Click to enlarge

The latest edition of The Slacker's Guide examines the Black & White Platinum Pack, a compilation of the original Black & White god-sim and its expansion Creature Isle. To succeed in the game players must use their godly powers to increase their followers in a battle for influence with other gods. To help in this task players are given a pet creature which must be trained through use of positive and negative reinforcement.

Your pet, which is both the gimmick of the game and extremely useful, can be your best ally, a good friend or a royal pain depending on treatment and conditioning. After completing some early tasks and choosing a pet from a lineup of a cow, a monkey and a tiger, the pet can become anything you want it to be. Behaviors can be encouraged through positive or negative reinforcement while the pet's appearance can be adapted by adding tattoos to its surface layer via one of the rooms in the temple. Learning can be encouraged by leashing the pet to an object, then demonstrating a behavior you'd like the pet to emulate. The pet will eventually learn and begin to perform these behaviors, such as casting helpful miracles for villages, on its own as they wander about the landscape.

Your pet isn't a subtle thing, nor would any gigantic animal given free will be (there's typically a little chaos associated with it, such as the pet knocking over fences or deciding to juggle villagers for amusement), but it can become an essential ally while your attention is diverted to other matters. While one village might ask for help with housing, food or wood supplies, your pet can be directed to go help another village and then be rewarded for it.

The Slacker's Guide: Black & White Platinum Pack Review

Feral Interactive

Lionhead Studios

Black & White

Search for other Mac games news stories or browse our Mac Games News Archive.