Black & White in Your Pocket

Say what you will about Peter Molyneux (and we have), but the man does have a knack for coming up with interesting game concepts. The AI-driven Black & White may not have been a perfect game, but it certainly brought out a bunch of new concepts. Well, Black & White is set to make a comeback, and I'm not talking about Black & White 2. Majesco has just announced Black & White Creatures for Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

This makes so much sense it's not even funny. Imagine Nintendogs with a large, living world (and lots of peasants for the puppies to eat). Think Tamogotchi with followers. Think Monster Rancher "to go." For the DS version, the stylus makes many of the original interface designs feasible in a way that the mouse never did. Gestural input should be much more intuitive. Scratching your creature's belly (or slapping it around) will be a matter of scratching the stylus on the screen. From a design perspective, it seems like a no-brainer. I'm less sure about the PSP version, but hopefully enough of the game will work in that format as well.