Captain Bible MIDIs
Posted on February 28, 2022
| 1 minutes
| 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
| 2 minutes
| 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
| 2 minutes
| 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
| 1 minutes
| 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
| 2 minutes
| 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
| 4 minutes
| 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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Beyond Oasis (Sega Forever)
Posted on August 16, 2018
| 3 minutes
| 443 words
(Originally published at Sega-16.com)
It’s been almost a quarter-century since The Story of Thor released in Japan as part of Sega’s Mega RPG Project – a strategy conceived in the final round of the Mega Drive’s bout with the Super Famicom. It’s assumed Sega hoped a quick shot of RPGs would help its weary 16-bit mauler finish strong. That’s just speculation, but it’s a fact Sega abandoned its Mega RPG Project after less than a year.
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Captain Bible
Posted on May 31, 2018
| 16 minutes
| 3229 words
Of the Christian video games of the 1990s, Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness stands out as the decade’s most derided. Admittedly, the game’s unapologetic theology and style – not to mention DOSBox compatibility – make it a ripe target for satire. A closer analysis, however, identifies Captain Bible as a successful synthesis of the ludic (in Huizinga’s sense) and didactic principles necessitated by the video game form and its Evangelical heritage.
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SimCopter / Streets of SimCity
Posted on January 29, 2017
| 19 minutes
| 3902 words
(Originally published at HardcoreGaming101.com)
Johan Huizinga opens Autumn of the Middle Ages by describing a mindset alien to us:
“…all events had much sharper outlines than now…every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child.”
The arresting power of the original SimCity in 1989 can be just as alien to us today. The simulation is distant, hoisting the player heavenward and granting him the power to zone land for commercial, industrial, or residential development.
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Unpacking Saints of Virtue
Posted on May 30, 2015
| 2 minutes
| 392 words
For better or worse, I’m probably one of the handful of people out there who takes any interest in Saints of Virtue. But hey, sometimes things just strike a chord. No need to repeat any of it – if by some miracle you’re interested in this, then you don’t need much background. This blog post is a short tutorial on how to open up the game’s .WRS files and get at all of the assets – graphics, music, code, sound effects, you name it.
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