Black & White

Tom's Comments: Peter Molyneux wants to mess with you. He wants you to leisurely play around in this little world he's created. It's inhabited by tiny people who look like a cross between his Populous denizens and the kids in Rollercoaster Tycoon. It is also inhabited by thirty foot tall animals who point at things, crap, and dance. Your hand also lives there, played by the same hand that was in Dungeon Keeper.

Black & White isn't a conventional computer game so much as the computer game equivalent of legos: you make of it what you will. If you're griping about feeding worshippers, moving the mouse in gestures to cast spells, camera controls, or the mandatory tutorial, you're missing the point. Which is that Peter Molyneux wants to mess with you. Black & White is exploration and experimentation. Don't come here looking for gameplay, interface, AI, pace, strategy, and all those other words you use to evaluate the other games on your hard drive.

The irony of Black & White is that it is at once open-ended and sadly constrained. It is both epic and petty. It is alternately relaxing and infuriating. Although it is innovative, it is nevertheless a combination of old stand-bys like Populous, digital pets, and Dungeon Keeper.

There are only a handful of islands to play on, each with a few quests scattered around and no time limit. This gives the game a languid feel. Go ahead, futz around as long as you want. Unfortunatley, as you progress through missions, the game throws some really restrictive puzzles at you. For this reason, I think I'm through with Black & White. The "twist" in level three was pretty aggravating. The "puzzle" in level four, which consists basically of being swiftly and repeated kicked when you're down, isn't any fun. And I haven't confirmed this, but I've been told there's a bug in level five that can really screw up the later game. If this is true, I don't have the heart to go any further. I've since given up on the single player campaign and I've been spending my time butting hands with an AI god on one of the skirmish maps.

Although the subject matter is epic -- we're talking god-hood, after all -- the mechanics are petty. I use my divine hand to feed people grain and give them lumber to build houses. I relocate villagers to new houses. I manage mana to cast spells. Sure, the spells are pretty dandy, and I like the gesturing system that makes them feel more like spells than game features. But Black & White is more often about feeding people who whine rather than smiting unbelievers.

But the bottom line for Black & White is that it was a strangely relaxing experience. I didn't mind toting villagers one at a time to their new homes. I didn't mind dropping resources by the handful down onto my grateful worshippers. I didn't mind crawling across the landscape with my lone hand. I didn't mind watching my virtual pet's antics even if he wouldn't do what I wanted him to do. I got what I wanted from Black & White: several hours of unique diversion. It's not like Black & White is supposed to "change the world" or "shatter the last arbitrary boundary between culture and technology".

It was a great ten or fifteen hours while it lasted, but now that the novelty has worn off and the frustration has set in, I'm done messing with Peter Molyneux.

Over to you, Mark