Unless you live in a cave and you never ever read the news, you've heard by now of Peter Molyneaux's new game, the first from his own software company (Lionhead Studios), Black & White. Three yeras in the making, and designed by the author of the best-selling Populous, this is the most anticipated, hyped, and reviewed game in recent years.

But there are a few questions that I think you ought to want to know the answers to before you plunk down your hard-earned cash, and very few of the newspaper articles (or reviews, including reviews here on Epinions) answer the most important ones. One, will it run on your hardware or not? And two, once you get past the really pretty graphics, will you have any fun playing it?

There's also one more question you may not think to ask, but it's a doozy, and you need to consider the answer, even more than you would for other games. That question is, does the game conflict too much with your values? Even if you're used to the goriest of first-person shooters, there are parts of this game that may disturb you.

About Those Really Pretty Graphics

This is the first computer game in a long time whose graphics are so amazing as to deserve to be presented at SIGGRAPH. If you throw enough hardware at this piece of software, it has the capacity to amaze you, no matter how high your standards are for computer art.

When the game was half done, Molyneau used to demo for trade industry groups something really amazing. If you've got access to a copy of Black & White you can do it yourself. Take any village in the game. It should have a Village Store, a building that stores food and wood. Looking at it from the "front," the side with the door, go around to the right-hand side of the building. Look down and zoom in on the barrel there. There's an apple on the barrel. Zoom in enough, and you can see the worm that's eating it -- moving. Now, with the view angle set to mostly straight down, press and hold Ctrl and Down Arrow, the keys for "zoom out." In one smooth zoom, with no jumps or arbitrary barriers, you will zoom all the way out through the cloud layer to low planetary orbit, without the graphics ever losing their detailing.

There are times when you're cruising around one of the "worlds" of this game and see the sun setting in the distance ... gorgeous sunsets, as beautiful as real ones and almost as convincing, with the mountains reflected on the water, and the village torches flickering on the water, and it takes your breath away.

Some people regularly pay $15-$20 for videotapes of computer animation, like the famous Mind's Eye series or the Computer Animation Festival series. If you've got the hardware to run it, it may be worth $40 or so just for the pretty pictures.

Can Your PC Handle It?

If you're one of those people who regularly spends $2000 a year on computer hardware and upgrades so you can play the latest games, skip this section.

It says on the box that Black & White can run on a 64 MB 350 MHz Pentium II. But it says that an 8 MB 3D graphics accelerator card is the absolute minimum, and they're only barely kidding.

I'm running it on the cheapo year-old eMachines box I've reviewed elsewhere, a 566 MHz Celeron box that I've upgraded to 96 MB of RAM. When I first installed Black & White, I didn't have a video accelerator card installed, just the (worthless) built-in Intel video on the motherboard with software acceleration. And it actually ran. It was even almost playable. I think if I'd tweaked the settings just a little bit more, I could have lived with it.

But I put an accelerator card in, a $50 ATI Rage XL 8MB PCI card, and it made a difference. And what I'm hearing from other users is that if you want to be able to play this game well, and competitively, well let me tell you, there is no video card out there so "moose" that this game doesn't need it. The more money you throw at it, the prettier it gets ... but also the faster your response time gets. Oddly enough, processor speed doesn't seem to matter nearly as much, nor even really RAM. But to play this game well, and enjoy it to its fullest, you may well need to spend $50 to $500 on a video board upgrade. At the minimum, that doubles the price for some of you. Is it still worth it?

Oh, and make that triple the price, not double, because if you have a "pointing stick" or a trackball, the game is unplayable, for reasons I'll explain in a bit. A touchpad or a mechanical mouse may not be enough better. To play this game well, you're going to want an optical mouse, preferably a force-feedback one, and/or a graphics tablet.

Fun to Play? Maybe, but Not for Everyone

As most of you have already heard by now, the basic story line of the game goes as follows. You are a new god, summoned into existence by a family's desperate prayer. You find yourself to be the god of a single village on a small island on a planet of small islands; your influence centers on your village, and expands based on the number and faith of your worshipers.

You inherit two advisors, your Good Conscience and Evil Conscience, a pair of elderly male imps who fly in from time to time to annoy you with mostly useless advice.

Early on, you also acquire a more important helper: a Creature. Your Creature is an upright bipedal animal (to start with, either a cow, ape, or tiger). It starts out a 1 year old toddler, a mere 12 feet tall or so. In time, it can be trained to help (or intimidate) villagers, to defend itself, to attack enemies, and to create miracles as well as you do. Better, actually: it doesn't need followers to do so, just rest. And given lots of time, attention, and rest, it gets much bigger.

And you do have enemies. Not among the other villages per se, but among the gods. There is one god, Nemesis, who has acquired a matching set of three artifacts that make him the most powerful of the gods, and he intends to kill every other god and Creature on the planet -- including you and yours. To survive, let alone defeat him, you must find and combine three similar artifacts for yourself, all the while under attack by Nemesis and his allies.

How this plays out is as a cross between three games or electronic toys:

* a strategy game (like Warcraft or Age of Empires),
* a fancy virtual pet (very much like a Tamagotchi), and
* a fighting game (like Tekken).

Warcraft set the model for strategy games. You start out with a handful of workers and maybe a building or two. Your workers gather resources (in this game as in most of them, Food and Wood) to support themselves and build more buildings. Each building gives you more power or ability. The more people you have, the stronger you are.

The strategy game elements of Black & White have some nice changes from other games, but also at least two major frustrations. The biggest change is that you are no longer in the business of raising and training soldiers; you and your Creature do all the fighting. Unlike most of these games, your human units are all 100% combat-useless.

Creating new villagers is more realistic in Black & White. In other games, you just "buy" them, usually with a one-time expenditure of gathered food. In this game, villagers mate, and a year later the female villagers give birth to and then raise baby villagers. Villagers need food every day. Also, for the first time in one of these games, trees do grow back if you plant and water them; with a little bit of planning and a little bit of miraculous intervention, it is possible to have sustainable logging in Black & White. It's not easy or likely, but it is possible.

You and your Creature can also help the villagers with resource gathering, picking things up with your huge hands and throwing or dropping them into the Village Store(s).

On the other hand, buildings in this game are insanely expensive and time consuming to build, even more than in Age of Kings. This gets frustrating, because villagers won't make new baby villagers without homes, stores, creches, and other buildings that all take obscene amounts of wood. Nor will they build even one building without your specific orders.

If you've never played a strategy game before, you may find the amount of jumping around the board you have to do, micromanaging villages all over the map, to be deeply frustrating. If, on the other hand, this sounds like a fun challenge, you're probably in the right place.

In a lengthy article full of interviews with Lionhead Studios staff on the web site GameSpy.com, there's a mention of the fact that during the early design of this game, company president Peter Molyneaux was completely obsessed with his Tamagotchi virtual pet. It shows.

The way you raise and train and care for your Creature in Black & White bears an eerie similarity to the Tamagotchi brand of virtual pets. You have a few basic methods of interaction with your Creature. You can pet him, punish him, feed him, play with him, and clean up after him, just like other virtual pets. The biggest advancement over those toys (other than the larger world and better graphics, of course) is that you can also attach a Leash of Learning to your Creature and (if you get its attention) show it the trick you want it to do. If it learns and repeats the trick, pet it to reward it, and voilá, your Creature has become even more useful.

So you spend a lot of the game, maybe a third of your time over all and much more than that at the beginning, raising and training your Creature. You lead it around on a leash. You make sure it gets plenty of exercise. You reward it at just exactly the right time for doing what you want; you punish it for doing things you never want it to do again.

And as you do so, your Creature forms not just a repertoire of useful tricks but also a "personality," and a tendency toward Good or Evil. This shows up in its appearance; as it grows brighter or darker in color, more childlike or more terrifying in the shape of its face, and acquires (ultimately, if pushed that far) a rainbow aura or horns and wicked hooked claws. Depending on diet and exercise, it may also become fat and slow, or skinny, or muscular. And the longer you care for it, and the better you care for it, the bigger it grows. Oh, and the worse it gets beat up, the more battle scars it acquires, even after healing.

Creature training takes forever. I didn't fall for the Tamagotchi fad, so much of this felt new to me. If you're already bored with Virtual Pets, there's a good chance you'll find this to be boring, unless doing it with this much better artwork is enough to make it fresh again for you.

If two hostile Creatures meet, and it would be anything like a fair fight between them, they form up a magic "challenge circle" and fight within it. There aren't a lot of fancy fighting moves; mostly you just click the enemy to target attacks, click your own Creature to block, or click the ground to move or dodge. Your Creature will fight on its own without your help, but until it's won a lot of fights, it won't do so well. If it has learned offensive miracles, it may use them in combat.

So what you end up with is something that looks a lot like Tekken or Virtual Fighter, but with a lot simpler (and less interesting) user interface and combat model. On the plus side, by the time of your first real Creature fights, you'll have a lot of emotion tied up in your combatant.

One of the other things that makes the game unique, more or less, is an odd feature of its user interface. It has no menus, no on screen buttons to click, and very few keyboard commands. What it does have is something called the Gesture Recognition System. What that means is that to invoke most commands, you must trace a particular design on the screen with your Divine Hand (cursor). When you get it more-or-less right, the magic flares into existence.

I hate this feature less than I did when I started. With a little practice, most of the gestures aren't that bad. And they did put in one useful keyboard shortcut: shift-R for "repeat" means "now do it again" -- very useful when you're repeating a miracle over and over again to teach it to your Creature, for example.

On the other hand, there are a few of the miracles, including two of the most important ones, where the tolerances are so tight that I simply cannot duplicate the gesture required. The spiral gesture that starts nearly all miracles has tolerances so loose that I have once set it off by accident. But Healing, the miracle you need to heal either your Creature or your villagers (or other villagers, if you're trying to impress them), which looks simple (draw a heart) must have tolerances that are impossibly tight. I spent about a half an hour one night, in frustration, trying to get it to work even once, without success. Physical Shield, the miracle you need to protect your villages from fireballs and giant thrown rocks, is even harder.

Oh, and despite lots of practice, the trick to throwing things accurately is still beyond me, too, which I find deeply frustrating. How important can it be? Well, throwing rocks is one of your most important weapons in this game. The gesture looks simple: "grab" a rock, then drag and release to throw it. Speed of the drag is supposed to control speed and height of the release. But I can not get it to consistently put a rock in the "strike zone," medium height. They either roll along the ground or head for orbit. In between, it refuses to release at all, and just beeps at me, 19 times out of 20.

Now, both of these features could be fixed with a minor software tweak. On the other hand, the major strategy problems, though, are the ones that really drag on the game, I've found. And those will be much harder to fix, in the event that Lionhead Studios even cares.

So, Is It Any Fun? Well ...

I really, really wanted to like this game. For a while, I thought I was going to.

But between breaks in working on this review, I found that I had gotten to the point where I could barely stand to launch the game, and had gone back to playing that increasingly tired old standby, Diablo II.

The main problem with this game is that it is deeply, irretrievably tied to the main story line game, and that game is dull, dull, and interminably duller.

As with many of these games, the main plot line game is designed to be a "super tutorial," to walk you through the process of playing and winning the game step by step, tool by tool. Along the way, you're meant to have plenty of time to develop your own strategy. And given that what you're doing here is training a surrogate personality to fight and work for you while you're doing it, this could have been really cool.

But the main plot line game in Black & White takes seemingly forever. In theory, you could (with some luck) play through it pretty quickly, but doing so would involve skipping the Creature training that you'll need if you want to keep playing. And in fact, I'm not at all sure that you can win that way; more likely you'll get close to winning, then fail horribly and have to start over from an early auto-save game.

See, here's the main problem: there are only five levels to the whole game. Compare that with 30 in Starcraft. There are also only a couple of main characters, and they're pretty one dimensional. Again, compare that with about a dozen in Starcraft, all of whom have distinct personalities that develop over time.

Starcraft's main story line game took me over a month to play through. But I enjoyed almost every minute of it. Heck, it's almost two years later and I still play through it once in a while; it's like a favorite show in reruns.

At one point, I decided I had made too many mistakes in Creature selection and training, and went back to start over. Consequently, I had to play through the first level of Black & White again to get anywhere in it. And I thought I was going to rip it out of my hard drive by the roots before I got done. What was dull the first time was almost as bad as a root canal without anaesthesia the second time.

Each of those five levels takes a long time to play through partly because they're broken down into quests, sort of mini-levels on the same map. As with most strategy games, some of them are simplified training versions of what you're going to do if you ever get to play a "real" game, a fair one on one or free for all against human or computer players. Those are OK, and might even be fun if I could strangle the useless Advisors and get on with the game.

But more than half of the Quests involve doing really boring one-shot favors for your worshipers, or worse, obscenely difficult bits of Hide and Seek. Now, I know I said that the landscape in this game is beautiful. That being said, I don't want to spend hours combing through it for three-pixel-wide white blotches that are all you can see of sheep or other critters (unless you're zoomed in so close that those hours become days).

I ended up looking for online cheat sheets for more than half the Quests I've played so far, because they were not only annoyingly difficult, they were too dull to spare half the effort required.

By the way, there's a separate tutorial, too, where you have no enemies to defeat, just opportunities to practice the user interface skills. It's called the Gods' Playground, and I swear, it is so slow, and dull, that I will never be able to finish it. I have no idea what skills it teaches in the later parts, and I doubt that I ever will. There is no way to skip the hours of boring practice of skills I've already mastered.

Now, I've liked games whose main story line games were uninteresting or poorly designed. The built-in campaigns with Age of Empires and Age of Kings are totally worthless, but I played those games for many hours.

But in both of those games, you could from a quickly loaded main menu skip the story line games altogether and go straight into one on one play. And one on one (or more) play is where the real fun is at in these games, at least if the AI is any good and the game play itself isn't awful.

Black & White calls these kinds of games Skirmish games. And if what you want is to play a Skirmish game, you must first launch the game, wait interminably while it loads the save point and returns you to where you are in the main story line game, pause that, and then start a new Skirmish game, and wait while it loads.

Whenever you quit Black & White it saves its place in the main story line game. Whenever you start it, no matter why you were starting it, it always takes you back to that place before it will let you do anything else. Now, this may fool you into thinking that it always saves what you were doing last. Don't bet on it. Quit halfway through a Skirmish game without saving it, and you can't get back to it.

What's more, the Skirmish games are sparse, and poorly thought out. The map is always the same for the same number of players. There is no map editor. There are no downloadable maps. There isn't anything like the super-cool random terrain generator in Age of Empires and Age of Kings.

What's more, those maps are unspeakably stupid. All that realistic rendering is wasted on these tiny little islands with completely improbable, arbitrary, and perfectly symetrical geography.

What's more, they're strategically stupid and way, way too predictable. You see, for all that there are eight tribes in the game, you get no control over which tribe you start with. Good thing, too, because each tribe only generates prayer power for very specific miracles. So to play the game at all, you have to start with the same tribe, and then impress villages of the other one or two tribes it lets you, in the same order each time, to get the other miracles you'll need. This gets dull and predictable awfully soon.

Moral Qualms

Then there are the moral qualms that I have with the game.

Look, I'm no prude, nor am I terribly squeamish. I thought that Duke Nukem was pretty funny, and I reacted the same way to that arcade game (name escapes me) that was the first one where you have to blow away zombies and monsters one chunk at a time. The movie From Dusk Till Dawn made me laugh myself silly; it was as if Tex Avery had made a splatterpunk horror film.

But no farther along in it that I am (after weeks of play), Black & White has pushed my buttons in unpleasant ways. There are parts of this game that I'm not quite comfortable to think of someone enjoying.

I have three such problems so far. One of them is comparatively trivial, but I found myself surprisingly uncomfortable with the cumulative effect of the casual blasphemy in the game.

That sentence is going to raise some eyebrows among my friends. Casual blasphemy is, for the most part, my idea of a good time.

But in Black & White, your followers grovel to you and worship you ... well, I was going to say slavishly, but even slaves show more spark, more rebelliousness, more cynicism than you'll find in all (but one) of the human characters in this game. It gets disgusting.

And if you're at all religious, somewhere around the first, or fourth, or five hundredth time someone in the game bows before you in closeup, and then imploringly addresses you directly as "Almighty God," "Your Worship," "Your Godliness," or whatever, you're going to run screaming from the room. Or at least, you ought to.

But that's silly and trivial compared to the problems I have with two ways in which the game actively encourages animal abuse.

One of them has gotten attention elsewhere. To teach your Creature, you have basically three tools: set a good example, reward good behavior, and punish bad behavior. Setting a good example is self explanatory; unless you've abused or neglected him to the point of petulance, your Creature will watch you and copy your actions. Rewarding your creature is pretty simple, too: click and hold one of the mouse buttons to zoom in, then "pet" your creature with slow motions your Divine Hand. Whether you tickle his sides, rub his tummy, scratch his chin, or pat him on the head, he loves it. The longer you do it, the more he loves it -- and the more he wants to do whatever it was he was doing that made you pet him.

Between these two tools, you can pretty much teach your Creature to be whatever you want him to be. But there will come a time when your Creature picks up a bad idea and cannot be bribed or cajoled or led away until he forgets it. It may be as minor as a bad habit of gassing villagers half to death with his flatulence. Worse, if you're trying to teach him to be Good, no matter how helpful your Creature has learned to be, there will come the one moment where he gets hungry enough to wonder if villagers are edible.

Now, you can't reward or teach him out of a habit this bad. If you do not beat him senseless, he will keep doing it. You use the same starting motion to zoom in and get his attention, and then sharply swing the cursor back and forth to slap him around. For minor bad habits, a single slap or two, which leaves no marks, may be sufficient.

But if you want to make sure your Creature never does something again, at least once you are going to have to beat it half to death. No, really: big ugly welts, seeping yellow and purple bruises, swelling contusions. And that's just a 6 or 7 on a scale of 1 to 10.

And oh, it gets worse: every time your Creature gets hurt, he gets more afraid, and he only gets over it slowly. If a player doesn't learn the trick of training the Creature in more gentle ways, it is very easy to turn it into a classic battered child, and it will act like one. And I'm more than a little worried that some players seem to like that.

But I ran into a less obvious, but more disturbing, example of encouraging animal abuse in my first Skirmish game.

The other god's Creature was a cat, a leopard about the same age as my monkey. Now, I'd already had my curious, want-to-be-helpful Creature wander within hostile miracle range of other gods. I've seen my creature drag its badly mauled carcas home with fireball burns and lightning scars all over it. But it had never occurred to me what it would look like, or feel like, to be the god, on the other end of that transaction.

So at one point, I find this giant leopard wandering around one of my villages. So I started throwing fireballs at it, in sheer self defense. And it did the same thing I'd taught my Creature to do: retreat as far as possible, summon rain clouds to put itself out, and try to get back within Healing range of its god before it got too tired to move.

I had to keep hitting it to keep it from coming back. And I could tell when I had it on the run, and here's the part that unsettled me: this distressed cat, with big pitiful eyes, cried and mewed piteously for mercy, as I set its fur on fire over and over again, not letting it have a moment's rest. What I had to do to that poor cat to protect my villagers turned my stomach. We've had video game characters get splattered all over the landscape before -- but how may of them looked like pets, how many of the attacks were as plausible as setting them on fire, and how many of them wept frustrated tears, imploring you for mercy while you were doing it?

The logic of the game is inexorable. If you don't use these kinds of measures, the other god runs rampant over you. To win, you have to get to the point of being comfortable setting a cat on fire. I shudder at the memory, and this may be another unconscious reason why I'm having a hard time turning the game back on.

In Conclusion ...

So here's what it all comes down, the question you come to Epinions for in the first place: should you spend your $40 or $50 on this software, or not?

No game ever to date has been more beautiful, and not since the original Sim City or Warcraft has there been one more innovative and original.

On the other hand, I have never had higher hopes for a game that turned out to be so unspeakably dull. It's aggravating, too, but that might be forgivable if it weren't so dull. Nor am I at all sure that I could keep playing this game for more days and weeks, even if it were neither dull nor aggravating, without being further repulsed by the groveling villagers and the overtones of animal abuse.

So here's my ultimate call on Black & White. You absolutely must see it, and play with it for a little while. If you have enough hardware and won't miss the money, you might even want to plunk down the $40 or so to buy a copy. But I don't have any great expectation that you're going to get a lot of good time out of it, and that leaves me hesitant to recommend it.

(Oh, and so many other things bothered me about this game, I see I didn't even get around to ragging on the documentation, which is the worst I've seen come out of an English-speaking country in seven or eight years: ugly, poorly written, and incomplete. The first half of the "Official Strategy Guide" is the manual that should have shipped in the box, so unless you're willing to read it in the store and take notes, add that $20 to the price, too. And did I mention the online help, which you must search for, clue by clue, before you can use it?)

Recommended: No