Long, long ago, in a land far, far away I found a nexus of gateways to marvelous universes. Okay... it was sometime last year at Wal-Mart and I found a pack of EA games at some ridiculously low price. Among those games was Black & White 2 (B&W2), sequel to, you guessed it, Black & White (B&W). They obviously dish out the big bucks to their marketing team for coming up with unique and catchy names.
If you're not aware, B&W2 is a "god-game." It's exactly how it sounds, you play the role of a deity whose goal is to help your people through whatever the dilemma du jour might be. Of course, this dilemma might be something as basic as providing them with houses to live in or you might be trying to fend off the opposing army while carefully balancing your village's needs against the resources you actually have available. Unlike other sim games, you actually have an avatar that represents "you" in the game world. In B&W2 (as in B&W) you're represented as a giant hand floating around the island. Which is convenient since you're picking things up all the time. If you'd been a foot or elbow it just wouldn't have worked.
One thing that sets the B&W games apart is the free-form style of play. You can be a benevolent deity, providing for your villagers' needs or you can be a heartless master, literally throwing your followers to their death on a whim. The game cleverly changes the design of buildings and the coloring of the landscape to reflect your alignment. If you're kind, then flowers will grow everywhere you touch the ground, however if you're cruel you'll see lava bubbling up through cracks in the wasteland of your domain. Of course, since you can tread the line and be both good and evil, the game might have more aptly been named Some Shade of Grey 2. I didn't make a conscious choice about the matter, but I tend to be more good than evil only because I don't want to spend my time throwing villagers into the torture pits. Instead I focus on expanding my influence and building whatever ridiculous monument my people demand. "Do we really need ANOTHER fertility statue in town?"
Fortunately, you do get some help in managing your village. Well, as much help as you can from a pre-pubescent King Kong. The game gives you the opportunity, before you actually take control of the village, to choose among a few creatures to be your assistant and pet, whom I'll be calling Stanley for the rest of this post. The choice before you is between an ape, a lion, a wolf, and... a cow? More importantly the two characters who appear as your conscience constantly refer to Stanley as a male and the cow has very prominent udders. Someone apparently skipped their biology class.
Stanley begins as a blank slate which will periodically try various things, like eating, sleeping on, playing with, or even defecating on the various things in the village. Your job is to punish or reward him for the appropriate behaviors. For instance, if you want to encourage Stanley to only defecate on fields (fertilizing the crops, though I'd personally worry about what kinds of bacteria live in giant creature feces) you stroke him once he's decided to perform that action. Similarly if you want to keep him from trying to eat rocks, you have to slap him around (by dragging the mouse across him quickly) to help him get the idea. Of course you can also simply open one of the menus and select each action Stanley might perform and train him all at once, but that could take a while and sometimes it's fun to watch him try to eat a tree before you let him know it's a bad idea.
Aside from Stanley you can also get villagers to aid you in your work. By picking a villager up and dropping them near specific locations, you can create "disciples" who will perform whatever task you assign them until they eventually die of old age (provided you don't feed them to your creature first). Now, the disciples largely make sense. I'll put farmers in fields, builders near my new housing development, and I'll throw some foresters and mineworkers out to gather resources. However the strangest disciple is one that you're encouraged to create, sometimes in bulk. By taking a male villager and dropping it near a female (or vice-versa) you create disciple breeders. That's right, you can tell your villagers that their sole purpose in life is to do nothing but make babies. If you ask me, that's just a little creepy.
Of course, it's important to have a quickly growing population in order to conquer the lands you find yourself in throughout the game. Each land essentially becomes an real-time strategy game in which you try to out-influence an opposing deity. You have the option of simply building a city of sufficient impressiveness so as to cause other villages to come flocking to your gates or you can create armies and send them (along with Stanley) out to do battle and capture neighboring towns. The trick comes when you realize that you're only able to perform miracles or other "god-like" actions within the ring of influence around your village(s). So in order to participate directly in battles they have to be staged within your influence or you have to leapfrog your troops out to capture your neighbors and use them as staging platforms. I personally find myself capturing empty villages (that have already converted and come flocking to me) simply because I need the extra space.
On top of all this management, they throw quests. The quests are generally minor and don't impact the outcome too much (though they do grant you points toward buying new abilities, etc.) but they're there. The quests span everything from throwing a keg from island to island, helping a bunch of brothers get hammered while they sing you a song, to catching some 20+ lambs that are launched from a ewe in labor. So if you ever need a diversion from micromanaging your baby booming villagers and keeping Stanley from pooping on their heads, there's usually at least a couple quests in the land to provide that break for you. Because, you know, you can't just save it and go outside or something.
While you're playing this game you'll find yourself constantly juggling between meeting your villagers' needs, training Stanley, building walls and armies, and performing the occasional quest for some extra points. And what's it all for? So that a few hundred tiny virtual people will jump up and down and say you're great! When you have their pre-programmed appreciation, do you really need anything else?
Just Use a (Managed) VPS
3 weeks ago
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