More Black & White

Choices, choices, choices

One example of a quest that we saw at the show involved a lost villager in the woods behind some houses. A woman comes out and prays to you (her god) requesting for assistance in finding her injured brother. This of course presents you with a number of choices. You can try to find the kid in the vast stretches of woods, pick him up with your "hand of god" cursor and return him. But it would be very tedious. Or, as our demonstrator showed us, you can pick up the insipid woman, throw her 150 yards into a rock face and kill her for wasting your time. This is clearly a sinister action that will result in your animal becoming more evil looking. Want to be doubly nasty? Our Lionhead demonstrator picked up the woman's lifeless body and placed it next to the injured boy in the woods. The boy looked up, saw his dead sister, bemoaned her passing and then died himself out of a broken heart. Talk about triple bonus points for evil!

That's definitely not Squirtle

Fiendish

Can I get an amen from the congregation?

As a god, your powers and influence increase depending on how many people worship you. The more people who worship you, the more spells and abilities you get. You also have to be careful about how your animal is doing in the world. You can control his actions of course but left to his own devices, he'll act according to his current demeanor. If he's currently evil, he'll do evil stuff. If he's a goody two shoes, then he'll act like one. You can watch him and train him the same way you'd train a dog. If he picks up a villager and eats him, you can reinforce that type of behavior by petting and stroking the animal's belly. Want to stop him from eating your worshippers? Give that monster a sharp slap upside the head and he'll learn quickly that it's bad to eat villagers.

Fight!

Happy little guy isn't he?

Fight fight fight!

We were also treated to an amusing fight sequence with a rival animal. Your animal will automatically fight but you can give him cues by clicking on areas of the enemy's body. Your animal will then target those areas. As they fight your animals collect wounds and bruises that are visible - that way you can tell if a certain animal is a bit more of an experienced boxer than yours is. The actual animations were rather funny. There's just something about seeing a two legged cow putting up his dukes and throwing wild haymakers and uppercuts. One particularly hilarious sequence had an enemy cow whiffing on an uppercut and our ape responding with a deft pimp slap upside the head!

Aww how cute

Neutral Wolf

There's so much more to Black and White that we just can't fit in this space. Extraordinary graphics, spells, more quests, etc. The seemingly limitless possibilities of the game are tantalizing, and astonishing at the same time. B&W is definitely on our top 5 games of the show list.