Hacker News Reader

Comment by nazgulsenpai | Hacker News Reader

My favorite unlicensed are then Wisdom Tree games. I have the bright blue Bible Adventures cartridge in my collection. It sticks out so badly and is such a terrible, terrible game... That it is one of my favorite thrift store finds for the console :)

View on HN

I was about to bring this up! I got one of these absolutely terrible games in the mid-90s (long after the NES was the hot thing and we had all loved to the SNES or even N64, I can’t remember the year) at the Christian book store when I was with my aunt and my grandmother, and even at that age (10 or 11), I knew it would be both terrible and also terrible in a truly wonderful way. It did not disappoint.

I can’t remember which one I had now (it might have been Bible Adventures but it might have been the one that was the Menace Beach clone), except that it exists in my parents basement somewhere along with my other oddities of childhood.

IIRC, Wisdom Tree was the first company to bypass the lockout chip, before even Tengen/Atari. I have to think the low market for those games, unlike Tengen which was for sale at Toys R Us like real games, probably prevented them for being caught up in some of the legal stuff.

Hah I remember trying to go into the casinos in one of these games would make you take damage. My friend was super Christian and we were allowed over to his house on Sunday but were only allowed to play these Bible games!

The Angry Video Game Nerd's videos about the Wisdom Tree games are too good not to mention here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkNvQYiM6bw

There exist two sequels to this video:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dUVZozf-i0

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz0TOQ1BF-M

Another game they made was Spiritual Warfare-- and surprisingly, it's a fantastic game. It plays just like a sequel to the original Legend of Zelda, and I dare say is superior to it in some regards.

When I was growing up I didn’t have legend of Zelda, I had this game. The trivia where you get the question right and the guy‘s bowtie spins, The pomegranate which functions like a boomerang, getting punished for going into a bar. All of it is awesome.

Was going to add this myself. It's too bad that the videos linked above only give a minute or so to Spiritual Warfare, because unlike Bible Adventures, Spiritual Warfare was actually good! I played the heck out of that game, knew the location of every fruit, and had pretty much the entire game map committed to memory.

If I remember correctly, churches would give these to kids for free. It was part of an effort to combat the "satanic influence" of normal video games.

My personal favorite of theirs is Super 3D Noah's Ark. It's essentially Wolfenstein 3D -- they licensed the engine and everything -- but instead of shooting Nazis with guns until they die, you instead shoot food at animals with slingshots until they fall asleep from satiation.

(It was originally supposed to be a straight-up adaptation of the movie Hellraiser, but they decided this was insufficiently Christian after it became clear that it would look like a cheap knock-off of Doom, which was released during the game's early development.)

I have the blue one as well! Man, collecting all those animals for Noah's Ark was frustrating. Oh, and the falling rocks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com