Sacrilege

Paolo Pedercini is best known for excellent, and risky games like the McDonald's Video Game, which takes cruel aim at the international fast food purveyor, and Operation Pedopriest, which takes equally cruel aim at the Catholic Church's proclivity for whitewashing the child abuse of some of its prelates. Faith Fighter is his most recent title, and it would be, well, cruel of us not to review it, since we have written so admiringly of his previous efforts.

Faith Fighter is a classic Street Fighter-style game, in which you choose one of several characters and engage in fisticuffs with another, either a computer-controlled character, or another player whacking keys on the other side of the keyboard. As one might expect, each character has special moves that can be triggered by key combinations. Two falls out of three. What you expect, albeit in Flash, and free.

If you're reading an indie game review blog on Christmas day, odds are you're not a Christian In that case, your gift from the deranged, artistic elites at Play This Thing is I Am Jesus, a projectile dueling game involving Jesus' revenge and God's cock from one of the developers of Manhunt 2.

A while back, in the wake of my article Why You Owe the Columbine RPG, I had the pleasure of being shat on by an old conservative game designer who was convinced that a) games that tackle uncomfortable issues are hurting the ability of upstanding game designers like himself to make entertaining product and market it; and b) I was shamelessly hogging the spotlight.

According to Kim Pallister, Microsoft's casual game guy, Bible Fight is "the most sacrilegious game ever."

It is a straightforward Streetfighter-style game, in which you and your opponent (either controlled by the computer or by someone else whanging on the other side of the keyboard) punch and kick each other until one or the other achieves victory.

As with other games of this style, there are a variety of characters, each of whom has his own combo moves that do extra damage, if you can hit the right key combination quickly enough.

Except that--the characters are Mary, Eve, Jesus, Moses, Noah, and Satan. And the special moves are things like Mary's Halo Toss, and Jesus's Loaves and Fishes.