Here it is, the grand finale of AVGN season one, and his Christmas episode for 2006; a look at a selection of Bible based video games.
These games are odd things: these happen to be the first unlicensed games that the Nerd reviews, and while not too common as the series progresses, many of these unlicensed games prove to be absolute gems in AVGN review content!
Explaining these games existences simply, for the sake of understanding, Nintendo wanted control of what was released onto their consoles, and to do this games had to be submitted to Nintendo, under certain rules and requirements, and once accepted Nintendo themselves actually produced the cartridges for the game company. One of the subjects that was a major no-go for Nintendo of America was any reference to religion, so these games would never have been officially published under that condition.
Bible Adventures, in the “baby blue” cartridge!
Wisdom Tree, a company which in and of itself has an interesting history of 3rd party software, found ways around the lockout systems built into the Nintendo Entertainment System, and later the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and were able to publish the games themselves.
The fact that this is a Christian company (in the case of many of the games shown here at least) adds quite a bit of irony to the story.
Anyway, on to the video, James covers these games in a wonderful style; the jokes are great, his reviews of the games go from several minute in-depth overviews to one that can only be summed up as “it sucks!” These games seem to have given James a ton of content to work with, and while this is still an “early” episode, he certainly takes the most of it.
This episode is also certainly the longest of the time, at about 20 minutes, and also covers not only more games than any other episode up to this time, but includes the first Super Nintendo game review in the series. It really is, no joke intended, one hell of an episode and shows the love James had for this series at this time, which at this point was growing at quite a rate. At least, that’s the way it seems to have been.
One of the many, many poor quality games put out by Wisdom Tree.
On an aside, I happen to own copies of “Bible Adventures” and “King of Kings” and all I can say is, the games are just as bad as James says. This is certainly some of the most accurate criticism I can find in Season 1, no exaggerations, unlike some other games.
Final Rating: 4.5/5
As I said above, this is just one hell of an episode. James really had some fun with it, and he really did a great job finding things to point out, yet still maintain comedy. It’s hard to describe, this episode just works and is always a treat to watch.
Enjoy.