Black & White 2

[cwieberdink]

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

[sanmonroe]

Does the IotD only apply to the Sims2 BBS?

The lionhead boards have some real sparklers. For example,

ASAP is french and im betting you have no idea what it means. because if you did you would not be here creating fully formed neatly spaced parigraphs, when you could be out ASAPing with the rest of us. now if you excuse me i have to go ASAP.

[cyperangel]

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

[sanmonroe]

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!

[sanmonroe]

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.

[sanmonroe]

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.

[Hook]

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

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

[witch]

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

[Diala]

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.

[sanmonroe]

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.

[dizzy]

 

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

[jrd]

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.

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.

[sanmonroe]

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.

[SaraMK]

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.

[sanmonroe]

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