures, or wait until this title has dropped a little in price and check it out.

The Good
This game is a true example of what AI is like. Your animal is smart, noticing every single aspect of what you do. Unfortunately, the people are dim-wits which leads to some disappointments. Let's look at the strategy that should have been more of a strategy game and less baby-sitting those dang villagers!

Obviously, you are a god who has been born through the needs of simple folk. You can help them by harvesting their crops, forcing them to breed :-), and basically telling them how they should run their lives. You know, like most Gods do. Eventually you can learn to cast miracles to help them like Heal and Rain. Others hurt enemies like fireballs and wolves. Some just impress them like flocks of birds and fireworks. However you have a creature to help you in all of this.

The most crucial aspect is this game is the creature, which you get shortly after you begin playing. You raise him from when he is as tall as a cottage to as tall as a mountain. They truly couldn't have created a better AI.

The point of the creature is to learn from what you teach him to do. He can learn miracles by watching you perform them, and once he does, will be able to cast them without you having to tell him to. Stroking him after a certain action encourages him to do that more, while slapping him discourages it. Through this an amazing system is born. Not only does he watch WHAT you do, but HOW you do it, WHERE you do it, and WHAT or WHO you do it too. For example, if he notices you healing the sick, when you teach him the heal miracle, he will heal only sick. But if he watches you heal healthy people, he will heal not only the sick, but the healthy as well when he learns the miracle. Another example of this is water. If he sees you casting the water miracle on farms to make them grow, but not trees, he will only use the miracle on farms. Or if you continually cast lightning on your own people and not your enemies, he will kill off followers by following your example and ignore your enemies.

Through this system comes the most amazing part. It is where the game gets its name: Black and White. The ability to choose alignments comes not from a screen selection but the actions you do. Good is basically good. Tend to ALL of your peoples needs, no human sacrifices, don't attack, only impress.

Being bad is much easier. Killing people is bad, but is truly not all creative. You can do much better. Torture people through starvation, burning alive, and sacrifices (big prayer power). Or better yet, burn the houses, and leave them without shelter. Kill all of the children in the village without much of a reason. Use your creature's poop to poison the village store, then burn the farms so none can be harvested! Teach him to play baseball with humans (it is possible)! Or even worse, sacrifice the dead. The list is endless. Being creative has BIG rewards in this department. In fact, this is probably one of the most fun things in the game next to teaching your pet to do it!

Teaching your pet good and evil is so much fun. Pets will follow EVERYTHING you do as long as they are near it. Tie him to the worship site and sacrifice some humans. Eventually he will learn this is acceptable and do it by himself! Burn some villagers. If it's okay, he will do it. Eventually he will grow horns and have a constant black aura around him. People will learn to fear him and obey him. Or he can be good, people will worship him and praise him, and so he will glow rainbow colors. This leads to the exciting possibility that your creature is praised and is glowing rainbow colors while your temples is growing spikes and the world is in infinite darkness.

Through the parenting system almost anything is possible. Teach him miracles, teach him to be bad, teach him to be good, teach him what to eat and what not to, where to poop and where not to. Its absolutely amazing.

The games sports some nice graphics, but it varies depending on a graphics card. I have a fairly bad one, but my creature, villagers, and structure models are absolutely amazing. However landscapes are a little blurry but are nothing to disappoint greatly. Anyway it goes, the graphics are decent even on low-end cards.

Sounds are decent to the game. The music is mostly soft flutes/violins playing in the background, while you hear children and villagers going about their daily business. Ambient sound effects are done nicely, and actually vary depending on what the villagers do (not just generic).

The Bad
Ugh. The game actually justifies a scientific truth. Most animals are smarter than humans. The creature is a wonderful thing. It respects you, plays with you, learns from you. You get to know it as a personal friend as though it really was your own super-smart companion.

The same cannot be said for humans. They are incompetent in almost every way. They are lazy, especially slow, dependent on your for everything. If you help them they become disillusioned and think you will keep doing it (yes, this is a part of the learning system we have come to love for the creature).

Tasks are normally assigned to them. Placing them over a farm makes them become a dedicated farmer. Over trees for wood, over workshop to gather wood for building, over a building to become builders, and over other people to become disciple breeders (how nice could it be to have God tell you your sole existence is too have sex!). However villagers tend to stray to much from their jobs if you help them too much (again, the learning system).

The worst part about them is how they breed. HUMANS BREED LIKE RABBITS, EAT LIKE LOCUSTS, DRINK LIKE ELEPHANTS, AND SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE. Making only one male breeder can impregnate every woman in your village. This leads to overpopulation, starvation, and wanton need for more homes until there are no more forests, farms, or space on the map. Even making no breeders, those randy little humans will breed with anything that moves. How dare they mate without your consent!

Even two hours of complying with their needs will result in nothing. It works like a cycle. First they will naturally need food. Once they have this they realize they have room to breed! This is where the cycle can stop! However, as I said, they breed like rabbits and spread like wildfire, so nothing will stop them. More children lead to more nurseries and more houses. More houses need more wood. Once all this is done, the population increase will need more food. More food will cause an increase in breeding. One cycle of this for ONE village can take up to 2 hours! For one village!

Tooooooooo much work. Unlike that great game Populous, where as long as you laid a plan, people were perfectly organized. They did it with rapid speed and precision. They upgraded without even you needing to be there. It pretty much maintained itself. If that were the case with B&W, then it would win game of the year. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Once you've done so much work with villages, this leaves no time for the creature at ALL. This is a great shame. The creature is practically the best part. Without any attention, he pretty much eats, sleeps, and poops all day, not doing much, and not impressing anybody.

The other part of the game which is disappointing is the fact that you don't build up an army. All converting is done through fear or respect. Pretty much miracles. Plus your creature. So what is the point of villages? Well, there is one point, and that is prayer. They just tend to ask for two much food, and starve. And even then human sacrifice will do just as well, probably even better.

After 3 levels of play, you are annoyed with the progression of play which is pretty much endlessly caring to villagers needs. You will find that once you have good enough spells, you can play skirmish. You can go around with your creature demolishing villages, which is insanely satisfying. Remember all the stuff you could do to torture them? Imagine how much more you can do with your creature. Play catch on a cliff. If he misses, down to the rocks below. If he catches them, offer him a reward: the villager as a treat! Destroying enemy villages is just as fun, except if you destroyed the other friendly villages and your own you will not have much prayer to cast miracles outside of your influence. Just let your creature handle it. He does everything nicely if you taught him right. You and your creature become an unstoppable team. After five hours of giving in to all of their TINIEST of needs, destroying the worshipers is the best stress management. Face it. They don't deserve your mercy.

The Bottom Line
The amazing creature teaching AI simply puts every aspect of parenting into a super-genius, giant pet of yours. Unfortunately, the people just lye around picking their noses wondering why the food store hasn't been growing and where the heck is God to take care of it.

In the end, though being good seems the righteous path, you cannot be good without being excessively annoyed. Plus, the few rewards you get for it (longer days, white temple, rainbow creature is pretty much the best parts) is NOT worth the hours of effort. So in the end, you may find your self giving up about half-way through or giving into the dark side and ruling the world the way YOU and your creature like it. This would make a great game in itself. Only you and the creature. Villages rule themselves. You just get prayer if they believe in you. But with great power comes great responsibility I suppose.

So B&W has its moments. But without the great self-reliant villagers of Populous, the worshipers really, really, bring this game's greatest features down. You may like it just with the Black- not the White

The Good
The ideas behind the game are good and the game attempted to do something new, abolishing traditional interfaces in an attempt to make the game more absorbing, and making the world truely interactive and responsive. The graphics were fantastic and the game was a pleasure to watch, and the first hour drew you in and felt like you were playing something special.

The Bad
In short, it didn't work. Although all the ingredients seemed right, they didn't pull to a game. Instead you began to act as nanny to your people, occasionally throwing rocks around to impress people. There was little to it and the concept soon wore. In one level, fairly near the beginning, they take your creature. One of the central pillar of the game is removed, for a whole level. This makes all the petty and repetitive things come to the forefront, and you realise how little game there really is.

I wanted this to work, I really did, but unfortunately, despite being immediately fascinated and dragged in at the beginning, like a cheap MDF veneerer, the lack of interest behind the game couldn't stay hidden for long.

The Bottom Line
Beautiful in appearance, clever in principal and impressive in aims. Yet unfortunately completely failing to deliver on the one thing that counts, depth and interest. The developers clearly loved this game, but I think they forgot what they were designing, and instead created something closer to a piece of art than a functional and playable game.

The Good
Presentation is swish, straight from the start of the game you are lead thru things in a very graphically beautiful way.

Interface is unique.. simple to look at..

Creatures are fun to begin with, are funny and quite well animated

Interaction with email... WAY too cute an idea

The Bad
Interface is fiddly way too easy to get the wrong spell in heat of battle.

Graphics are just eye candy glossing over basically an updated Populous (not a bad thing really, BUT means not everyone can see all this as it pushes tech specs to the heavens)

Creatures are DUMB, they may get better later on, but the simple fact that they will wander outside your area of control means u have to drop things to go tend them (yeh i know people will say its part of how you play the game to keep control of them)

LINEAR - its not as open ended as made out.. set pieces are all over the shop, and you have to do certain things to enable progression (again i expect people to say that you have expect this)

The Bottom Line
Populous with graphics, and big creatures

The Good
The game's general idea is very nice. Playing a God, "educating" your villagers and creature, choosing a moral path, etc. etc. Another neat option is the way you choose spells- each spell has an icon (for example, fireball looks like a spiral). If you want to cast a spell, you move your mouse according to the symbol, and then you can cast it- very efficient.

The Bad
The implementation. First of all, the game's interface is terrible. The designers wanted to simplify things, so your only way to control the game is by using the mouse, and placing various objects on various locations will immediately set them up to the appropriate role. Unfortunately, taking fifteen villagers and changing their job will require about forty mouse clicks... Which leads us to the next downfall- the game's micromanagement. Every little detail has to be managed by the omnipotent God, because the villagers are too stupid to take care of it themselves, so you'll find yourself delivering wood and food (the game's two resources) through a dozen villages instead of playing the actual game.

The Bottom Line
Good idea, but a terrible interface killed it. Don't buy it, rather save your money for WarCraftIII or Emperor.

The Good
To start off on the right foot, I have to say I liked just about everything in this game. "Just about," being the key phrase here. I loved the AI of the creature, how you could treat them however you wanted to, and they learned and evolved by your example. I loved the sound, the graphics, and the complete freedom to be whatever kind of deity you wanted to be. Then, however, there's the ugly.

The Bad
"What is the point?" "What am I supposed to be doing right now?" "I can't remember these blasted controls!" "Where the heck did my creature go?" "Why are my followers such idiots and do nothing for themselves?" were just a few of the comments that left my mouth as I played this game. As someone stated earlier, Lionhead Studios put so much into the AI and the hyping up of the game itself, that they seemed to have forgotten the game aspect of the deal. What I heard of this game during the reviews was enough to blow my mind, and I freely admit, I was skeptical. Upon release, however, my skepticism proved correct. I knew that it would be next to impossible for this game to live up to the hype, and, well...it was. I hope to see a sequel or another expansion soon which deals with these problems, because I'll admit, I played this game for about two weeks and ended up not playing it again because of extreme boredom. Maybe I'll pick it up again and try it out, but for now, I think I'll stick with the Temple of Elemental Evil.

The Bottom Line
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's a BAD game. I only want people to be cautious when buying it, that they may shortly grow tired of it. In my personal opinion, I'd wait until Black & White 2 before I would recommend a purchase.

The Good
The engine in this game blew me away. There are no icons or menus, and every task is performed by making gestures with your mouse. You can zoom far away, hundreds of feet above your island, or you can zoom in so closely that every colonist is in full detail. The physics system is also highly detailed - you can throw objects around, and your mouse movement in the "throwing" stage determines the arc, and how the object spins. Going "bowling" with a large boulder and several buildings was highly amusing (I played Evil, naturally).

The creatures can be very amusing, when they start learning. Some of the things they learn are so bizarre, you can't help but laugh and shake your head. For example, my Stupid Tiger(tm) learned that when he was thirsty, he could cast a Rain Miracle on himself. However, he also knows that if he happens to be on fire, he can cast the same Rain Miracle to save himself.

So what does he do, when thirsty?

He sets himself on fire with a Fireball, then casts the Rain Miracle. This moment of hilarious stupidity on the part of my creature bumped this game up several notches, in my opinion.

There is also a multiplayer capability, which seems to be the real meat of the game. A handful of players can connect to a host, and play with or against each other. In addition, the state of your creature is always persistent - that is to say, anything he learns in the multiplayer game will be carried over to any singleplayer game you load up later, and vice versa. If you find yourself doing poorly in multiplayer matches, just load up a single-player mission, and teach your creature some new tricks.

The Bad
Once you've played for a while, and get beyond the initial awe at the interface and engine, you quickly discover that there isn't an actual "game" here. It's essentially Populous - you build up villages, and the more villagers that believe in you, the more powerful you become. In addition, there are only five levels in this game - some of which recycle. Level 4 is the same map as Level 1 - with a very large environmental difference (it rains fire), but it's nothing "new".

And while funny at first, the pets become infuriating. My Stupid Tiger(tm) watched an enemy creature attacking my village with fireballs, and he learned that. No matter what I do, he'll always shoot fireballs at my village now. I have to keep him chained up at the temple, where he'll do no harm - he's essentially out of the game, unless I give him constant supervision and direction.

This game is also quite resource-intensive. This unfortunately makes it almost impossible to cast miracles with complex gestures - if your system starts hitting swap, and the action pauses even slightly, your gesture won't be recognized. It would be nice if there were keyboard shortcuts for miracles, but alas, there are only a couple of keys that actually serve any purpose, none of which are related to circumventing the gesture system.

The Bottom Line
A beautiful game world, and fans of Populous would love it. If that's not your thing, though, or you're looking for a good single-player experience, you might want to wait until it appears in the bargain bin.

The Good
Considering all that the game was to accomplish, the graphics were surprisingly good. Especially amazing was the animation that was encoded in the avatar/pet.

The music was beautiful and diverse, taking arrangements from different cultures and places. The idea of miracles and casting was pretty cool. Fairly easy to learn how to play.

The Bad
Oh, so many disappointing things about this game. The hand control scheme was difficult to handle. The continual fedex missions and the requirement to babysit the avatar at the same time became nigh impossible by the 2nd land.

The Bottom Line
Beautiful, but Tedious.

The Good
I love the concept of this game: A God watching over their village and taking over others to increase your realm. One part that's always been my favorite since I was younger was the creature. I'd work hard on training them and giving them love. My favorite land is the second land, as there is a variety of miracles, silver reward scrolls and Khazar (Who is one of my favorite characters.)

The Bad
Not much bugs me about this game, but Lethys' voice kind of irks me. It's high and whiny, which is probably what was intended, but sometimes it hurts to listen to him. Land 4's constant storming and bright flashes hurt to look at, and I often need to stop playing due to them.

The Bottom Line
Black and White is a game where you play as a God and have your own creature. It's really fun and it's actually my favorite game of all time. The replay value is great since you can choose how you want to play each time. The first time you play you could be strictly good, but next time you could try being evil! It's great fun and I recommend it.

The Good
This game is sort of like a cross between a RTS and Pokemon. You're basically a god, and you float around trying to convince people to worship you. It's a novel concept. Black and White certainly gets points for being unlike other games. It's rare that you get something this original.

The Bad
Unfortunately, the big gamble didn't pay off here.

The controls are clumsy. It's impossible to navigate to precise locations quickly. This in itself wouldn't be so bad, except that the game requires precise movements.

The creature hinders rather than helps. It would be nice to have a giant cow helping you do the routine work, but half the time it eats your villagers, and the other half of the time it's throwing them into the ocean. On top of that, some of the levels won't allow you to even use the creature, meaning that you have to do everything yourself.

The idea of this game is somewhat offensive. I don't know, maybe it's just me that feels this way. One of the objectives of this game is to convince these villagers to worship you, and thus add to your "godly influence". It seems to me to be a mechanism of self-gratification for people who don't get enough attention.

The story is uninteresting and uninvolved. It's there merely to give some mediocre reason why you're slapping your giant cow around in a desperate attempt to make it behave.

The Bottom Line
This game is absolute, complete, and utter garbage, and is not even suitable to be a coaster. If you ever see it on your shelf, you should avert your eyes and hope that it dosen't make other games suck by merely being in proximity to them.

The Good
The game itself is very unique, so to say what's good about it would take so long to explain, all I can say is that playing Black And White is like nothing you've ever seen before, I mean what you do in this game has an effect in what happens later on in the game and the creature raising part of it, while tricky at first, becomes quite an important part of the game (once you've mastered it that is!)

The Bad
There is nothing bad about this game, if only there could of been a bit more features when it comes to raising you creature

The Bottom Line
This is a groundbreaking game, that's all that needs to be said about it, very recommended