Great experiment (Black and White (PC))

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	Black and White (PC)
Date:	03/09/09 (3 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Superb visuals, interesting morality idea

Disadvantages: A little difficult to get to grips with sometimes

Black and White was an incredibly hyped game back in 2001 developed by famed game creator Peter Molyneux (who most recently released Spore). Melding elements of simulator games, real time strategy, and even a little from the beat em up genre, it's a very curious enigma of a game, where the player essentially plays God to a vast island.

You control an animated hand, and with it, can pick up (and even kill) villagers, grant their wishes, help the town prosper, and perform celestial miracles. The ultimate goal is to have every village on the island eating out of your hand, but my favourite component of the game is the creature aspect, where you can obtain a pet and teach it to perform almost any action that you can perform yourself. The pet can be one of any number of creatures, and this is by far the most rewarding aspect of the game, both in how insanely cute it is, and the sheer impressiveness of being able to train something to recall your commands so well. Ultimately, also, you can get your pet to fight other pets online, although this was quite widely criticised for being buggy, due to the constraints of most Internet connections at the time.

The film is one of the few that has a very strong moral impetus - the game title itself proposes that you can either be Black (Bad) or White (Good). You can go either route to get to the top - that is, be a tyrant who runs a dystopia, or a kind, forgiving and helpful God, although in my experience, being Evil was far easier, as the people didn't complain so much, and knew that I'd throw them in the sea if they didn't listen to me.

Although some of the ideas are a little too cumbersome, and the game didn't wholly live up to the huge potential, it's still an extremely impressive exercise, and a superb testament to the power of artificial intelligence. It would have been difficult to live up to the immense hype, but Molyneux made a damn good effort nonetheless, and otherwise made a visually impressive, and incredibly inventive game.

Summary: A mostly successful experiment