Coverage on the Black & White Experience

GameSpot, the e-mag with the most consistently full and well-done features, presents another of the game that most of the gaming world is putting aside their money to spend on, Black & White. It comes in three parts, each well worth reading. The first two are four pages apiece, and the last is a 2 pager describing the spell system.

Please set foot inside the personal transport pod, brace yourself for the slight change in pressure and speak your destination:

• The Hands-On Black & White Preview, Day One Please
• The game’s 400-plus quests are divided across five unique lands, and aside from the distinct break from one land to the next, there’s no real distinction between where one quest ends and where another one begins. This isn’t Populous–the entire world of Black & White is persistent and constantly changing.
• The Hands-On Black & White Preview, Day Two Please
• We ended up playing Black & White for the better part of a day, but we’re still unable to properly pigeonhole it. The game seems pretty evenly split between being a role-playing game and being a real-time strategy game with empire-management influences. Black & White clearly exhibits the delicate balance required when dealing with resource management in more orthodox RTS games as well.
• The Spell and Miracle Preview, thank you very much
• … In this case you should opt to use Gestures. This is one major new technology in Black & White, where you trace shapes on the screen using your mouse, which are interpreted by the game and used to select a spell. The bottom right of the screen always shows what gestures will be recognised at any particular time. For instance, to indicate that you wish to select a particular spell, you trace a spiral. You can then trace a W, say, to indicate that you wish to cast a Water spell. A capital R repeats the previous spell.