Black & White 2: Battle of the Gods Comments by Egon Superb

Egon Superb?

When will they stop beating this dead horse! WHEN!

If only Populous could work in 3D.

Luckily this studio was bought by MS, or else it would probably have gone out of business.

He's a genius...

He's also damn well right. Multiplayer made B&W playable. Without it this is a paltry offering indeed.

smoison - ever heard of Populous 3? it was 3d and great fun - get to a bargain bin (better than this shite)

Uncle Superb is right to pour forth his bile but has overlooked one glorious feature: WALLS. I like walls in games, decent walls make any game at least halfway enjoyable and this one is no exception. Aesthetically, B&W2's walls are very nice, easy to sculpt, AND for a coup de gras you can put little men on them. That's right, ON them - they run up a little tower then stand on top shooting arrows. It's immense. This alone is worth an extra mark on the score.

The fact that all this lovely masonry is wasted on a game where a big gay gow runs up and puts a volcano underneath them every ten minutes is a bit of a downer, but still, if you're looking for a game to flesh out that metaphor of hiding yourself from the world via imaginary leviathans of stone - look no further.


EDIT: Little men, not little me. That's just frigthening.

EDIT 2: Frightening, not frigthening. Frigthening sounds like some obscure harvest ritual.

6?! 6?! A whole article tearing a game to shreds with not a redeeming feature in sight, and then a 6?

Brilliant name, that.

What started as a hugely disapointing game in 2001 has turned into an irrelevent no hoper 5 years later. NEXT!

All populous games were in 3D werent they? Dont seem to remember a 2d one?

The first two were isometric but populous, the beginning was fully 3d

P:TB wasn't a particularly good God-Game, though. One of the best RTS (in terms of actual fun) I ever played, mind.

I bought the original black and white and the extension pack for buttons a few years ago. I installed it, buoyed by the glowing reviews it had recieved everywhere, spent more hours than I care to think about trying to find those fucking signposts, trying to get my creature to do something useful, then I got to the sailor level and just turned it off, giving its hard drive space over to something more constructive, like fansub anime and porn..........

Took them back into Gamestation to trade and got 50p each for them.........

So more (but only a bit) of the same.

I used to love his early games; and why, becasue they were new and no one had done that before. But I guess the rehashing of old work is the curse of the Artist. Make few great pieces of work and spend the rest of your life trying to do better, but ultimatly repeating yourself.

Have to say having read the review I thought I saw a 3-4 landing down but a 6? thats above average which the review really dont make this expansion pack sound at all. This pack sounds more like a freebie/patch not something to cough up your bean-buying-bag to pop onto the counter for.

The first two were isometric but populous

isometric IS 3d last time i checked.

I bought the original black and white - played throgh to the end of the game, where i attack the nasty creature from the nasty god.. win..

Then every time it crashed. I tried restarting the game, everything.. and every time.. when it got to that part it crashed.

A new patch came out, but it didnt have my problem listed, and by applying it it'd lose yer save files.

At that point i decided to not buy another lionhead game.

Great! Not only have we moved from trusted reviewers to no-name reviewers, we now get reviewers who aren't even willing to put their name on the review.

I don't have faith in Eurogamer's reviews outside of the big guns (Tom, Kieron, et. al) and I don't think Eurogamer does either. There are a stack of "reviewers" here who would never get close to writing up a AAA title review.

Now this review itself doesn't seem too bad although the conclusions are a bit mystifying. "Egon" says that you'll like B&W2 if you liked the original ... except that he loved the original and doesn't particularly like this one. And apparently there's nothing new for newcomers ... except, I guess, that the game will be entirely new for them by way of not having played the original.

(As a side-note, if "Egon Superb" is actually "Gypsum Fantastic" (aka Martin Coxall), he's getting better.)

Now this review itself doesn't seem too bad although the conclusions are a bit mystifying. "Egon" says that you'll like B&W2 if you liked the original ... except that he loved the original and doesn't particularly like this one.

I think he means you'll like the expansion if you enjoyed the original B&W2.

don't have faith in Eurogamer's reviews outside of the big guns

Surely in such a wordy review, even if you dont agree with what the person is saying, you can tell whether you'd like the game or not. So therefor you can have "faith" in that?

Or do you just look at the scores?

IMHO, as long as a review is written well, i can pretty much figure out if i'll enjoy it or not. This review was written well. You may agree/disagree with it, but who wrote it matters jack (as long as it's written well).

having "faith" in the reviewer matters if you just have a paragraph saying "hey, it's on a sega console, we love sega, this game is great 10/10". But if the review goes out of his/her way to point out what they liked/disliked about the game, you can pick up whether you'll like it or not.

Which is personally why i've always had a problem with scores - they tell you nothing apart from whether the reviewer liked the game or not. And you can pick that up from the words.

Put it this way, with just a score, i cant judge if i'll like a game - with a well written review I can judge if i will or not. A game may get 4/10, but after reading a well written review i could decide i'll like it. And vice versa.

So I dont necessarily believe it actually matters who reviews a game, as long as the review covers all angles, is well rounded and makes sense. Like this one was.

see?

Do I just look at the score? Good lord! Did you even read my comments? Particularly the third paragraph where I'm either paraphrasing parts of his review, or just taking a very lucky stab in the dark.

I also said the review wasn't too bad. It was just the conclusion I thought was contradictory (and perhaps a little generic).

So, when you suggest that I didn't read the review, I have no idea what you're going on about and I guess that makes two of us.

And I also guess we're very different people because, unlike yourself, there is no way I'd trust the opinion of Joe Random. Regardless of how well he writes and in how much detail he speaks. But hey, I'm ok, you're ok.

"there is no way I'd trust the opinion of Joe Random. Regardless of how well he writes and in how much detail he speaks"

I'm with smelly on this one. If Joe Random writes well and includes a lot of detail, surely its not a matter of trust anymore. If JP gives you hard facts on which you can base your own opinion, what is the there left to trust or distrust?

"If JP gives you hard facts on which you can base your own opinion,"

Ah, but how would you know what are facts and what is spin? This is just some anonymous person we're talking about and all you have to go on is their word.

"what is the there left to trust or distrust?"

Well, for a start there are those show stopping bugs/features that really kill a game. Everything in the review could be the absolute truth and they may just be failing to mention the painful interface or controls. I guess my point is that you just don't know.

I'm not saying you're wrong, we just have different standards of trust.

I take your point. My take on your definition of trust was that you "trust" the opinionn of the reviewer and I was suggesting their own opinion was moot.

But I see what you mean now, there can be a degree of trust that the reviewer will actually perform the job of providing the info you need.

I'm no fan of anonymous reviewers either as it happens, but I'm not quite as bothered as you think you were ;)