EPT![[image loading]](http://abload.de/img/bw_logoc2b00.gif)
I recently dug out a really old gaming title: Black and White. I remember trying to play that game as high school student, but didn't have enough time to fully explore it. Back then, it was kind of fun to fool around in the game and it left a rather positive impression on me. Rather good graphics, an open world feel and the idea to have freedom to chose constantly how to behave; finally, you could be a blood thirsty player. Now I have a few weeks to try again. And I did (for a few days).
Introduction
Black and White is apparently, according to German PC Game Magazines, a God Simulator. It certainly is no Real Time Strategy game, as there is not much of strategy. A player starts the campaign on a remote island called Eden. He has a temple and controls a village. Later you'll be able to cast spells, such as generating food, lumber or woods, or destroying spells like a flame ball or bolts.
Regardless, there's not much to manage for you, or nothing you can control as you could in better simulations. You need to take care of food and lumber supplies, can manually raise several different structures, but that's mostly simple stuff. Theoretically speaking, you can force villagers to harvest foods on fields or from sea, make them craft buildings, tell them to make children (by kissing) or send them to pray. More on that later.
After running through several tutorial tasks, such as „throw this stone over there“ or „pick up this villager, who for no reason at all, lies around“ you'll get your very own creature: an orang utan, a tiger or a cow. I picked the ape. The next hour you'll spend time on teaching your creature how to behave, how to cast spells and how to convert other villages. That's pivotal. You have help from some sort of AI monster creature, who'll annoy the fuck out of you.
In scenarios and the campaign it's the ultimate goal to defeat other gods. Gods who can do the same stuff than you and have their own creatures. You can convert other villages by showing your magic or using your creature to impress peasants. The difference between the campaign and scenarios is that the campaign has dozens of subquests you can solve or ignore.
The most interesting part is that you can either be a cruel or a generous god or both at the same time. Same is true for your creature, it can either be a saint or a jerk.
The Story
The story of the campaign is kind of a stereotype. You'll start on Eden and think you're the only god. Fun. Then you get your creature and educate it. Dull. Suddenly, a vortex opens and flames and shit spit out. You learn there are other gods, who are evil, their boss being some idiot called Nemesis. A really innovative name you have there. However, there are good gods as well, trying to fight Nemesis. They also tell you shit about three souls. Your goal is to obtain these three souls. Hence: you're a ginger god. You can't play jazz. Yet. There's no reason to chase three souls, but you do.
You follow your allied god into the second world and help him fight an ally of Nemesis, a guy called Letis. That's easy as fuck, cause he is stupid. So is your ally. The two of them fight by not fighting and not converting villages. So you learn how to build your village, expand and convert. Once you converted one of Letis' villages Nemesis pops in and bombs the shit out of your ally. GG NO RE. He literally uses Independence Day blasts, you can not defend against. Now the question: why wouldn't he kill you? Nobody knows, he just choses not to, a perfect Bond villain. Turns out, your ally had one soul hidden in his creature; but fear not, Letis steals it with HIS creature and disappears via a Vortex. You follow, third world. But before he does so, he magically starts to control your creature and kidnaps it.
Consequently, in the third world, you have to convert villages on your own. Which is kind of annoying, as you can not perform magic outside of your influence circle – you'd normally use your own creature to do that. So, time passes as you expand your village and take control over villages. But there's more – your creature is held prisoner by Letis' creature. The more villages you destroy, the weaker the prison boundaries become. At last, Letis' fights back. You take over the first town, he sends villagers on fire back. If one reaches you, you have to start converting again. Hf. Same shit happens for the next two villages. However, if you're patient, you'll win soon enough. Now you have the choice to completely kill Letis or just get the Soul he stole and jump into yet another Vortex.
Fourth world, you're back in Eden, except it rains fire, Ogers raid villages and the sky is red. You learn that Nemesis took over control and set up plagues. You have to fight them by beating the Ogers with your creature (which you 'muricated in Letis' world), take over a village and by either killing an old man or re-uniting him with his wife. Afterwards you have to lift the curse of a skeleton village. You'll earn the second soul and can go into a Vortex, after Nemesis challenged you to beat him.
Right now, I'm in the fifth world. He cursed my creature thrice; each curse can be lifted by destroying enemy village's wonders. Well... not hard at all. No idea how the story ends, I guess I get the third soul, Nemesis dies and everyone is happy (or not if I'm evil, not sure).
Criticism and Stuff
The game has some fun stuff, which I can't really judge.
Decisions and „Strategy“
First off, you have the Word Clip in double version to help you out – an old guy resembling your good conscience and a burned Ewok-Devil for your bad side. Who you listen to is up to you, at least that's the intention. Ironically, the good one is so annoying, you want to disobey, while the Ewok helps you to be good by pointing out that you're about to become weaker if you kill your own believers.
You'll soon figure out that converting with bad and hurtful spells is not efficient at all. E.g. if you burn down a village and convert it soon after, you still have to repair it and grow more peoples. If you don't your influence only marginally expands, which in turns will prohibit you to perform more spells. That sucks.
The Simulation also, theoretically again, allow you to plan villages. If you raise more houses, people will mate faster. That's bullshit. You can still force them to mate, by assigning them the roles as breeders or something. Then they'll make children – by kissing each other. Other structures like kindergarten help to keep the children at bay. It's not needed. Or you could spend thousands of lumber resources on a grave yard. There the dead are burried and people will stop mourning them in the streets and go to work instead. However, it's far better to have their remains lying around, because you can easily sacrifice them and get instant mana boosts – without being labelled as bad god.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/w8pMJZb.jpg)
Sexy Time, as NSFW as it gets
To make it all worse, the interface is shit. You have a few short cuts, such as R to select the most recent spell you casted, but nothing REALLY helpful. You have to turn the camera to focus something, you have to „paint“ spells in order to activate them if you're not in vision of your temple and so on. If you throw shit like flame balls or stones, you can't possibly aim accurately. Sometimes, for no reason at all, you'll throw in a complete opposite direction, burning bystanders you don't want to hit. If you drop a villager on a field he should be turned into a farmer, yet, if you scrolled out just one pixel too much, he will plunge to death.
![[image loading]](http://abload.de/img/1h029iukv.jpg)
The Red Ewok of Advice
However, it has its funny sides. I killed three villagers before I created one farmer, much to the like of the burned Ewok cheering for me, while the old guy paper clip dude was crying how evil I was. My creature, standing by to learn, picked up other villagers and throw them into the sea.
Also, villagers often tell you, like directly, how they feel. If someone dies, they'll cry „TOD“ (death in German) out loud. If they want food, they scream „We need Food“ and so on and so forth. Now, thanks to some bug, whenever I made two people mate (kiss), they'd still cry out „TOD“ in a really deep, lost voice. It's somewhat satirical.
The Creature
A funky idea is that your creature has different values, depending what you picked. The Tiger is a fierce fighter, the ape learns fast, the cow... I don't know, I think it it's better at impressing people. The ape is still the creature to go for, because it learns how to cast fire within five minutes, while the Tiger is a child left behind. I remember playing B/W at a LAN three years back, where my ape threw lighting bolts in a fight while my friend's tiger wasn't even in reach to hit a punch, still trying to figure out how to cast the same spell.
The teaching, btw, works if you either pet your creature or hit it. This way you teach them to be more interested, to treat villagers positively or negatively and what to eat. Not that this works immediately. Like, regardless of how hard you try, you can't make the tiger eat crop automatically, he'll still devour cattle if he's unobserved – or villagers. The creatures will also take a shit wherever they stand. Right after they ate. Sometimes they eat and take a dump at the same time. Also, more annoying, your creature has to be in the „mood“ for a special behaviour. The fucking ape tries to play or five minutes, so you only have the choice to either reward or punish him, only triggering him to play more or less. Only if he makes the gesture for interest, you can reward him for that behaviour. This way, it can take up to an hour to teach him to be more kind.
Kindness for instance means that the creature will randomly cast „positive“ spells on villagers. E.g. watering plants. That's what they understand of being helpful – watering a random tree 10 kms apart from the village. Rarely, they cast health, food or lumber. The most annoying kindness feature is that they'll randomly pick up villagers, cuddle them (which makes the villagers 50% scared) and afterwards making them breed – an 'angel like' creature apparently is a peeping tom. He'll follow around his breeders and sits there. Good thing there is no masturbating going on.
If you want to punish your creature, you should be VERY careful where you do it. If it stands in the middle of a town and just ate a kid, you want to slap it. If you do, you end up also slapping the houses, or rephrased, destroying them.
Funny Glitches?
I still haven't decided if bugs annoy me or not. Some of the decisions you make really do have consequences. E.g. in world one you'll encounter some asshole musician pioneers, who'll sing your their quest in the utmost emberassing song – they want to craft a ship and sail away. The Ewok will tell you to burn them, the bearded paper clip will tell you to help them. If you help them, they'll return in world five and grant you an extra village – a huge bonus.
For other sub quests you'll receive instantenous wonders, e.g. a lighting bolt or a health spell, which automatically recharges and therefore is faster usable than from your temple. In World 1, shortly after having your own creature, you'll have to find a guy who kidnaps children. You find him, but can't pick him up, as he runs away to quickly. Consequently, you have to use your creature to get a hold of him, as he will freeze in fear when it approaches. Then the creature will pick it up and a monologue of said evildoer Belgian kidnapper will start, he'll whine about being Shauni towards gurls. Then you can decide to kill him or bring him to his hideout – depending on your decision the fail-PUA will give you either health spells or a lighting bold. As my creature could use the health spell, I wanted to „help“ him and the children. However, while still ranting about not being alpha enough, my creature was hungry and ate him. This resulted in the monologue continueing from the stomach of my creature, who already jumped around in joy, ending in my paper clips explaining what could happen. Three seconds after, the Ewok was laughing and I had the bold, not one option to change the outcome in hindsight. I had to reload and play another ten minutes to slap the shit out of my ape after it finally ate some villager. Sigh. Not saying it wasn't funny to listen to the belly-close up-monologue with overlapping Ewok subtitles celebrating the evil spirit of my creature.
The creature ↔ villager relationship is also always interesting. The way it tries to be helpful is hilarious. It followed some elderly man around for about ten minutes, before curing him with the health spell it just learned, then casted birds on him to impress him; it then realized he was about to chop some wood, so he helped out there as well – he ripped out the giant tree and held it up, not knowing what to do with it. Then the AI turned for the worse, as the ape forgot what it intended to do and threw it over the shoulder, onto the elderly man's head and killed him this way. He saw some children approach the dead man's skeleton and mourn him (no graveyard) – and facepalmed. Enter subtitles: 'Your villagers appreciate the help of your creature', while a random voice cried 'TOOOOOOOD'.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/4AT0Nn9.jpg)
Kindergarten = Toilet
Also, your creature grows in size. With increased magnitude, it also needs more food and consquently takes bigger dumps. As previously mentioned, the toilet is anywhere the creature stands. It will bow down in the most respectful manner and then release a literal shitstorm. E.g. on a Kindergarten. Most memorable though, my creature casted three times food over a town congregation, drowing the people in grain, and then, once the people crawled out under the pile, shat on them. As the congregation took place on a cliff, some of the people, including children, were rolled over with grain, then shit and then fell to their death, while the survivors started to dance around the creature.
Dancing is a tool your creature uses to impress a village – the more it dances ,the more points it gets: moon walk included. Problem: moon walking over town halls, houses and grave yards. For some reason, if you're creature is mad and destroys buildings, the people are scared; if shit is destroyed by dance, people love you.
Related to dumps, your creature can eat anything and will if you pet him enough – e.g. trees, own feces and stones. Yes stones. It will then puke it out, but regardless, it worked. Even stones on fire. For scientific purposes I trained it to eat stones. It ate stones. It wanted to be helpful. So it threw stones on the town hall, so people would have food. It destroyed the town hall. Enter subtitles: 'The villagers appreciate the help of your creature'.
Related to the fourth world, in which you have to re-unite man and wife, you have no way to reach the man's house in the first place. It's on top of a mountain outside of your influence. Hence, your creature has to pick up the wife and carry it to the mountain. That's possible in the vanilla version, but not in the patch version, as there are stones blocking you and too big for your creature to move. So... what happens now? The only solution to solve this by being good would be to wait until your influence grew, so you can lift the wife and place hear near the hut. I didn't know this. Instead I had my creature giving the woman a lift. It ran around the mountain house in circles, until it figured out it could not get up (the womand died twice due to hunger before saving btw). My creature, the epitome of intelligence, figured out, it could also throw her up. It worked, she smashed the roof, and killed both herself and the man in the process. The aim of my creature is unmatched. For some reason this still counted as positive solution and the sequence afterwards showed both living – well...
Ranking:
7/10 would shit on villagers again
. you know these things are meant to be fun and they are! I threw a lot of stones at anything, loved the mechanics. also the game evolves around petting your creature and casting spells,playful stuff, not so much about hitting perfect allintimings. 
