|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
Review: Black and WhiteReviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: April 24, 2002
I'd like to start by offering a formal apology to the makers of Survivor: The Interactive Game. What I said, I said in ignorance. Not in ignorance of how terrible your game was; so little effort was put into it that you might as well have just made a DVD of highlights of the TV show and called that a "game." Hey! I can select which episode to watch! Increase the volume! I can turn the power on or off! No, what I'd like to apologize for is my own ignorance. Survivor was a very boring game with absolutely no control over anything. What I didn't realize was that it is possible to create a game where you have control over every aspect, and have it be just as screamingly frustrating. That game is Black and White.
Black and White is a "god game." I'd like to talk about this genre. I've noticed that in a lot of "god games," I seem to spend an awful lot of time doing crap for my followers. Growing their crops, finding their lost loved ones, building things for them. Gods don't do this. Gods do whatever they damn well please, and you'd better suck it up, or you're likely to have a limb withered. Black and White tries to incorporate this; heck, it's the name of the product. You can either be good or evil, and it has no effect on the game (unlike, say, Baldur's Gate, where city guards come after you if you build an evil reputation, and worse, goods cost more at the store). Nevertheless, you still end up having to help your followers (who look like hobbits) build temples, etc., if only to help yourself.
A cow. Also, they fart. The creature management aspect of Black and White has gotten a lot of praise, attributed mainly to the AI of the beasties. See, if you pet them, they like it. You have to feed them. If you put a leash on them, they'll follow you. I'm sorry, did everyone else miss the Tomagotchi craze? Did I dream it? Was that only the kids in my school who were into that? If so, I've got a great idea for a ground breaking game; a baby...who dances! Anyway, so you use your creature and your divine powers to move about your primitive island home, performing missions for your followers to increase their belief in you. And the game goes on like this, accumulating power, knowledge, etc. Assuming you get that far, of course. I found the game so incredibly aggravating that I had to leave my apartment so I would have more space in which to swear. Black and White's major flaw is its interface. It's too robust. You can move forward and backward, side to side, rotate, pan up and down, zoom in and out. All of this requires about eight million key combinations, and a two button mouse. Provided, of course, that Black and White works with your mouse. The tutorial tells me that I should be able to zoom in and out by clicking both right and left buttons. But doing so caused my point of view to plummet to ground level, where it stayed until I released both buttons.
And what's worse is the feeling the game is deliberately trying to sabotage your ability to succeed. Early on, you're learning how to take care of your creature, and you have to feed it. Okay, I had the tiger, tigers eat meat. Hey, there's a sheep just wandering around. Great. Except that a later mission is to help a shepherd find his lost sheep. When I trashed a nonbeliever's hut, I was given a water miracle. "Click on the chest," said the game--and let me stress again that this is Black and White I'm playing, not some sort of "Aggravate You By Giving You Instructions Contrary to What You Should Be Doing" mod for Black and White--so I clicked on the chest and got a rain cloud. "Now click the action key to perform the miracle." Did. Got some rain, which shortly ran out. Then, about three minutes later, the nonbeliever set fire to my storehouse. Boy, it sure would have been nice if I had some rain to put that fire out. Of course, I had been meaning to crush the nonbeliever right away. Unfortunately, he ran off during the cut scene. I would have tracked him down, but I had to find my creature, who broke his leash during the cut scene also.
One of the oldest cliches in gaming is that characters who can jump from train car to train car can't step over slightly higher elevation on otherwise level turf. This, you see, keeps you on the path, and more importantly, keeps you on the story. If you break the linear structure, you'd better be sure it helps the game. Deus Ex did this marvelously, but in the end, you were being given different paths to the same goal. Black and White may have a structure to the story, but good luck keeping tracking of it as you extricate yourself from the foliage and try to track down errant animals. But when I sit down to play a game, I want to play the game, not take a freaking driver's license exam. Thankfully, just like Survivor, the command-Q shortcut works as expected.
 [an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
. |
|
||||
You also get a creature, a giant animal who is supposed to be an extension of you power on the physical plane. You train the creature to follow commands using a reward/punishment technique. This strikes me, however, as being a lot less like Bullfinch's Mythology, and a lot more like Cat Fancy magazine. Do these animals reflect the awesome power of a deity? I'll let you decide; your beginning choices are a tiger, an ape, or a cow.
The game takes place on a nicely rendered island. However, navigating this territory is a colossal pain in the butt. I constantly found myself getting lost as I zoomed into a mountain while trying to advance slowly. There's no way to maintain a relative elevation, unless you zoom all the way out, and then you can't see any detail on the island. There's nothing quite so frustrating as having your "consciences"--a little devil and an angel--telling you there's an emergency on the island, and being unable to find the emergency because your rotate command has shot you half-way around the world, behind a cliff wall, and into a forest. This is not a rare occurrence.
I just finished the book