Hello all.
Things are starting to come together here at PressReset. Email me if
you want to help with content or anything. I added more ROMS in the Atari
2600 section, including the "adult" Custer's Revenge. I will
have a full review up soon.
Old news can be found in
the Other
page.
Spotlight On...
Menace Beach, and Sunday
Funday. One's a Color Dreams release;
the other is a Wisdom Tree release.
Formed in 1989, Color Dreams was one of the
first companies after Tengen to produce unlicensed games for the NES. With their
robin's-egg blue carts and cocky rebellious attitude, they caused something of a
stir in the industry... a stir that died down quickly when everyone realised how
bad the company's games were. Nintendo had nothing to worry about from Color
Dreams.
The company (along with its Bunch Games label) produced
around twenty games, including one Atari Lynx game. Unreleased games included a
whole line of Genesis carts, as well as the mysterious Hellraiser. Touted
as using a special chip to get 16-bit quality out of the NES, the game was
cancelled in the early stages of development when it was realized that the cost
of the chips would make the game nearly $100.
Like many small NES licensees, Color Dreams had trouble
staying afloat, bouncing paychecks every now and then. So, the company called no
lesser a person than the Supreme Being for help...
Someone came up with the idea of doing a Bible-based
game and people didn't really take it seriously... about six months later, work
actually started on one. No one knew it was going to take off, but it took off
like crazy."
- Vance Kozik, Color Dreams/Wisdom
Tree programmer
That first game was Bible Adventures, a cheap Super
Mario Bros. 2-like game which occasionally printed Bible quotes on screen.
There were eight other games for the NES (as well as ports to other consoles);
the best being the actually somewhat respectable Zelda clone Spiritual
Warfare.
The company is actually still in existence, and are
STILL selling their NES games (if you really, really feel like spending $40 on
them). Give them a call if you'd like at 1-800-722-4253.
Most of their NES games are rather shoddily coded, as
the Color Dreams games were.. in fact, some of the Wisdom Tree games are
actually the exact same as Color Dreams games released before, with some
graphics added or changed to make the game more religiously-oriented. For
example, Exodus is Crystal Mines with changed graphics, and Sunday
Funday is actually Menace Beach with a few changed enemies and
graphics.
They also have the honor of making the last NES game
ever released in the US - Sunday Funday has a copyright date of 1995 on
the title screen.
All of the Wisdom Tree NES releases can be considered
fairly rare. Certain games like Bible Adventures can be found in both
light-blue colored carts (from when Wisdom Tree was using their leftover Color
Dreams carts) and black colored carts. Also worth noting is that certain games
have some paper-based documentation that is needed to play the game
effectively.. for example, Bible Buffet comes with a fairly hefty Bible
quizbook that the game uses to quiz you on stuff. It's not necessary to play the
game, but it's still a neat item to have.
Although none of these games are really all that good,
they are interesting to look through because of their Christian themes and their
general oddness. After playing the games, one can understand why Nintendo didn't
pursue legal action against them for producing unlicensed games. One can imagine
the headlines: "NINTENDO SUES ACTS OF GOD"..
Besides their NES games, Wisdom Tree produced versions
of their games for Genesis, Game Boy and the PC. They also made a version of the
King James Bible for the Game Boy, as well as the only unlicensed SNES game ever
made - Super Noah's Ark 3d. This game is basically a Wolfenstein 3d
clone with changed graphics - in fact, it is Wolfenstein 3d; the
maps are exactly the same. There's been a rumor that id Software, in retaliation
for how Nintendo treated them during the SNES port of Wolf3d, gave the
engine code to Wisdom Tree so they could produce this game..
The strangest thing about Super Noah's Ark 3d
is that it's shaped kind of like a system adaptor or Game Genie - you have to
stick a cart on top of it in order for it to work. This is needed to get around
the SNES lockout technology. Why wasn't Wisdom Tree able to circumvent the
lockout themselves? In a way it represents Wisdom Tree's general game philosophy
- as long as the Bible theme is there somehow, don't worry too much about the
rest of the game.
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