Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Grand Theft Auto: Book of Revelations


This is a game that's actually been out for a while. I read an early review on it when it was going gold (ready for mass production), and was filled with Christ-love. I was so taken aback by the message of tolerance delivered in this game, that I had to pause my viewing of The Passion of the Christ while breezing through some of the recent Promise Keeper literature which had been stuffed into my Jesus/Santa mailbox.

In the game, titled Left Behind: Eternal Forces, you are a person left behind on Earth after the Rapture has come and taken all the true believers to Heaven. If you don't know what this means, then you're a doomed sinner, so put your head between your legs and kiss your forked tail goodbye. 666 Satan hearts you.

The point of the game is to convert people into disciples in order to combat the Anti-Christ. Those who cannot be converted you must kill. The bad guys are rock stars and Arab-esque people.

Seriously folks...there's nothing I can say that isn't already implied by the existence of this game, but let me go ahead and say that from a strictly empirical standpoint, the game suffers from a host of design and gameplay issues. It also includes what some people would consider spy ware, which the developer (Double Fusion), evangelizes by saying:

The Ad Engine is the seamless interface between the game and the advertiser servers, and works as a broker between the two, calling advertising creative elements as needed, providing them to the game to be displayed as ads in the game, and tracking impressions and views and reporting back to the advertising management servers.

This means that if the player in the game strolls by a building in the game, and there's a banner ad on the side of the building that banner ad is actually tracking behavior and information about the user, and sending this information to the advertiser. Hallelujah! Finally, Capitalism and Christianity give each other a well-needed back-rub, and maybe a [wink-wink] "happy ending"?

Even more wonderful than the message of love and tolerance that murmurs deep within the rotten, festering code is the fact that there are also a horde of books and movies out in the Left Behind franchise. In fact, our beloved Kirk Cameron plays the lead character. I'm betting that these films are real popular in Montana, you know, next to Ted Kaczynski's cabin?





So to sum it all up my good people, it's a lame game that installs spy ware on your machine, and it sends a message of hate and intolerance. I'm going to give this one a big fat no, although my man Mel Gibson paid me $50 to give it a thumbs-up.

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