Sound and Interface

Fart Jokes

If there's one aspect of this game that doesn't need changing, it's the sound. The music is subtle and doesn't get in the way, but if you listen to it you'll find that it fits in the game well. Cultures have their own style of music at the worship site, from stereotypical Native American drumming, to a play on Sing Sing Sing at the Celtic site.

Sunset

The Norse wonder

The effects of ripping a tree out of the ground, casting a miracle, destroying a house and the like are excellent as well. These sounds could get annoying since you need to listen to them so many times, but luckily they don't. The creature sounds - when it giggles from petting, or whines from punishment - fit the cartoon adaptation of the animal. That is, the lion roars and the cow moos. Even the farting noise when the creature takes a dump fits. I wonder how long it took the sound engineers to find the perfect farting noise…

It seems that voice acting in games has been improving lately, and Black & White keeps with that trend. From the conscience devil/angel to the villagers to the special characters, all of the voice acting is great. I especially like the three pilgrims that sing their quest requests (it sounds like Monty Python's Bruces' Philosophers Song).

Interface

The nice thing about Black & White's interface is that there isn't one. All you have to interact with the game is the proverbial hand of God (yours). Need to kill a villager? Just pick him up and throw him against a side of a mountain. To move the map, just grab it and pull. The interface is designed so that you don't need to learn commands or complex menu structures to do something. Everything is already done for you, or it just takes a few motions of the hand.

Now that would be scary

The Temple filled with worshipers

The spartan interface isn't perfect however. I ran into a lot of problems with inaccuracy. The hand is plam-down with five fingers open, so to pick up an object you need to move the entire hand over the object. Unfortunately this is like typing on a keyboard with your elbow - the hand is too large to accurately click on an object. And you can forget about trying to pick one object that's close to another. For example, on the last island there is a miracle dispenser under a large rock. When I tried to tap the dispenser, I ended up tapping the rock, breaking the rock in two. The two halves of the rock fell on the miracle dispenser, destroying it.

Slackers, all of them

The Japanese wonder

Saving/Loading

One big gripe I have about this game is the save/load game function. The biggest problem is that you can't restart a level. I can't express how incredibly frustrating this is. In games that are mission based, you'll come across a mission where you realize that you've made a mistake in the start of the level and that you'd like to go back and fix it. You can't do that in Black & White. Well, just save it manually right? The problem is you can't save the game until your temple is built, since the only way to manually save the game is in the save game room. A great example of how frustrating this problem is comes in the fourth island, where you start off with a small village under constant attack from fireballs. A few tries to figure out the best plan of attack would be nice, but you're out of luck in Black & White.