Black & White 2 - Lionhead - PC

[Samwise]

I was a big fan of Black & White 1 (when I wasn't hitting gamebreaking bugs), but I somehow missed B&W2 when it came out, and there was very little buzz (either positive or negative) around it after release.  Yesterday I finally fired it up to see if I'd been missing anything.

I played it until I went to bed, and this morning I snuck another half hour in before work, so it must be doing something right.  I haven't hit a single crash yet, which makes it the most stable Lionhead game I've played.  The world is pretty; mostly it's B&W1 with lots of polish.  That about sums up the game, really.  Building is more pleasant, with a menu of buildings instead of the weird scaffold-stacking thing from the first game, and the ability to free-draw roads over the landscape.  Creature training works about the same way, except without guesswork; when you interact with the creature to reward/punish him the game tells you what specific behavior you're reinforcing, and allows you to set exactly how disposed the creature should be towards it in the future.

The biggest turn-off for me has been the tutorial sections, the first two of which are how to (I'm not kidding) move your view to the left, and then how to move your view to the right.  And although you can skip a block of tutorials, once you've start a tutorial you can't fast-forward through the text, or even escape out to the menu.  Good time to go get a sandwich.

The major addition to the game is the military units, but it doesn't take over the entire game like I'd feared (although I'm still only on the second level).  You can turn some of your villagers into platoons of up to 20 soldiers, and then tell those platoons to defend a location, or attack an enemy platoon, or try to capture an enemy city.  I had wondered why you'd bother with mortal armies when you had godly powers at your disposal; the answer is that you can freely command your armies outside of your "Influence" area, so the armies fill a similar sort of role as the Creature, except that they're better behaved.  (You can also tell your Creature to run around beating up enemy armies, which is really fun to watch.)

All in all, I've been having a good time so far.

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Verdict: Buy it if you liked Black & White 1.

[IainC]

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Verdict: Buy it if you liked Black & White 1.

Smallest. Demographic. Evar.

[Samwise]

 

[Yegolev]

Does your creature still shit in your granary no matter how much you beat his ass?

[Samwise]

No.  Creatures are both easier to manage and not buggy as fuck.  It's a nice change of pace.  I stopped playing Black and White 1 around the time that my pet decided that his purpose in life was to throw fireballs at my temple until he passed out from exhaustion and/or heavy beatings, wake up, and keep at it.

I did train my chimp to poop on enemy villages, though.  It'll be great when he's big enough for the turds to crush buildings.   

(edit) I'll expand on how the creature training works.  When your creature is doing something, or about to do it, whether it's because you told him to or whether he thought of it on his own, you can click and hold on him to bring up the usual "reward/punish" interface like in B&W1.  The behavior that he was in the middle of is displayed on a slider that shows how likely he is to engage in that behavior on his own in the future; it goes from "I will never do this no matter what" to "I will do this at every opportunity", with lots of variance in between for "I will do this seldom" or "I will do this often".  When you reward, the slider goes one way, and when you punish, it goes the other.  You can reward/punish as much as you like in any given session, so you only need to teach any given lesson once.  And from what I've seen so far, when you tell him not to do something, he will not EVER do it again unless you specifically tell him to.

[Yegolev]

Oh dammit.  I didn't want to give Molyneux any more money.

[Samwise]

If you paid for the buggy/unfinished version but boycott the more polished version, you're sending the wrong message.

[Sky]

Eh, I think not giving Molyneux any money is always the right message anymore. What the fuck happened to you, Pete? You and Sid need to go hunting with Cheney.

I'm not entirely convinced I won't send Will Wright along with you next year....

[Samwise]

I spent much of last night playing ding-dong-ditch at the Norse village.  I'd have the ape go over, kick their wall until part of it caved in, and then run like hell before the archers filled him full of holes.

This is way more fun than it should be.  Also, my pet radiates pure malevolence now.  The ground under his feet cracks and glows with evil.  They did a really good job with that.