For those not in the know about Act Raiser, Enix released the game in 1991 for the Super NES and You play as God-I mean
For those not in the know about Act Raiser, Enix released the game in 1991 for the Super NES and You play as God-I mean "The Master" (Hooray for censorship! I mean, I thought the Master was evil!) and you have to kill monsters to make areas inhabitable for people to start a new civilization in an simulation type game like Sim City. After you clear the area of the monsters, a temple arises and then you proceed to guide an angel to guide the people of where to build roads and such. There are still some monsters left that spawn from a patch of land called a "monster lair" and try to stop the building of the city. As the angel you have to protect the fledging city from these demons by shooting them with your arrows. Eventually the people seal up the monster lairs and this gets rid of the threat. After building the city a problem will arise that makes God have to come down to fight a new evil threat to ensure safety for your followers.
The game play in Act Raiser is pretty simple. In the action stages, the D pad moves God around the stage, the B button makes him jump, the Y button swings his sword, and if you have a spell, you can use the X button to cast it. The action levels aren't too terribly hard. Occasionally some parts you get stuck at or a boss battle is pretty difficult, but through trial and error you can get them down. I know I've had trouble at parts. If you are familiar at all with the Castlevania games on the NES, the action levels are pretty similar though not as hard.
While the action levels were fun, I liked the simulation parts the best. Maybe that's just me. The aptly named sequel to ActRaiser, ActRaiser 2, jettisoned the simulation parts all together. All in all, ActRaiser was a really fun game and held up really quite well over time. If you still have a Super Nintendo in your closet you could do no better than to give than give ActRaiser a play through. But if you like the simulation parts (like me) maybe Sim City would be a better choice to play, though it still was a blast to play. Also this game is on the Wii's virtual console so if for some reason you don't have an SNES, then there is hope yet!
I give this game an 8.5 out of 10.