Oh…God.
The story behind how this game got made is a bit involved, but it goes something like this: Nintendo required that NES games be licensed and copy protected by them, in hopes avoiding an Atari-esque crash. Some companies didn’t like this, and came up with various ways to get around that. One such company, Color Dreams, had mild success with this before Nintendo pressured the retailers who carried their games to stop doing so. Without the ability to sell through the usual retailers, Color Dreams found another place to sell their games – Christian book stores. Nintendo can’t intimidate them! It was kind of a brilliant plan.
After changing their name to “Wisdom Tree,” the company released a small handful of Christian-themed games to varying degrees of success. The most well known of these is this week’s game, 1991’s Bible Adventures. The game gives you three different adventures to “enjoy” (in theory), and while they’re all fairly similar, let’s look at each of them one by one.
The first on the list is “Noah’s Ark,” in which you have to collect two of every animal before God kills everyone. There’s no time limit (God’s cool like that), but you do have a limited amount of health to run around each level and find the animals you need. Different animals are elusive in different ways (pigs need to be distracted by food, for instance). Noah lifts all animals, regardless of size, over his head:
You’re given a checklist calling for two of each animal, and roam around grabbing animals and putting them in the ark. Each level has a different set of animals, which become increasingly resistant to being Saved From God. Eventually, there’s a bird that’ll just pick you up and fly you into the treetops, ruining whatever it was you were doing. Oh, and by the way, Noah can climb trees.
The second of Bible Adventures‘ three games is “Baby Moses.” In this one, you play as Moses’s mom, who must carry the extremely important infant Moses through a series of weird areas (basically, it’s The Mandalorian). Each of the game’s areas is filled with various plagues of Egypt or whatever, including birds, spiders with googly eyes, and framerate issues. All you really need to do is pick up Moses and jump around, avoid enemies, and get to the end of the stage. Or you can just ignore all that and throw Moses in the river.
The game lets you try again any number of times, which is good because it’s surprisingly easy to accidentally lose Moses in the river, or fall into it yourself, after being hit by an enemy. The platforming feels a bit clunky as well, and some levels with small and disappearing platforms can be pretty frustrating to deal with.
Overall, though, this one’s probably my favorite of the bunch. The levels are rather varied, often with multiple paths you can take, and carrying Moses around (over the head, just like Noah did) is pretty amusing.
The third game, “David and Goliath,” is really mostly just David gathering sheep. This one’s a lot like “Noah’s Ark,” in that you mostly pick up sheep (over your head, of course) and take them from wherever to somewhere else. Come to think of it, it’s the same as “Noah’s Ark.” This one has more angry rams who want to stop you, though.
In all of the game’s modes, you can pick up what appear to be small stone tablets, which provide both health and Bible verses, like this:
Or like this:
Bible Adventures has gotten a very bad rap from plenty of gaming writers, including Seanbaby, who named it one of the 20 worst NES games ever. I’m going to be honest, though – I don’t hate this. It’s basically Super Mario Bros. 2 without much polish. There’s something weirdly endearing about the simple, goofy platforming, the tacked-on Bible stuff, the iffy but functional platforming, and so on. It’s weird, and it’s not especially good, but dang it, it’s not bad. I swear to you, it is worth a try.
Next week’s game isn’t about God stuff, as far as I know. Apparently it’s a “simulator,” which I expect means the physics will be out of control. Maybe.