Black and White 2
Something very strange happened in the gaming world this week. Peter Molyneux released a game and nobody cared.I'm from the gaming generation that remembers Peter Molyneux as big, big box office. He was consistently innovative and always interesting. Even Black and White was more interesting as a failure than many games are as successes.
How times have changed. Black and White 2 was released and there is zero buzz about the game. Zero. The reviews have not been kind, either--75% at Game Rankings based on six reviews (and here's a link to the excellent EuroGamer review (6 out of 10):
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=61124. I just don't think this game is going to sell, and like I said, for someone who used to be big box office as well as the critic's darling, that's a shock.
I have higher hope for The Movies (which went gold this week), but I saw a lengthy demo at E3 and I couldn't help thinking that it looked like the kind of game that would be tremendously fun for the first five hours, then boring as hell after that. I hope I'm wrong, but that was the problem with Black and White, really: I was blown away for five hours, then my interest level fell off a cliff.
EA, as the world's most prolific flogger of existing intellectual property, probably insisted on a sequel to Black and White. It's what they do--they won't invest in original i.p. unless they plan on putting out ten sequels or twenty expansion packs. So instead of being an interesting experiment that ultimately failed, pieces of which might have appeared later in other, more successful Molyneux games, they can't let it go. And the original sold well, if I remember correctly, so that's even more reason to force a sequel, even if it wasn't a good game.
If I'm Peter Molyneux, I'm not particularly happy about that. And as a gamer, I'm not happy about it, either. In the ideal world, guys like Peter Molyneux would always be experimenting, always thinking about how to push gaming forward. Sometimes,they would fail, but they would never stop moving forward, and that would be far more important.
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