Darkness, And Lack Thereof.

I am in love. I've never been in love before, and it's a new and exciting time for me. My newfound love, the one who completes me, whom I love without compromise, is published by Lionhead studios and developed by Peter Molyneaux. I'm talking about Black and White, the most amazing game to ever be released for any platform. I'm not biased or anything (go buy it now) but it is my honest opinion (even if you have to sell your body to afford it) that you should buy this game, and soon you will pledge your undying love to this masterwork, this opus, this bar-raising product of pure genius. In Black and White, you play a god, created by the prayers of some poor little suckers/innocent islanders. when you arrive, you start helping out the village and learning about your godly powers, you can be nice to the people, or you can be evil and kill them with wild abandon, giggling the giggle of a wicked god throwing his followers into the sea at several hundred miles per hour. I took a mostly neutral path. I will sometimes be a little nasty and roll a boulder thru town or something, but I'm quick to call up a food miracle or heal the village. Oh yeah, and you have a creature. Your creature is your avatar, an extension of your powers and your representative in the physical world. I have an ape who throws cows but eats sheep. The creature is a miracle of coding. the AI is astounding - they will learn from your actions and can take care of themselves if you teach them well. My ape knows to eat when he's hungry, drink when he's thirsty, and poop on trees when he, well, needs to poo. Your environment changes when you change - if you are evil and spend all your time terrorizing people, your land will become dark and evil to match. your creature can change as well, becoming evil or good depending on how you trained it. when I first got my creature, I beat him senseless (you can slap or pet them if you want to punish or reward them), of course, I felt like an abusive parent when my badly bruised ape had to go to this guide creature to be trained. There are several "neato" features in the game that set it apart from pretty much everything else: the game has a built in email client, and can name members of your village after names in your address book. The game also has a weather system built in so you can go register the game and where you are, and while in the game, the weather on your land will match the weather in your real life area. Did I mention the gestures? you can draw shapes with mouse movements (called Gestures) to create miracles and such. some are a little tough, but it really helps in blurring the line between the game and that other thing that happens outside the game (I think somebody called it "a life"), since you don't have a bunch of menus clogging things up. I would also like to mention the amazing look and feel of the game in general. it starts with the lionhead logo - it consists of a bunch fo blakc and white spheres floating around, which eventually form the company logo. You can interact with this logo as it forms. moving the mouse makes the spheres swirl around in response. Once inside the game, you can zoom right up to a single person, then zoom out to above the clouds, all in one swift seamless motion. All the movement is smooth, and when the in-game cutscenes activate, the camera moves under its own power, and there is realy no indication that anything has changed, except that you are no longer moving the view. There is just too much in this game to mention without writing a book about it or something. Go get it, now. this game is beyond amazing, it is beyond anything ever made. It will be remembered in 20 years when many more games have copied it. You will fall in love and forsake your real life and wish that you could just live in the game world. I need to go play Black and White now, so you people all go buy it.