Eternal Forces Previews
I found a couple of previews with more information on Eternal Forces. If this discussion of Christian media, especially games, has interested you at all, go ahead and check them out. There’s one at GameSpy and another at GameSpot. Here are some excerpts I found interesting:
From the GameSpy article:
Players aren’t competing to kill the enemy army — rather, they’re trying to save them, and each person killed represents a failure rather than a success. “We found that adhering closely to Biblical philosophies made the game more interesting rather than less,” Lyndon[, CEO of Left Behind Games,] said.
Peppered throughout the city, the player will come across scrolls, each marked with a Biblical verse…. In my demonstration, I watched an angel descend and take the scroll’s figurative Biblical quote (1 Corinthians 15:37 “When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else.”) and translate that into a gift of money — which, all things considered, made him the coolest angel ever.
As for the violence in a game built from a Christian perspective, Lyndon doesn’t shy away from that either, pointing out that the Bible itself is quite a violent book. “The point of morality is that people have a choice in how they react to situations — and one of those choices is always going to be violence.”
From the GameSpot article:
The game will feature biblical facts between levels, accompanied by tracks from Christian rock groups…. Troy Lyndon, the CEO of Left Behind Games, told us that you can quickly skip over this by hitting the continue button, but they’re also putting in a button to learn more if you’re intrigued.
It’ll be interesting to see how well the game does when it ships…. Lyndon says that the company plans a grass-roots outreach to churches to generate buzz, similar to those used for Mel Gibson’s movie and last year’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
At some point, the idea that this is about ‘outreach’ wears thin — this is about surfing a financial wave. Not much more than moneychangers in the temple, in my opinion.
I believe that what the author of that article meant to say was that they plan an astroturfing campaign. He slipped and said “grass-roots”.
The argument that people always have a violent response as an option in their moral decision making is actually much more compelling than I would have thought, and I give them credit for that. However….
When you read the actual articles, you have to wonder what these people are thinking. Great, Troy Lyndon, you want to make a quality game, and have it be a Christian game. That’s a good goal. But I don’t see this game being it. It’s so un-Biblical as to be un-Christian. Even if we took out the total corruption of the book of Revelation (BTW, it’s singular - please, everyone, stop calling it “Revelations”) upon which the game is based, we still have things like:
“For example, you may come across scrolls that bear a scripture from the Bible, but they also act as power-ups. If you’re low on food, using a scroll to summon the angel of harvest will boost your food levels, and so on.”
Now it’s possible that GameSpot is just misrepresenting the game. But they might be accurately representing it, too. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Scrolls of Angel Summoning in the Bible. Or how about this little gem:
“Or [you can] convert [a building you control] into a combat training center, and you can send civilians that your evangelists recruit there to train as soldiers.” OK, so I need evangelists to recruit potential soldiers? This is repugnant.
The mechanics make this sound like a really interesting RTS game, and if I still played those, I might be interested in a game very similar to this. But when they wrap it up in pseudo-Christian garb, it sickens me.
I didn’t even finish reading the rest of the GameSpy article. These comments are just from the GameSpot preview and page 1 of GameSpy’s. Maybe I’ll read the rest later.
-Matt
PS It also doesn’t speak well for the game’s quality that the text “Quick attacks are there strength” appears in a unit description at the bottom of image 12 in GameSpy’s gallery.