Nostalgia Gaming: Black & White

I just reinstalled Black & White and remembered how amazing it was.

If you've never played it before it's kind of a real time strategy game but also a God simulation game. You are a god and you have to please your people with whatever they need, be it food, wood, homes, etc., by any means necessary. This can mean killing the homeless or making homes for them. You can be good or evil and, as we all know, evil is almost always more fun.  Your people can either fear or love you but either way they will follow you.

You also have a creature. It changes its appearances depending on its alignment (which is separate from yours). This creature can cast the miracles you teach it to help please the villagers. To learn these miracles you have to train your creature. Actually, you have to train your creature to do anything. For example, if it poops against something you don't want it to you can smack it about. You really have to micro manage your creature for a while in the beginning to train it. I found the best way to do this was to just go into a skirmish game and follow it around. You can train it to eat villagers too which I thought was entertaining...

The villages are scattered throughout the islands when the game starts. However, you can also build your own. The happier or more terrified you make the villagers the more they believe in you. To achieve this you can either heal sick villagers or throw rocks at their faces. At a certain amount of belief they will convert to you and give you all the miracles that they have knowledge of. Converting these villages will bring you closer to destroying the temple of the other god(s), which you need to do in order to win that map.

The gameplay is amazing and is pretty sandboxy. The campaign is really challenging and can take hours upon hours (which is a good thing if you have no life like me =P ). Also good and evil games are almost always fun for me. There is a modding and map making community as well. I'm not exactly sure how active it is now seeing as how the game was made in 2001 but here is a site to download maps and mods from:

http://www.kayssplace.com/boards/index.php?board=5.0

And if you don't have the game you can buy it on Amazon here (for some reason it's stupid expensive new so it'd probably be better if you bought it used... or got it through other means but I didn't tell you to do that):

http://tinyurl.com/yhruq3h

TL;DR
Get it if you can. Certainly worth playing at least once. 

And for people who are wondering I've never played Black & White 2 but I've heard it focused more on building up cities rather than being a god so I can't really say if it is any better. Certainly looks better but that's really the only judgement I can make.