Who doesn't like a little schadenfreude every now and again? Left Behind: Eternal Forces is a game that...
involves killing non-Christians and Christians who don't convert to a particular form of Christianity, teaches teens that activists are "wolves in sheep's clothing," that rock and pop stars are "formidable spiritual opponents," and that non-Christian aid workers like doctors and nurses are enemy forces who can be killed. It also points to a passage on the game's Web site that says the Antichrist is "an imposturous one world government seeking peace for all of mankind," saying the game teaches players that those who seek peace are with the forces of evil.
Of course it's rated for teens. One would hope the general public would ignore it.
Left Behind Games, the video game publisher that has introduced a game (Left Behind: Eternal Forces) based on the book series of the same name, has just released their latest financials. The four year old company posted a loss of $4.1 million or the quarter ending December 31, '06 on sales of $2.2 million. The $2.2 million constitutes the only revenue the company has ever made. The company has lost $31 million since its inception. It seems the general public is ignoring it. But, not everyone.
If the bad reviews from video game critics were not enough to starve sales, perhaps a little derision by Rob Cordry of The Daily Show could help. On top of that, there is the petition being circulated by more reasonable Christian organizations to have the game pulled from the market.
It seems this game is not much different than Grand Theft Auto. One of the differences is that instead of killing for money, the player kills for God. The other difference is that the game is poorly designed. A review from Gamespot says it best:
Don't mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it's a Christian game. Mock it because it's a very bad game. The real-time strategy/adventure game from Left Behind Games based on the best-selling series of novels from Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins will even let down born-again types who expect the Rapture to beam them up to heaven any day now. Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the interface and graphics, and loads of crippling bugs.
...[snip]...
Last but not least, you need to do some praying yourself to make this buggy mess run. Crashes are such a frequent occurrence that it seems like you've got maybe 50/50 odds between a level or a save loading properly and the game freezing up with a sound loop. Sometimes it also hard locks Windows in these circumstances, forcing a system reboot. This was even a problem for us during automatic restarts after changing the in-game resolution. The only way we could change any of the default visual settings was to manually shut down and restart the game, because letting it restart on its own always locked up our system and necessitated a reboot.
For the life of me I can't figure out how a company like Left Behind Games can come up with the venture capital to screw up this bad. Apparently the publishers of the Left Behind book series had enough money to piss away at a market they know nothing about.