More Awesome Than You!

Hey JM, here's a game you might like. EA are releasing Black & White 2. I went to look but it's about much more warfare and killing than the 1st relase, so I immediately thought of you.  ;) This is the game where you can train a creature to be evil or good and you are an evil or good god.

Killer sims had an ad, leading to here: http://www.blackandwhite2.ea.com/good.asp (http://www.blackandwhite2.ea.com/good.asp)

Impressive web page I thought but probably incredibly irritating to people with slow connections.

Witch, I enjoyed B&W 1, but my computer and graphics card were not up to the task.  I got sick of hunting through the poor quality trees for things and it moved S.L.O.W.  But I am looking with interest at B&W 2.  I love the concept of everything changing.... landscape, weather, houses, etc.  based on whether you are good or evil.  Cool! 

C

Dig the hand, it reminds me of Dungeon Keeper 2. :D

Been thinking of getting this, and if it has any similarities to DK2 then that is definite! What a great game that is... properly panders to all my god complex.

I will be waiting until the reviews are out and it has been released for a month. Peter Molyneaux has ass raped fans too many times.

That's quite a vivid image that you've drawn up for us. But come on, stop being so coy and stop beating around the bush. Tell us how you really feel.  :D

No, seriously. Actually, care to elaborate, as I don't know if I've had any experience with this ass raping Peter Molyneaux. What else has he been responsible for? I'm too lazy to search on my own right now, so please divvy up a summary.

Also... off/on topic, B&W looks very cool. Although I've discovered that I mostly almost totally completely suck at resource driven type RTS games, or RTS games in general. :P Although WarCraft II was fun and StarCraft, I just really did not fare well when it came to acquiring resources in a timely, fashionable manner and efficiently mining those resources and building up an army or whatever. I dunno what it is, but I am just totally inept when it comes to that kind of management. *sighs* My ex-bf used to kick my ass all the time whenever we played against each other, and it was one the most frustrating humbling moments for me as far as video games go, since typically I have a knack for picking up games quickly. I guess my weaknesses are RTS games and shooters, I've never been great when it came to aiming. :P

Anyhew, the somewhat off topic bit that I wanted to throw out was that I am eagerly awaiting further development, news, and the release of Spore (http://spore.ea.com). That game seems like totally cool! I love the idea of including some form of evolution. But if the genetics have anything similar to what's been implemented in the Sims 2... well.  ::) Plus... seeing how noticeable the bugs are in these TS2 games is also kind of discouraging. At least with the original Sims 1 games, if there were any bugs, I hardly noticed them at all. :P But then again, I probably didn't play enough to really notice them or even realize there were bugs, or just assumed that any bugginess was actually mistaken for gameplay.  ;D Still... Spore could be pretty promising.

Ste

Reminds me of Heaven & Hell (http://www.heavengame.com/).

 ;D Ditto.


What does RTS stand for? I can't aim to shoot either, I panic, I forget which combination of buttons, mice, keyboards and scrolling to do, I end up falling into pits, being blasted into bits and so on. I played Prince of Persia once, he's still stuck in the initial corridor 'cos I can't get the jump right to get him to the next bit, I think that was the tutorial part of the game.  :-[ After several hours I thought 'sod this' and uninstalled it.

I like management games, balancing resources and patterns, that's what I'm best at.


Spore sounds like the most promising release on my event horizen.  8)

I loved the game but got nauseous at the wheeling, swaying scenery. On a previous thread here somewhere, several other people said the graphics affected them in this way too. I would certainly check that out before purchasing the game.

Spore looks so cool . . . wow. Can't wait. From the information I have currently, the genetics are basically completely user controlled. With each "generation" (i.e., new creature) you get to adjust what it looks like and buy new functional bits. It's not really a genetics simulation so much as an ecosystem/evolution tool. And, hey, it's Will Wright's project, and so far things have only started sucking once he's left. (Sims 1 didn't suck until the later expansions bugified it, and he wasn't involved with it at that point.) Well, except TSO . . . but that's a different problem.

B&W2 looks kinda nifty. Don't really know if I'll get it, as I too heard *bad* things about the original game's performance, bugginess, and management. And I prefer a nice, shiny software toy over an actual game any day.

RTS = Real Time Strategy.  Good examples are Starcraft and Warcraft 3.

Starcraft is still my favorite RTS.  Ahh, the feeling you get when you have a mass fleet of Protoss Carriers level an enemie's base....  Its almost uphoric.

I would go for starcraft over B&W1 anyday. Now Starcraft made it clear that it isn't realistic, and then stuck with it. B&W is fake in it's 3D ugliness, IMO. (Just like AoEIII - now let's be historical and zweihanders in the 1800's!  ::))

Ok for those who want details. If you didn't follow the development of his last few games and the fan backlash you probbaly are unaware of how unlike the game he promoted up until release was from what came out.

Peter Molyneaux is one of the "Game gods" (Like Will Wright, Sid Meier, etc). He was the guy who made Populous, i.e. one of the founders of modern games who has continued on. He did a sequal to pop, then another sequal that was 3D and pretty good. Then the interweb became big and he became a minor celeb and ccould give interviews that people would read.

Unlike the Will , Sid, etc Peter is well known for speaking about his projects very openly. He is the opposite of Will Wright. Will only talks about things that are almost complete, rarely talks about hopeful features. If he cannot show it, he probably won't disscuss it. As with Spore, it was a complete sectet until he revealed it in a talk and had a playable late alpha version.

Peter is insane and promises HUGE things. His talks a month before a game release sound like a development wish list. The problem is, since populous, none of his games have lived up to their Hype. B&W1 was the best example. The bugs that destroyed your creature alone would make most fans cry with hate, but the fact that the game was immensly below what he was promising the month before was really bad. He siad he learned his lesson in an interview where he agreed he was "overenthusiastic" about hopes and ideas after B&W1.

He didn't learn though. Fable is another one of his games, and to be fair, fable was fun. However it was extremely short and matched very little of what he had been promising up until release.

After some fable backlash (and another interview where he promises to shut up) he seems to have learned and has barely been involved in the marketting of B&W2, so the hope is that the game will be very close to what is being advertized.

What I liked about B&W was exploring the region you were in, training your creature, completing tasks, building villiages, and converting villiagers.  I had an awesome time in the first couple of levels.  What I did not like was competing with other gods, especially when it came to sending your creature to combat their creature.  No, other god, I do not want to send my nice friendly cow to go fight your big slobbering wolf.  She gets her ass kicked every time and I'm not into it.  I spent a lot of time playing the first two levels and then quit once the focus became beating down other creatures.  Apparently it's possible to beat the game as a good god, but I'm not sure how your creature is expected to ever win a fight if teaching it to fight ups your evil levels.

The game did have a lot of bugs, but the nice thing was that Lionhead released many, many patches.  If EA is putting out B&W 2 that's enough to make me stay away, even if you guys weren't just saying that the focus would be more on fighting other gods.

My son is TOTALLY into this video game called World of Warcraft, and I mean totally.  He has a fit when I tell him to get off the thing to do his homework or to eat or got to bed.  I swear he lives for this give.  I have to admit that it has some very awesome graphics, although I don't understand the game one bit.

MMORPGs are addicting, though I can't say it's fun. It's all about power, since your character can become more and more powerful as the game progresses. You could say money also. At a certain point you just can't handle anymore, and like I did, throw everything you worked so hard on to the ground, causing a short period in which people stop talking and loot.  ;) MMORPGs are the curse of the gaming world.

Well the game was supposed to WW release this week, instead it was cahnged by EA (without telling the devs) do be released starting the 4th and in parts of the world as late as the 13th.

If you use about half the Nvidia cards, including the 6800 ultras you likely cannot play the game. There is a fix, download the leaked beta drivers. Don't know how they managed that one, I know ATI is on thier splash but you would think they would test with more than an NvidiaMX on an emachines.

There is a patch coming out that fixes "nothing critical" but just the bug fix list alone is a mass of game loss, crashing, etc. Who knows what is not in that list ot get EA to make a patch that is supposed to be out before the game hits shelves?

Well they screwed it up anyway. The patch is set for tomorrow, people got the game yesterday. So the patcher tells you you have an update available, but the link is dead.

Go read whats left on the forums over there. From the looks of it the Devs (Sam in specific) were blaming EA for not putting it up and that they have no control at all oer it. Then piece by piece it has come to be known that while that is true, EA cannot put the patch up until tomorrow SINCE THE DEVS ARE STILL CODING IT! Pull an all nighter for a patch that fixes "nothing critical".

Plus the patch is so "minor" that it won't let you use your prepatch save games. So you can play the bugged version, then patch and start the tedious training levels (you can skip the tutorial, but not the training levels) all over again, or never patch and wreck your game anyway.

Oh, and the skirmish mode didn't come with live. Maybe with a patch or expansion.

So, if you bought the game right away, HAVE FUN!

Oh mate!, what a major cockup. I certainly won't be buying it.

Another bene of stupidity and greed to EA. I swear I'll think twice (and then rethink twice) before getting ANYTHING EA related in the future. And it won't be fresh products either. Let them simmer for a while until the patches are out and then get them I say. "EA Games - Challenge everyone's nerves!".

Edit: and with this post I get my first pair of ripped lips  :o

Man the drama gets better and better!

EA completely locked down the UK B&W forums since they had gone out of control. On the lionhead forums one of the devs is closing tons of threads and has actually sent posters PMs saying he has added them to his ignore list since they are too negative.

:)

Oh and the patch is still not out.

Patch delayed "at least" one more day. It seems that making people stay up 24 hours to bang out a patch at the last minute is not a good idea since they break as much as they fix.

The solution?

ANOTHER ALL NIGHTER!!!

Drama like this arouses me in ways I know are wrong and don't fully understand.

So now it looks like people who bought it on release will lose 3 days of game play, unless they have an Nvidia card in which case they won't have been able to play at all.

 :D

Hmm. If the business of Nvidia cards is indicative of a trend, I may be off the hook, no matter how nifty looking a concept EA's future offerings are. I won't be able to play them, since I'm not buying new hardware for a game. Not *quite* that crazy.

On a somewhat related note: Death to all corporations! CHALLENGE EA!

And assist Google's plot for world domination. Mass open betas, the incorporation of the consumer into the design and testing, and -- behold! -- software that works! I pray for the Google operating system (Googlix). Perhaps it is time to start praying for a Google game company. At the very least, someone should check them out as a model for how to run the public relations end of a software company.

And I'm very, very glad that RTS's aren't my niche, so I'm not unduly tempted to purchase this product.

The company you are dreaming of is http://www.stardock.com/ .

Open betas, they release the code for modders, lots of communication with the consumers from start to finish.

AND NO PUBLISHER! They ither get apublisher when the game is DONE or publish it themselves.

Their biggest hit is Gal Civ. The game MoO3 was supposed to be.

If you haven't played it download the demo of the old one to see just what a company can do when it works wth customers and focuses on makeing a great product.

http://www.galciv.com/

And you can check out the sequal, Gal Civ 2. They have beta and also let anyone who preordered play the game from late alpha to release (and as such with the preorder money can pay the Developers without going to EA, MS, Vivendi, etc.

The onl;y big corporate game company I believe you can trust in their releases is NCSoft. They have some nasty practices with competition (like what they did to the Blizzard WoW team after vivendi screwed them, which is why WoW still has no expansion when in the same time EQ2 has put out 1 major and 2 mini expansions plus a complete revamp of the game's combat engine). BUT they corelease most of their games in Japan and Korea with the US. They know to make sure thier shit is together because the markets are so nasty there, a game comes out, that game will work and be tested. Otherwise it will crash and burn. I mean hell, they released a MMO with no monthly fee and are turning a profit! Thats planning!

Stardock is the Firefox of game companies.

The thing I remember about Stardock and Gal Civ is that it was originally published exclusively for OS/2.  And since I was an OS/2 user at the time, I was very glad to see someone publishing for that operating system.  Even tho I never bought the game. :)

Hook

Hey Hook, how do you and some others I've noticed, get flames and 'Senator' instead of ripped lips and insults?

Because they are members of the senate.  Silly Witch.  ;-)

On the front page there is one moldy old post from JM in the Senate Chambers section, but who knows what it is really for.  I mean, besides them.

C

Does the IotD only apply to the Sims2 BBS?

The lionhead boards have some real sparklers. For example,

man, I think my IQ dropped 20  points just from reading that quote... Wow!

I am tempted to put it in my sig.

Add a bunny, something about Bush, and a bunch of smilies and you have a winning sig!

Oh and a B&W sig.  The devs have the webcam set up so you can watch them now in THIER 3RD ALL NIGHTER.

Rather than communicating they are now apparently taunting the people waiting ona  patch.

One dev posted there would be details in "1 hr 18 min".

2 hours later, he posts. "We're still here!" (because the webcam doesn't tell you that)

Then the dev who uses the monitor directly in front of the webcam puts a sign that says WAIT on his screen and leaves, someone else puts a B&W box and Fable Box up.

Then after getting the nickname "table humper", rather than update in the thread one dev starts making faces in the cam, playing the guitar, while another is obviously stressed and working.

Class all the way.

(http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/8658/rocker2zk.jpg)

lol this thread should just die, but it makes maxis look so good.

Patch finally came out last night. 20 minutes before midnight EST, so even though sun was coming up in the UK they declared it "on time".

The patched game corrupts new save files. Apparently about half the time you save your game, if you try to load the game up (the whole game, not just the save file) it crashes at the splash screen.  The solution is to delete your save files!

So now if you patched, your old save files were destroyed, if you play again you can lose hours of play from corruption.

Oh, and just something else funny, the "bonus" thing like the NL hot rod, is a tiger. The installer program is only in German.

I dunno, sanmonroe.  I've been enjoying reading this thread just to see how bad it can get at times.  And it *does* make Maxis look good! :)

Hook

sanmonroe I find this story absolutely fascinating, please don't stop.

Wow, just wow. And I was honestly thinking of buying B&W 2. And people wonder why I perfer console games over PC games these days.

Well since everyone is fascinated.

The preorder bonus download, the one that is only in german, was not secure. When it asked you for your password "code", just like the NL car download, you could just hit random keys and it always accepted it.

The solution? Delete and ban anyone who gives out the address to the file on the board because it is theft and "ILLEGAL"!

Some of the game crashes are due to EA's new generation software security! The only solution is to run the full game with a crack on your harddrive. But that is illegal.

So now the boards are full of people getting banned that are just posting the link to the bonus and links to cracked copies of B&W2. Oh and you just need a valid e-mail address to regster and post. Since the forums are shared with the lionhead console games no CD key is needed. :)

I downloaded the bonus  just in case I ever get the game or in case a cracked copy ever somehow finished downloading onto my computer without my knowledge...Lets say in about 8 more hours...

So I may post a first hand report of the game in a few days.

 :P

Wow. EA sure knows how to crank em out, don't they?

Maybe illegal in the US. Right here it is illegal to sell intentionally broken software (which is what spyware... err "anti-copyright theft" software" is. I have succesfully gotten my money back for four games which were so inherently broken by the included spyware they wouldn't install. Several other games only run because I use virtual drives and no-CD patches (which are not illlegal: the copying and redistributing of games is).

I don't want to continually swap discs. I play TS2 with a virtual disc, and most other games are no-CD'd.

Well having played with it I have to say.

Game looks AMAZING (On a 512 7800 anyway).
Controls still suck, but are much better than B&W1
The Advisors are a never ending stream of annoying shit spattered on the screen.
Pretty much no challenge at all.

I played all the tutorial parts and then the norse and 2 japanese campaigns.

If you build a wall you win. All you need to do is just place new buildings within the wall and wait a few hours while they get built.

The first thing you do in each land is build a wall. The game tells you to and rewards you for it. The game attacked my wall a total of 4 times. 2 times with catapults and 2 times with a creature. Anything else that got near my wall just stood still and never did anything. You cna just use your giant god hand and slap them to death. They don't even run out of your influence.

The only time you have any risk at all is when other towns defect to join you and you ahve to open your gates to let the new people in. Since they stand there just out of your range to pick up for a long time the computer has time to send a regement of troops toward your gate, right into the line of archers or your creature who is standing there. If you are an evil god you can just drop a fireball on them and be done with it.

The game is just a builder. Not much else to it. If you WANT to fight to win you can, but I found if you control him well you can tear up the computer just using your creature, once you get bored then you can send troops out to clean up. the game cheats though so if you get close to wiping the computer out thier population suddenly jumps by 100 or 200. So they suddenly have troops.

You also cannot destroy anything, you can reduce it to a broken framework but you can never, no matter how many fireballs burn a wood building into nothing. Maybe the volcano can do complete destruction, but who wants to earn that much influence? I took a town and moved my influence to overlap with the first japanese town and just tossed fireballs on their town till it was all cinders. Didn't matter, their troops and people still appeared out of nowhere. Their impressiveness never went down at all. You would think a city that is a smoldering wreck with an 11 meter tall evil cow shitting on its villagers (I trained it to poop on people) would not be too impressive.

All in all, glad I didn't pay for it. Thank you internets. Can't be assed to finish the game.

The creature AI is much better now, and the villiagers are not completely retarded. They won't flourish without your help, but they won't starve to death if what they need is present.

Here is what I wrote about the game on another forum:




I've had this game since the day it was released because my cousin bought the game without so much as glancing at the system requirements. I'm extremely glad I didn't spend any money on it.

Graphically, it is definitely amazing. I spent a lot of time just looking at stuff. But as far as gameplay? Disappointing.

The military AI is really, really bad. The enemy sits outside your wall and lets your archers kill them all. So on my second go, I knocked down all the walls and played without any defences around my towns. And my armies still desimated everything that came in. The Epic Wonders suck. Seriously. They just don't do any damage. The only acceptable one is the Siren, mostly for the music that goes with it.

It is also very annoying to have the guy you're fighting be saying "Ha! THAT is what happens to people who defy me!" while you are assaulting his city and kind of about to get your ass kicked, and suddenly you get interrupted by "Oh... their town is so wonderful... lets go live there!" because that last building you put down caused you to become too attractive. He was WINNING, damn it. That really pissed me off.

That is another sucky thing. Towns will just up and surrender to you. Just because you plopped down one too many hovels. It is really annoying when you are an evil military-minded god and would rather go in and kill them all. What they should have done is not allow any towns to migrate to your town if you are evil.

I found the silver scroll challenges (mini-games) more interesting than the game itself. There's one in there, the Isle of Nymphs or whatever it's called, that just cracked me up... although it took ages to find the right "thing" to bring the Nymphs even once I figured out what they wanted. There's another one, called Rain Dance, that is very amusing to lose and then restart. Most of them, however, are utterly dumb... or utterly easy, which is the same thing really.

The creature is okay, but it really doesn't need you to control it or teach it. I played nearly a whole  game without ever teaching the creature anything or taking it off free will, and it just went on doing all the things necessary to help me win the game, just like the creature that I had carefully taught to be very helpful. Worse, an evil and a good creature are really not that different. I had a 94% good creature and a 100% evil creature and did not notice that many differences other than some physical ones.

Also disappointing is the fact that you can't do all that much to your own people. Sure, sacrifice them, bash them with rocks... but you can't drop a fireball on them or anything. I played one game where I did all the challenges with the aim to be as nasty to people as I could. In the Paternity Suit it amused me when the girl exclaimed "You killed my father!" when I dropped a rock on him. I then dropped a rock on her. Lost the challenge, of course. Wasn't even rewarded by any clever commentary by Baddie.

The hand tool has incredibly bad aim. You THINK it's over something, but then it picks up something else. It also has an amusing tendency to cause you to throw an entire handfull of people halfway across your island when you are trying to set them down. Oddly enough, it does not do that with any other object, only people.

But wait... I haven't mentioned the most damning thing about the game. Here it is: Replayability is ZERO. You play as good... You play as evil... you might try playing as neutral... and THAT'S IT. There is simply nothing more to do. Unless, like me, you start modding, there is just very little reason to start the game over. There is no free-play mode. Once you "win" that is all. Your only option is to start a new game. You can't, for example, go back to a previous land. You can't pit your own towns against each other. Once you win the island, it becomes utterly worthless and it is pointless to stay on it any longer than that. As well, playing an island for the second time, you know exactly how to win it. No surprises, no challenge. The enemy always attacks in the same way.

Bottom line... the game can be won in about 6-10 hours of playing. The tutorials are what take up about 1/4 of that. After you win, you can replay with a different good-evil alignment, but after you do that it is pretty much dead. My copy is already on the shelf. The tutorials are the WORST thing ever. You are stuck for over an hour just doing stupid "this is how you build a house" tutorials that can't be skipped because if you attempt to skip them, you never get options unlocked. In one case it forced you to build an armory and a temple, spending valuable amounts of tribute that you may have wanted to save. On a second run through the game that can be terribly frustrating.

After winning the game twice, I started modding the game. I changed a bunch of stuff trying to make it so no towns would ever be impressed enough to surrender to me. It kind of worked but not everything could be changed, or, well, there just isn't enough info on what each thing in the files does. I think in time it may be possible to mod the game so that it isn't as easy. I've been trying to figure out how to change the Epic Wonders so they charge instantly... since that would affect both me and the enemy I figure it could be interesting. But my suspicion is that it wouldn't really work out. I have noticed that the enemy does not seem to need to charge their Wonder the same as we do. Theirs seems to work immediately after construction, and the wait in between is pre-set.

Would I recommend the game to anyone? Well... it was enjoyable while it lasted. I won't lie and say I didn't have a great time with it. But, first of all, be extraordinarily careful about whether or not your computer can handle the game. And if you don't like to spend money on games you won't play again once you win them... maybe skip this one or try it out first when a friend gets it. I never played the first game, so I can't comment on how this one is the same or different. I suggest everyone use caution and look at reviews carefully. There are just some things about this game that make it a very short-term investment. I'm sure some people will play over and over, but personally I don't see that there is any reason to.

I will say this, if they release multiplayer this game will be awesome.