Yeah, Mike, I’ve seen a *lot* of this game.

I think it’s a good idea to start creating more Christian fiction that is easily accessable by everyone, all ages, races, and yeah, especially look to include non-Christians in our fun. Marketing people are also wise to continue hyping the older stuff like Narnia and Phillip K. Dick stuff and (so I’ve heard in a convuluted and confusing assed way) LotR, all of which has been successful in the past and continues to be because they are really, really good times.

HELL YES! I mean…

But the Left Behind series doesn’t hinge on the books being really, really good times, they hinge on being hyped from the pulpit. Which worked really well, by the way, especially in smaller churches and on BTV (Baptist Television. I’m serious, it’s in extended cable. There’s a tubby black woman with floppy tits jumping around screaming on it right now). The writing translates the authors into characters in a post apocalypse world, and the whole story is totally narcicistic and is all about them and their courageous adventures and deeds, and how they assume the world will go down, and its all very petty and small and unrealistic, and I hate this series, you get the point.

So, we start with a book series I don’t really respect, but in all fairness, other people liked the story and I’m not that big on the whole "book thing," anyway. That’s why I’ve got a picture of Stiltman getting nailed in the balls with a rocket pinned in front of my toilet. Because I don’t need Reader’s Digest, I just need to see something and laugh a few times, and all I have to do is tear out a page of Perdido Street Station and my business is done.

Now on to calling the game a piece of shit before I’ve played it. Its like the developers asked themselves, "What would be the least fucking relevant genre to host this series in an interactive way that will totally cut off the console market, yet appeal to the eight PC gamers who love heavily censored violence and shitty graphics? OH I KNOW, AN RTS!" It’s the least narrative type of game that you can present, and since the focal point of the books is how two men survived the apocalypse, I’m guessing it’s not going to translate the story very well, which is okay, because it sucked. In a way, the genre itself is sacriligious, because in RTS games, you play God.

Its Alanis Morrissette. Get it? Because it’s ironic? Bah.

Anyway, here we have a game that has, from the looks of things so far and for whatever reason, been poorly made on the cheap, appeals only to the Christian gamer market, focuses on the "fuck you, non-believers, you’re going to suffer and then go to Hell" part of the new testament, and is of a genre that has never told a story very well, ever, and IMHO, was done after Starcraft in 1997. I’m guessing some Christian geek in his basement was playing Red Alert 2 and said to himself, "You know what’s missing from this game? FEAR OF GOD." He slapped on the name of a Christian franchise that was already popular and voila, a game for fifty bucks cheap. And you know what the worst part of it is? Some asshole I know is going to think, "Well… He’s Catholic… He’s a gamer… What can I get for a Catholic gamer?" AND THEN BAM!

It’s right there waiting for me under the Carone family Christmas tree without a return receipt, forcing me to re-gift it as soon as possible to make some other poor sap who doesn’t want it miserable. Or I can use it to piss off orphans by donating it to charity. That’d be the Christian thing to do. Heh heh heh, stupid orphans.

And I have no idea what the Hell the vikings are all about. Those guys show up in the weirdest places.