Black & White

Peter Molyneux headed Bullfrog when it developed the original Populous and other sim based strategy games such as Powermonger (1990), Magic Carpet (1992), Syndicate (1993) and Dungeon Keeper (1997). He's since left and established Lionhead Studios in 2000. Black & White was its first title, taking the God game genre to the next level. Like many of these games, there is a self contained and lively environment that players interact with (all in 3D naturally) as well as the game's signature feature - giant animal familiars towering over the landscape and whose powers and looks change depending on how good or evil you play. Black & White caused more than just a few ripples in gaming circles when it first appeared, and it represents a significant step forward in pushing game worlds to more complex and subtle heights.

This is actually quite amazing. Be warned though, its a genuine attempt to be different. While many games fall into preset genres (3D shooter, RTS, RPG, etc.) Black & White is basically a character study. It closely resembles the God Sim, but with a strong dose of Tamagotchi. Or is it a psychology test of the player? Its very subtle, and probably the most sophisticated example of game physics and AI published at the time.

The most notable feature in the game is the giant Creature each player gets, and the character AI driving it. The Creature has to learn everything either from you or whatever it picks up from its surroundings. As it grows progressively larger, it can learn to do useful things, acquire spells, help out in building and repairing your towns, rescue villagers and fight mighty battles with rival Gods' Creatures, and a lot more besides. Or conversely, you can train it to do evil deeds, like eat children and destroy villages...

You can leave the game running for a few hours and your creature will wander off and maybe learn some dance steps in the next village. Or maybe eat the next village! Since you play the part of a deity, there's no right and wrong in how you approach to the game. You can play for Good or Evil, or change your mind halfway through. The open ended and loosely structured island "missions" certainly upset a few gamers. Black & White doesn't have a linear plot that runs on rails, and there's nothing to reel you in towards a single conclusion that involves blowing up a base or killing an end of level Boss. You've got to get off your bum on this one. Players spend a lot of time exploring their environment just to work out what the game is up to, not to mention having to train their Creature - or rather, trying to work out how to train their Creature. The villagers and the territory that you annex is certainly just like a regular RTS, and very reminiscent of Populous, but the Creatures added an extra dimension that a lot of people seemed to either love or utterly loath.

Like many of its Bullfrog predecessors, Black & White is one of those rare games where figuring the ins and outs of the game and learning how to teach the Creature how to do (and not to do) things is an integral part of the game experience. Trying to change the established conventions of any media is never easy. Some people simply just won't get it - as evidenced by some of the polarised player reviews at sites like Gamespot.

Depending on the cumulative sum of all its actions, a Creature's appearance slowly changes. A thoroughly Good Creature will start to grow bright colours and emit a wholesome aura; a Creature committing Evil will inexorably revert to a smouldering and spiky monstrosity that strikes terror in the hearts of all your villagers. Villagers and towns have a cumulative memory - and I mean, they really seem to remember things - so the old adage: "once bitten, twice shy" really applies here. If your Creature eats some children, for example, you may need to perform a fair bit of persuasion before the villagers learn to trust it again. While the mechanics are pretty nifty and the graphics a little mixed, the interface can be cumbersome at times in that innovative but perverse Bullfrog way.

As a result this was precisely the sort of game that found itself plastered over every design and cyber magazine you could think of in the late Nineties, with lots of ruminations over artifical life, artifical intelligence and other exciting cybery subjects (which sort of evaporated with the dotcom crash and the Internet turning into nothing more than a virtual magazine rack and pickup joint), while regular hard core gamers thought it was a pretentious pile of poo because everything in it wasn't immediately obvious . It was the sort of game that pushed boundaries and let the commentators offer it as an example of why computer games should be taken more seriously compared to other artforms. It also appealed to the newer-than-new Brave New World school of thinking the Internet is still the Next Big Thing. And maybe not just a magazine rack for those with computers...

Lionheart has also developed a few interesting add-ons you can download. There's a WinAmp music plug in that lets your Creature dance in time to tunes played on WinAmp, and a Soccer plug-in where your villagers can build a soccer pitch and play the World Game!

A new studio, Black & White Studios has been spun off by Lionheart to do nothing more than develop the Black & White game series.

Expansion: Creature Isle. Apart from discovering new creatures, you can give your Creature a pet of its own or find it a mate.

The official sequel, Black & White 2 has been released. Sure enough, its generating pre-release hype of the "next big thing", but this time the strategy element is a little more focused. Some of the graphics look strongly reminiscent of the Total War series' battlefields. But, we'll see. The graphics at least look amazing, and it will at least be something interesting one way or another. I really must flesh this all out further.