Soooo....Mass Effect 3

[Maitre]

We are now 10 years past the release of Black and White, and it doesn't look ahead of it's time. It looks stranded in time, an overambitious experiment whose results went nowhere. Who else has tried for 1st person simcity? Trainable learning AI? Iconless control? Almost none of the things in that game have become standard. The genre itself is practically dead, except for some wacky Nintendo experiments like Pikmin. I guess the gesture system was ahead of its time? Even that's still kind of iffy.

There was nothing 5-star about that game except Peter Molyneux' self-opinion.

-Jester

Kind of iffy? Everytime I swipe the screen of a smartphone, I think of whacking the crap out of a lion for eating someone. Everytime I see squad commands in tactical shooters and lament the terrible decisions the squad makes in choosing their chest high walls, I think of a cow wandering back and forth between a field and a granery with absolutely no idea what it should be doing. And when I look at the convoluted conversaion/moral/rep system in Mass Effect, I'm reminded about the decision I had to make about whether to accept a human sacrifice from my loyal subjects (warning, the choice you make probably won't have the consequence you think it will).

I have no idea whether any of those have a direct relationship to the overall progress of game development, but to me, I see things in Black&White that seem to be implemented in newer games. I'll agree it was not a great game, but I disagree with the idea that it wasn't any fun. Yes, there were serious issues with the controls (lofting a projectile was nearly impossible to distinguish from flinging a worm-burner, for example, or hoping that twisting the camera just a bit more would let the game figure out that you wanted a large hut rather than a school), but it still had moments of great joy (flinging wolves into the ocean, or "Disciple: Breeder" which made me laugh every time).

A quick re-read of my post is making me realize just how partisan it may seem. Eh, I guess you can count me as one in the bag for B&W. And I even tried to bring it back to the original thread topic...

So ME3, huh? Anyone have a PC that will run it?