A blog for the Lent season, if there is such a thing.
By Video_Game_King 20 Comments
Bible Adventures
( You guys do know what today is, right?) Some regular day? Yea, pretty much, but it's also a holiday. Kind of. It's some day of Lent! For those of you who don't know what it is, I don't, either. I think it has something to do with Jesus walking through the desert, because he really wants E.T. and eBay hasn't been invented yet. The Bible takes place in the 80s, right? Anyway, what better way to honor Lent than to blog about two Bible games? What's that? Give up video games for Lent? WHAT SICK FUCK THOUGHT UP SUCH A HORRIFIC PRACTICE!?Anyway, Bible Adventures is obviously a game based on the Bible, much in the same way that Okami is based on Japanese mythology: extremely loosely. There are exceptions to all of this however: if it's inconvenient, then loyalty is strictly enforced. But I'm guessing you already knew all of that; what you don't know is how the game is played. If you do know how it's played, then we shall weep later, after I have explained the gameplay to the others. Depending on which part of the game you play, the gameplay changes quite a bit. If you play the Moses one, you just run from left to right. That's pretty much it. If you're looking for any type of complexity, go for the Noah or David games, because they're pretty much the same thing. You walk around levels and grab animals, bringing them to a giant collection arrow. Does that sound boring? That's because it is. It doesn't help that the music is specifically designed for optimal boredom, or that all of Noah's levels are EXACTLY THE SAME. Over time, a tedium sets in, and I think this was what Wisdom Tree intended. After all, if you're completely bored, you're probably not going to notice all the weird glitches or obvious palette swaps or the shit Bible quotes ("I'm not that scared" is not as good a quote as "Am I my brother's keeper"). However, no matter how bored you are, you're still going to notice some flaws, and I'm not just talking about how fucking boring the game is. I'm talking about the controls. Holy hell, do they suck. Somehow, they manage to be both sticky and slippery, probably as Christianity's "fuck you" to the laws of science.
Anyway, onto the story of Moses! One day, the Pharaoh (I promise that there won't be a single protest/Yu-Gi-Oh joke) decided to kill every male baby in Egypt. Why? I honestly don't remember, so I'm going to pretend that it wasn't well explained in the source material. What the fuck, pharaoh guy? Moses' mom catches wind of his highly controversial "Lesbians for Future Generations" campaign ("We may not have had the goods, but future generations will!") and decides to take her freakishly huge baby out of Egypt. On the way, she must avoid shirtless Egyptians who wish to toss baby Moses into the nearby river. So what does she do at the end of her ordeal? Toss baby Moses into the river.......Uh, finally, we have the story of David and Goliath. Trust me, they aren't superheroes who beat up henchmen like Batman and Robin, but mortal enemies. Why? I have no idea. Should it surprise you that nothing about this is well written? You don't believe me? How about this: David thinks that he's fit to fight Goliath because he spent his entire life raising sheep. That's how Ryu learned how to Hadouken, right? With sheep? Joking totally not aside, I can kinda see where David is coming from, since, like Noah, he can lift four of the damn things at a time. So after training with sheep, he climbs the nearby mountains and encounters the terrible power that is scorpions. These things are invincible. You can rock people to death (I'm not making the same Tenacious D joke), but scorpions laugh at your puny rocks. Not convinced? How about this: the mighty pretty-big-Eastern-European-guy-known-as-Goliath falls to the might of the rock. Granted, you have to hit him in his extremely well guarded forehead to kill him (why did he never wear a helmet?), but he's still killable. Once you do, this game is finally over. All I have to do is give it an award, and then I'll never have to look at it, again. *deliberates* I'VE DECIDED! Jesus Award for Resurrection. What do I mean by this? Wisdom Tree lives. They have a website and everything, which told me that I can't play Bible Adventures on Vista...even though I very clearly played it on Vista. The hell? Weirder still, you can play their games directly off their website through a Java application...that, for whatever reason, very clearly loads an NES emulator. They couldn't even be bothered to convert them to the PC, since they're, you know, on it?
Review Synopsis
- All three games are exactly the same: incredibly boring and broken.
- I can't tell if it's a good or a bad thing that it doesn't bother following the Bible.
- I would prefer turning a jackhammer upside down, sitting on it, and turning it on to Bible Adventures. Why? Because there's no way this game can be worse than being violently fucked up the ass.
My opinion on religion in general:
Bible Adventures
( .....Hey, Jesus?) I can't blog about the same game twice, so give me something better. I know it's the Genesis version, but I can't just write the same shit twice. Give me something better. I'll be waiting........Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters
( Jesus didn't come through for me.) I knew that Bushwald Sexyface was right when he told me never to trust a man with a beard, and especially not a woman with a beard. That's why I abandoned Christianity in favor of these Greek guys. Let's see how they work out. Wait, I've already beaten Kid Icarus. Might as well try the sequel that Nintendo made solely to get fanboys to shut up about there not being a Kid Icarus sequel. Obviously, it never worked. *rebeats Of Myths and Monsters* The ending froze on me. Again. What the hell is it about this game that makes it want to lock up? I guess the Greek gods aren't much better than the Judeo-Christian gods. Fuck it, I'll just renounce them all and join atheism, the religion of Athos, the kickass final character archsage guy in Fire Emblem.And this game gives me a good reason to do so. I'm not calling it bad (it got the exact same score as the original, a game I think is pretty cool), but saying that the gods in this game are completely useless. Paluntea or whatever the fuck her name is (I'm too lazy to look it up) finds out that there's some evil force about to destroy the land. Knowing this, she doesn't destroy the evil, herself, because actually protecting your crappy little people is apparently below the status of a god. Instead, she decides to summon the greatest warrior in all of Greece, but then realizes that she doesn't like Kratos. It probably has something to do with the fact that he communicates solely through heavy breathing, or the basement full of dead cats. So instead, we get Pit, an archer-angel-thing. And that's about it, really. If you're looking for more story, this is not the place. It probably should be the place, though. There's just something about the atmosphere and the RPG aspects that led me to believe that there'd be a fleshed out story of some type. Hell, even Tail Concerto had a big story, and that game couldn't even decide what it wanted to be. Are you going to let furries one-up you, Kid Icarus? That's how they breed! Then again, I don't remember the original Kid Icarus having much of a story. All it did was say, "Medusa captured the goddess Athena/Paluntea/whatever her name is, go rescue her ass" before sending Pit into the Realm of the Eggplant People.
And your dungeons only serve to make you more awesome. Like the rest of the game, they're completely identical to the original labyrinths in Kid Icarus, only with a few minor differences. You know, like a map, so you don't wander around aimlessly, looking for the boss or a nurse who can cure an eggplant curse. Granted, this new map doesn't tell you where those are, either, but it at least makes it easier to find all the cool secrets in a given level. Besides, the boss is always going to be on the edge of the level, and since it would be a bad idea to put the boss two rooms above you, chances are you'll find him pretty easily by going to one of the other sides of the dungeon. And once you get to said boss, you'll often find that it was harder finding the boss than it is actually beating them. Every single one has an incredibly easy to exploit pattern, and once you figure it out, the only time you'll take damage is when you walk up to their face and mash arrows into it. Even the final boss falls prey to this: fly above him, lower yourself down, shoot at his taint like a sexually confused Robin Hood, dodge his easily-dodgeable fireballs, rise above him, repeat until he's dead. Wait, I forgot about the second form, AKA "the one that's legitimately challenging." Sure, he has as exploitable a pattern as any of the other bosses, but since there's a lot more shit on screen at any given time, I think it balances out. I'd end this by telling you that it's a cool game, or by giving it something like the They Told You That There Wouldn't Be a Sequel Award, but since this game never gave me an ending (fucking freezing), I won't give you an ending. So there.
Review Synopsis
- You'll get all the story before the game begins, because there's not a lot of it.
- It's pretty much Kid Icarus again. This is awesome.
- Why did we never get Super Kid Icarus?