Although they are hardly a household name amongst athiests and agnostics, just about every Christian gamer who was around in the NES era is familiar with one particularly infamous developer: "Wisdom Tree." Basically, they started life as just another crappy developer who published all of their NES games without Nintendo's liscense. But when Nintendo started cracking down on un-liscensed developers, someone at Wisdom Tree had a brilliant idea: "Hey, let's make all of our crappy games be Christian themed!" The thinking at the time was that Nintendo would not want to be known as "The game company who sued Jesus," and apparently it worked.
One of the best examples of the developer's farce was originally a game where you played as a Ninja trying to rescue your girlfiriend (who wears less and less clothes after each level) from a demon. This of course was changed to "Sunday Fun Day", where you now played as a good christian boy in hot pants, and were trying to get to sunday school on time. Your girlfriend was replaced with a fully clothed sunday school teacher, and the demon was replaced with a bear. They made an entire slew of these crappy games, and poor Christian parents were none the wiser (ironic since the developer was Wisdom Tree) when they shoved these games on kids like me. And that brings us to what is undoubtedly the crown gem of Wisdom Tree's career.
Basically, you weren't anyone back in the day if your mom hadn't come home from the Christian bookstore one afternoon waving a copy of this game in your face. It's basically a really crappy Zelda clone, but with some interesting changes. Instead of killing Moblins with a sword, you hurled pears, mangos, papayas, and whatever "fruit of the spirit" you could find at average citizens, which caused them to kneel down and pray. The goal of the game was to find all the pieces of God's armor, which made your character more power and granted him special abilities. And every now and then, and angel would float by, and if you touched the angel, you got to answer bible trivia. Every time you answered the trivia right, a dismembered head wearing a bow tie would smile with delight, and his bow tie would spin in a bizzare fashion (yes, I am SERIOUS, this was IN THE GAME).
What was most strange about SW was that for such a dumpy game, it was very hard. When I got older I rediscovered this piece of crap, and ended up turning it on. I got so obsessed with conquering my childhool tormenter that I actually beat the game, and you know what I got? A screen of text that said something along the lines of "Thank you for being a good warrior for God! May he bless you in everything you do!" And apparently, the first thing that God blessed me in doing was turning off the NES.
This game should be on Virtual Console just because it's so bad, that I think the next generation of Christian gamers should have to play it too, just so us adults can say "See son? This is what we had to play when we were your age!" This is a stinker truly worthy of archiving. :P
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