Bible Adventures

Developer: Wisdom Tree
Year: 1991

I'm not going to lie: I like the Bible. I think it's all made up, and I think that if you try to live by it, you're an idiot, but I like the stories. Always have.

That said, I was fully expecting Bible Adventures to be a real piece of crap. Everything religious that's not supposed to be religious is crap. Christian rock is like regular rock, except it doesn't rock, and it sucks. There's a restaurant on 72d street in Manhattan that serves kosher italian food, which is stupid because italian food is defined by parmesean and pork sausage. And then there's that PLO sponsored Mickey Mouse knockoff that tells you to kill jews.

So I was really pleasantly surprised to find that Bible Adventures is actually pretty good. I mean, not awesome, but good enough that we didn't mind playing it, and actually sort of got in to certain aspects of it.

Bible Adventures is actually three games: one where you rescue baby moses, one where you're noah collecting animals, and on where you're david doing something about goliath, though i don't know what. The moses game was OK -- basically, it's an evade-or-mash side-scroller. The david was sort of weak -- basically the same, though the overall mission wasn't clear. And the noah was really pretty good -- you have to get two of every animal, and there are things to lure them with, and you carry them into the ark.

The best thing about the game is that you power up by getting these little commandment tablets that stop the game to give you either
a) a relevant bible verse, or
b) a gameplay tip.
It's a great touch, and really funny because you don't know whether you're going to get some profound passage about virtue and sacrifice or told that tapping b while running will help you catch up to a wayward goat.

All in all, Bible Adventures was a not-half-bad mission-based scroller. I feel sort of dumb about this, and I wonder if somewhere, there's not a Christian hip hop band that i might enjoy if I managed to ignore the fact that all the songs have replaced 'my gangtas' with 'my jesus'.

Rating: 7/10 I mean, whatever. If Jesus were Metroid, he'd play this game. Or something.
Best Moment: Hey, where's the ark? Oh, that's right, under the flashing neon arrow.
Advice: There's nothing in the cave. I have no idea why it's there.