Spiritual Warfare is one of those games that you aren’t entirely sure what to make of. On one hand the game is a shameless rip-off of The Legend of Zelda which tries to shoehorn several Christian themes that, frankly, are painfully unnecessary. On the other hand, it’s a shameless rip-off of The Legend of Zelda, which you would think bodes well for the game.

…and on yet another hand on our mythical Goro-beast, Spiritual Warfare is the most inadvertently awesome game ever made.

Spiritual Wha?

The plot of Spiritual Warfare is quite simple: In a world polluted with sin, you are the last great hope for Christianity. Chosen by God herself, you set out on a quest to rid the world of evil, convert the nonbelievers to the ways of Jesus Herbert Christ and defeat Satan once and for all.

By pelting everybody in the face with fresh fruit.

Oh, sure. The symbolism the game tries to pass off is that you’re slaying demons with the Fruit of the Spirit (that’s right, JW went to Sunday School) but in practice all you’re really doing is pelting some poor gardener in the face with a pomegranate. Why? Because he believes in a different deity than you, that’s why!

Of course there are other weapons in the game. Late in the game you get a sword, which does significantly more damage than any banana peel. You also have another weapon that can be used to blow up nonbelievers. This weapon?

God’s motherfuckin’ Wrath!

That’s right. When all else fails and you find yourself on the verge of being turned into an Iron Maiden album cover, you can call upon a vial of angry God juice to lay waste to anything and everything that stands between you and the righteous light of God. So long as they’re within a 3×3 block that surrounds you.

Out the gate you are tasked with recovering the six pieces of the Armor of God in a manner that in absolutely no way resembles the search for the Triforce in The Legend of Zelda. Each piece of the armor gives you a bonus (the belt helps you move items, the boots let you walk on rocky and hot surfaces, etc.). You’ll need all six pieces of the Armor before you’re allowed to go face the devil.

To say that Spiritual Warfare is heavy on the Christian influence would be a bit of an understatement — this game is, flat out, for fundamentalists. It’s not enough that you’re trying to save the world from Satan ala End of Days, oh no. With the exception of a few little girls (and a hooker by a train station), everyone and everything is trying to kill you — including Hindus at the Airport which you must convert to Christianity by pelting them with apples. Every once in a while when you smash somebody’s grill with some grapes, a demon will come flying out of their asses and charge at you.

Oh, you’re also rewarded for accosting these poor people. When you bounce a banana off their face, they’ll often leave behind some doves. The doves are the game’s currency which you can use to buy fruit upgrades, anointing oil to replenish your health and more vials of God’s Wrath.

So, obviously these couldn’t possibly be this game’s version of Rupees. Obviously.

Another way to earn doves is by answering Bible-specific questions from a Pee Wee Herman-lookin’ angel that you automatically summon after you convert your monthly quota of sinners. While at first you may want to see these angels so you can replenish your health and earn some righteous cheddar, you’ll soon be avoiding these bastards like the plague — a task that becomes damn near impossible since they follow you everywhere.

Which is kind of convenient, considering your character has this constant look of dread and foreboding.

Sure. That’s all well and good. How is this awesome?

So by now you’re wondering where the “awesomeness” is with Spiritual Warfare. Well, it’s all around you. You see, when Wisdom Tree was working on this game, they wanted a simple game of good vs. evil. What they wound up making was a game where you get to pelt businessmen, construction workers, lumberjacks and police officers in the face with fresh produce, forcing them to shit out demons and birds which you can use to buy makeshift grenades and blow up a small chunk of God’s kingdom.

And then there is this:

That’s right, dudes and dolls — Satan has an army of demonic ninjas at his beck and call. And they live in the suburbs.

Okay. Satanic Suburbian Ninjas are Awesome. But is the game?

HELL NO! I know I said this would be a “Greatest Games” feature on Friday, but I lied. After playing this game for most of the week to refresh my childhood memories, I suddenly remember why I hate it so: It’s a Wisdom Tree game.

Leave it to Wisdom Tree, the people who would go on to lobotomize Wolfenstein 3D with their Super Noah’s Ark 3D, to take an idea as simple as “copy Zelda” and find a way to completely dump all over it with confusing and pointless puzzles, lousy level design that can often trap you in a building or between two sticks of dynamite (essentially killing you). Furthermore, the game has a downright weird difficulty curve where obtaining the six pieces of the Armor is painfully easy, and hell is damn near impossible — until you fight Satan, which is a walk in the park.

Oh well, what else can you expect from a company founded as part of a scam?

Yeah, you heard me. While the company that appears in the credits is Wisdom Tree, the game itself was developed by a company called Color Dreams — which just happens to own Wisdom Tree.

You see, Color Dreams was a game developer in the late 1980s who decided to release games on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rather than going through the process of acquiring an actual license to develop for the platform, the company decided to reverse-engineer the NES in order to crack the 10NES lock-out chip. Because of this backwards way of developing, their games still wouldn’t work half the time and when they did work they were quite awful.

In order to save face and fool people into buying games, Color Dreams founded two publishing fronts: Bunch Games for general NES titles and Wisdom Tree for religion-inspired games.

So there you go. Spiritual Warfare, arguably the most popular Christian video game ever made, was based on a lie.

And last I checked, lying was a sin.

Popularity: unranked [?]