Saints of Virtue Unofficial Patch: SaintsX
Posted on March 23, 2022
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| 95 words
The 1.0.0 version of SaintsX has been released. Check out the website and download the patch here.
From the site:
SaintsX is a fan patch and alternate runtime for Shine Studios' Saints of Virtue, a Christian-themed first-person shooter from 1999. It is not a remake, remaster, or source port. It requires the original retail game files to run.
And the features:
Patches older retail versions to the final official v1.
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Luminous: Before Shine Studios
Posted on March 1, 2022
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| 725 words
Shine Studios was the name of the company at the time it developed Saints of Virtue. It was really just three guys - Bud Gillian, Michael Ulrich, and Dave Slayback. But I discovered sometime in 2014 that Shine was actually the second version of the company. Before releasing Saints of Virtue, they called themselves Luminous.
How did I find out? Well, my memory is hazy, but I think was just Googling around for Saints of Virtue references and stumbled across their original website as Luminous.
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Captain Bible MIDIs
Posted on February 28, 2022
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| 70 words
Eve Engelbrite composed the music for Captain Bible. You can’t get any soundtrack files out of the game, but her personal website has hosted two original MIDIs for a number of years: the main theme (THEME.MID) and the Unibot theme (ROBOT.MID).
Check them out here:
THEME.MID
ROBOT.MID
Obviously how they sound will depend on the MIDI synthesizer you’re running, as illustrated in this interesting comparison by The Rec Room Plays.
Bible Builder Copy Protection
Posted on February 28, 2022
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| 369 words
Bible Builder is the lesser-known of Bridgestone Multimedia’s Christian PC games. It’s more edutainment-y and less interesting than Captain Bible. That said, it does have a surprising copy protection method.
You can see it coming from the warning on the Credits screen:
If you play a pirated version, it warns you on launch that the copy is pirated:
If you continue, you can only click 5 bookmarks before the candle instantly burns out and you get dumped to this screen:
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Saints of Virtue / Redemption
Posted on February 28, 2022
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| 294 words
I recently noticed that the Redemption card game by Cactus Game Design has a “Saint of Virtue” card. Not that surprising, since Cactus Game Design published Saints of Virtue as well as the Redemption card game. But there are actually multiple versions. Here’s one from “The Persecuted Church” expansion:
“You may negate and discard an evil Enhancement. Topdeck an Armor of God Enhancement from discard pile. Cannot be prevented.”
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Captain Bible Building and Victim Descriptions
Posted on April 1, 2021
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| 125 words
Using a hex editor on CB.EXE reveals some strings describing the various buildings and victims. These don’t appear in-game, but it’s the closest I imagine we have to official names.
A - Round Tubes with Fireballs - Relative Moralist B - Huge Dark Blue - Fearful C - The First Building - Cultist D - Purple Lights - Legalist E - Wall with Platforms - Greedy F - Green and Purple - Drug Abuser G - Caves - New Ager R - In the Unibot I’m kind of surprised at “Green and Purple”.
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Saints of Virtue Beta Testing
Posted on March 29, 2021
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| 350 words
In January of 1999, David Slayback solicited alt.religion.christian-teen for beta testers. You can see the thread here.
We are looking for beta testers for an upcoming Christian-oriented computer game called Saints of Virtue. The game is a 3-D action shooter similar to Doom or Quake in play but without the blood and gore. We need a limited number of beta testers to help test the game over the next few weeks.
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DOSBox Saints of Virtue
Posted on March 28, 2021
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| 728 words
Saints of Virtue was intended to be run on Windows-based systems. If you click the EXE, it’ll try to run wvrun.exe under the covers, which is a Windows binary. On modern x64 Windows 10 machines, this isn’t going to work for a variety of reasons. However, you aren’t stuck running a virtual machine or building a retro PC if you want to play Saints. Besides, with those approaches you can’t remap controls and you’ll struggle with bugs introduced by playing with uncapped framerates.
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Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
Posted on September 25, 2019
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| 649 words
It’s brilliant and effective, yes, but it’s ultimately just the story of how two vile egoists (even Capote’s powers cannot make them into sympathetic characters) butchered a decent family.
It’s more interesting as a cultural artifact than as a piece of literature per se.
For instance, Capote provides a portrait of the rural Bible Belt culture that influenced my own childhood context. The Clutters are teetotalers, gravely serious about religion, the closest thing to aristocrats in a community neither academic or urbane yet practically intelligent and fiercely concerned with honor and virtue.
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Reynolds' Discourses on Art
Posted on December 28, 2018
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Reynolds’ Discourses are like a Westminster Confession of Faith for classical Western art – a formal expression of received ideas offered at the final moments of those ideas’ influence. The introduction to my edition called Reynolds’ theories a “coda” to an age of art about to give way to Romantic individualism. That seems about right. Some thoughts on the passing pages…
Reynolds agrees with Johnson that studying by inclination is best.
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