Most retro gamers are familiar with Christian themed games like Bible Adventures, but for awhile there were actually a number of biblically-influenced first person shooter, trying to capitalize off of the popularity of Doom and Quake? This update's article includes a look at five of them - the most noteworthy is Super Noah's Ark 3D, which infamously licensed the Wolfenstein 3D engine and was one of the only unofficial SNES carts out there, but the rest are of the PC, and there's some interesting history behind them.
Continuing the coverage for "decent but slightly overlooked NES titles", read about Conquest of the Crystal Palace, one of the first games developed by Quest, who would later go on to create Ogre Battle. The other articles are for more recent games, cult classics that deserve to be picked up immediately though they've been out for awhile. Deadly Premonition is one of the most divisive games of the generation, with both criticisms for its awkward controls and praise for its incredibly bizarre atmosphere. There's also an extensive interview with SWERY65, the game's developer. And Ghost Trick comes courtesy of Shu Takumi, the guy beyond the Ace Attorney series. It has been growing a little bit stale lately, so he changes up the forumula with something brilliant, and, of course, it flops. The DS games hasn't gotten TOO expensive though, and the slightly nicer iOS version was released in English not too long ago, which you can buy for $10, which is easily worth it.
The third episode of Game Club 199X is up also - this talks about The Maze of Galious, the second in Konami's Majou Densetsu series. It's an action-RPG that takes place in a rather expansive maze, although despite its exploratory structure and side-view perspective, it has more in common with the original Zelda than Metroid. Your Weekely Kusoge is Taiketsu Rumiizu!, an old Bomberman clone that gets it horribly wrong, and the featured article is a re-look at the innovative but clumsy SNES title SOS, an ode to The Poseiden Adventure with numerous endings.
I'm really happy that the coverage on the Christian games was handled rather even-handedly. It's hard to get any sort of objective writeup on these types of games on the Internet. Most of them aren't that good, but I think that the intentions to make something worthwhile are there, and as pointed out, it often just doesn't happen because of limited resources.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Spiritual Warfare was a pretty awesome Zelda clone. So there's that. :)