#079 – Bible Adventures

Historical epics reduced to tedium

PLAYERS: 1

PUBLISHER: Wisdom Tree

DEVELOPER: Wisdom Tree

GENRE: Platformer

RELEASE DATE: 1990

Each game deserves its own hastily written paragraph, so let’s hop to it! “Noah’s Ark:” even if you’ve never been to church, you know the story. God deems the world too evil and decides to flood it, but spares Noah and his family, provided they build an enormous ark so they can save two of every animal along with themselves. In the game, your only goal is to collect two of “every animal:” pigs, cows, snakes, monkeys… and that’s about it. I think as you finish each level, you move on to collect different kinds of animals, but there is no point. You pick up the animal, place them in the ark, then move on. There is little in the way of challenge: sometimes the animals hurt you, but there’s plenty of health to pick up. On a 1 to 10 scale of sacrilegious, with “10” signifying a Roman general sacrificing a pig on the Jewish temple altar, I give this segment a 2. There’s no telling how Noah rustled up all of the animals, but I doubt he carried them on his head, three at a time. Unless he was really Samson in disguise.

I’d rather play “Noah’s Ark” for joyless hours on end than pick up “Baby Moses” again. At least Noah could subdue the creatures around him. Miriam has to grit her teeth and bear it as her child flies out of her hands time and time again. In the Bible, Pharoah issues an order in Egypt that all Jewish sons shall be killed once they are born. Miriam, Moses’ sister, hears this and follows God’s order to stick him in a basket and place him down a river. Seems crazy, but the river takes Moses to Pharoah’s daughter’s house and Moses is raised in the Pharoah’s household. In the game, Miriam is trying to make it all the way across Egypt with baby Moses on top of her head. I’m guessing the goal is to take Moses to the basket waiting in the river, but there’s a river running throughout the levels of this game. Also, all of God’s creatures are out to kill Miriam and baby Moses, including what appears to be Israelite slaves; not sure how that works. At any rate, the game makes Miriam powerless. She has no attack feature in the game, and the best the game can do is supply her a decent jump. If she gets hit, Baby Moses goes flying. If baby Moses flies too far off screen, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the level, but if you finish the level without Moses, it doesn’t matter. You still move on to the next level. On a sacrilegious scale, this definitely rates a 6. No way would God let anything come between Miriam and Moses, and if Moses flew off of his sister’s head, he’d be dead. That’s just common sense.

“David and Goliath” is the triumphant tale of a boy defeating a giant with one stone. At least it was in the Bible. So why then, in the first four levels of this game, am I collecting sheep? I understand that David was a shepherd before he became a warrior, but if I wanted to collect anything, I’d get Noah on the horn and ask him to do it. After the first four levels, you run through the Philistine Army and do battle against Goliath. It shouldn’t have taken four levels of throwing sheep and avoiding lions to get to that point. They should have done a “David and his Mighty Men” segment, which would consist of David and a bunch of guys running around and doing battle with others. On a scale of Blasphemy to Worship, this segment gets a glass of lukewarm water for being a blatant ripoff of another segment featured in the same game.

Bible Adventures is a sad, depressing waste of time. If you’re going to combine the stories/morals of the Bible with a secular/neutral entertainment medium, at least make said project entertaining. There’s no reason to give the Lord a bad name with yet another crappy Christian product.

F