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Sunday Comics: Dead Island This week’s new batch of downloadable tracks for Rock Band all have one thing in common. Did you catch it? The post-Easter releases from bands like Anberlin, Hawk Nelson and Skillet all fall under the “Christian rock” label.
The makers of the Left Behind series of religious video games says Walmart is expanding the Christian game test-market it opened last year in Texas, with an eye toward distributing such games nationally.
The company behind controversial end-of-days simulator Left Behind and the developer of Christian rock Guitar Hero knock-off Guitar Praise have merged, forming one giant powerhouse of Christian game development.
Two paragraphs is all the China Daily puts to this topic, so I can’t give much context here. But the Chinese government will start “real-name registration” for online game players this year.
I’ve heard the Christian rock industry in the US is worth millions. (Pause for irony to sink in). You’d think, then, they could have spared more than a couple of bucks on the production values for this Guitar Praise trailer. Or spared more than a couple of bucks on the production values for Guitar Praise.
So, Guitar Praise – the Christian music-based rhythm game? HUGE hit, apparently. So huge, in fact, that the publishers (Digital Praise) are considering not just a sequel, but an evolution. Or at least an Intelligent Redesign that could see the game moving from the PC/Mac to consoles and extending to full band gameplay.
Stryper. Oh, lawd … the Christian hair metal act reached their apogee when I was 13, just about a year after my confirmation, and though North Carolina is a place where, as the late Doug Marlette would say, even the Episcopalians handle snakes, at least we didn’t listen to Stryper. That was for the Babdists.
Yet even after flaming out in the mainstream shortly after 1986′s “To Hell With the Devil,” Stryper remains the top-of-mind brand for Christian rock. Curious, then, that the band wasn’t in the first release of Guitar Praise, the Christian rock Guitar Hero clone which we’ve covered lavishly and smirkily since its release in September.
Well, guess what, just like its Satan-worshippin’ brothers at Activision and Harmonix, Guitar Praise has DLC. And MTV Multiplayer (and sometime Kotaku guest editor) Stephen Totillo reports that all you rapture-ready rockers can get your Stryper on in a spring ’09 expansion pack. Yup. MTV confirmed it with the band’s manager, who said Stryper wasn’t in the original release only because of some tight deadlines to get legal clearance for some songs. A publicist for Guitar Praise backs it all up. Hossannah and hallelujah!
Christian Metal Band Stryper Coming to Christian Clone of ‘Guitar Hero’ [MTV Multiplayer]
With the announcement of Guitar Praise, the Guitar Hero knockoff with a Christian twist, came a new round of ‘Isn’t there a commandment about stealing? Surely that applies to IP, right?’. Simon Parkin took a look at why Christian-themed gaming is so maligned; who cares if people are catering to a niche market? He does concede that in some cases, like the really awful looking Zoo Race (Destructoid aptly summed up the results of that little debacle as looking ‘like someone handed [the designer]a bag of cocaine and a Quake mod and said “Go crazy”.’) it’s less about Christianity and more about poorly made games:
