http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/6/9/32014/83270

Excerpt:

”
Layman repeatedly states on Wikipedia that his core concern is Talk to Action’s report that the Christian militia - called the Tribulation Force in the Left Behind novels, graphic novels, and video game — uses the power of prayer and modern military weapons to conduct physical and spiritual warfare, which means converting or killing New Yorkers.

“It is inaccurate, untrue, not factual, to say the game calls for people to `convert or kill.’ That’s simply anti-Christian propoganda [sic],” writes Layman. “The secular reviews by people who have played the game completely contradict the nonsense espoused by Talk2Action.”

Enough. Let’s go fishing for facts - in the very waters where Layman claims to have caught his “whopper”. Let’s see if we can catch a real whopper. Layman has searched Technorati.com (a web site that aggregates information about blogs) for days, he says, posting on dozens of blogs that Talk to Action has spread inaccurate information, and this is his key contention, his claim to fame. Layman thought he hooked the big one, and he’s bragged to everyone about it for days. Let’s see what kind of whopper he really reeled into the Christian Cadre boat.

Layman asked for reviews by credible people who have actually played Left Behind: Eternal Forces, and which document the “convert or kill” claim. Here are two.”

But, I’m a visual thinker - the issue seemed fairly cut and dry to me simply from the promotional images of the game -as it’s being played- that were released by the game’s makers :

Those image appear to depict paramilitary forces firing close range at civilians, and civilians dropping to the ground - apparently from being shot.

Here’s a collection of images:

http://www.talk2action.org/comments/2006/6/7/41835/37829/5#5

http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2006/06/truth-about-left-behind-video-game.html

http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2006/06/truth-about-left-behind-video-game.htm

It actually was in no way my intention to compare the violent content of these two religions. Rather I wanted to point out the hypocritical responses one would get when confronted with violence justified through one, as opposed to that justified through the other.

Because there are absolutely no scriptures in the Bible that are violent at all. Nothing there about killing unbelievers. Nope. Especially not in, say, the Book of Joshua, the part concerning the Israelites’ entry into the Promised Land.

But at least we have brave warriors here who are selflessly protecting us from those dastardly Christians, who are well known for their bomb belts, suicide pilots, car bombs, videotaped beheadings… oh wait, that doesn’t describe Christians at all!

Not today, but in the past there’ve been plenty of Christians using scriptural justification for terrible things–not car bombs and videotaped beheadings, obviously, but…well, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the Spanish Inquisition was able to find plenty of scriptures that they thought justified what they were doing.

Yes, today there are Muslims who justify their terrible acts through the Koran, and there are no comparable Christian terrorists justifying themselves through the Bible. This is true, and this is obvious. But I don’t think this can be attributed to anything about the Koran and the Bible themselves. I’ve read both the Koran and the Bible, and I’m pretty sure the latter actually has more violence in it. If someone wanted to pick verses from the Bible that seemed to justify killing innocents with car bombs and suicide pilots, it wouldn’t be hard to do.

One can’t help but think of the following. Suppose that a fundamentalist Muslim game designer came out with an analogous game in which the goal was to systematically exterminate Christians and Jews until they were wiped from the face of the Earth. I expect we’d see outrage on a national level.

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This does in fact exist, but it’s not a game. You see precisely this sentiment expressed in many passages from the Koran (particularly Sura 9) and hadith (sayings and actions of the prophet, as compiled in ‘Bukhari’, ‘Daud’, ‘Muslim’, etc.) Of course, there is no national outrage against the “Religion of Peace”. Simply bringing up the violent scriptural foundations of Islam would make you an Islamophobe, right?

But at least we have brave warriors here who are selflessly protecting us from those dastardly Christians, who are well known for their bomb belts, suicide pilots, car bombs, videotaped beheadings… oh wait, that doesn’t describe Christians at all!

This game must be doing something really awesome to be able to even raise the ire of Jack Thompson, who is pretty nutcase himself!

But anyway, if some poor bloke out there thinks this is cool, lets be careful not to paint everyone with the same brush. I’ve been hearing about these scary caricatures for years, but I’ve never met one myself…

I think this Left Behind game is not a hoax. Maybe for an encore they can do a historical role playing game where the player can be Col. Chivington smiting down heathen women and children at Sand Creek.

Scary.

and click on the “F-H” section of the filing cabinet. When it opens, click on the folder marked “Flanders, Rod”. When his file opens up, click on the “Bible Blaster” image.

http://www.adl.org/videogames/default.asp

Years ago on BBS’s (before the internet was popular), occasionally I came across really nasty video games portraying things like “managing” a Nazi concentration camp.

I suspect the main reason these sorts of nasty video games were never really all that popular, was that they were largely an underground thing. I couldn’t imagine any of them being made for an Xbox, Playstation, or Nintendo. This could be a first if this “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” game ever becomes popular.

The game’s resource model is interesting in that these buildings aren’t used to “produce” units. Rather, the major resource in the game is actually the “neutrals” — people who haven’t yet chosen their side in the great war. Every unit in the game has a name and their own life and faith history (written in text in the unit information), along with a “Spirit Level” rated from 0-100. Spirit levels between 40 and 60 are considered neutral. As a unit’s spirit rises, their faith increases until it reaches 60, at which point it becomes a “friend.” Friends are basic units who can then be trained in a particular profession at a converted building. A unit whose Spirit falls below 40, however, becomes a member of the enemy camp and can be likewise trained.

It’s this wrestling back and forth for the souls of the people that makes the gameplay dynamic so interesting. 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 said. “One of the key elements of that is to make sure that the player sees that every life is important and precious.”

Translated to gameplay terms, much of the game involves the management of unit morale, represented in the game as the Spirit resource. Being converted to one side or the other isn’t the end of the struggle. A unit’s spirit level will continue to rise and fall depending on outside circumstances. Certain events — being asked to perform immoral actions (such as killing civilians), being seduced by the enemy, witnessing good or evil miracles — lead to adjustments in units’ Spirit ratings. That means that managing one’s army and shepherding one’s flock are essentially the same thing. Units can and will lose faith during battle, and those that fall below the threshold will immediately become neutral and walk away from whatever they were doing. That can be pretty bad if they’re in an Abrams in combat, which takes three units to run.

Players won’t be able to rely solely on the killing power of conventional military force, because every skirmish in combat drives units back toward neutrality. They’ll need spiritual units to both keep the faith and hopefully recruit, rather than kill, enemy armies.

and

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.” While the game itself has no blood, it doesn’t shy away from showing corpses, and lots of them. In fact, one of the things people might find surprising is that bodies in this game don’t disappear, making for some gruesome landscapes as corpses pile up in the streets of New York. “Violence has consequences — even justified violence,” Lyndon said. “You can behave morally and still cause harm. Most people tend to do evil unconsciously because they’re shying away from the consequences of their actions. Making moral choices — good or bad — have costs associated with them. We want to make sure we show that.