Not that I'm not a fan of Molleindustria's work, but I'm dismayed (not sure if that is the right word) with Faith Fighter's similarity to Adult Swim's Bible Fight.

http://www.adultswim.com/games/game/index.html?game=biblefight

Unfortunately when bible fight came out we were already working on Faith Fighter (the project was submitted to the 2006 rhizome commission) but we decided to complete it anyway cause, despite a similar post-modern humor, they are quite different.

This was a fun play for about half an hour. It wasn't exactly deep gameplay, of course, but the art was truly amusing and it was only after a bit of play that I noticed 1) the worshipers I was flattening (the casualties of religious combat?) as well as the Flying Spaghetti Monster (who I truly was hoping would be a playable character at some point).

Nothing terribly exciting in all this but Ian does bring up the point that even the depiction of Muhammad is a worthy act of confronting (not merely creating) controversy. I think the best games to examine religious conflict in the 21st century have yet to be made... but these games are perhaps the first steps toward making them.

I like(?) how my first matchup was God vs Jesus. So very wrong, but so strangely familiar in a bizarro-evangelical way.

I've been having an interesting panel discussion with the Jay Is Games writers about this one. They more or less collectively panned it. :P

Why was that Patrick?

It makes sense Patrick, the people at Jay is Games are more interested in games with original and elegant gameplay and they are doing a great job in reviewing them. FF is crass stuff for newgrounds punks ;-)

After spending some more time with Faith Fighter, I can definitely see that it is operating on a different level than Bible Fight. I think I prefer Faith Fighters' slower, more methodical, gameplay to Bible Fighter's rampant button mashing.

Was the slower gameplay a conscious decisions? I recall a comment by Yoshiki Okamoto (Street Fighter creator) that a problem with the SF franchise at the time was that at high speeds there was no effective difference between Ryu and Ken- and that negated some of the game's story.

Yeah Paolo sums it up well. The punk sensibility and the craft sensibility are distinct. I'd like to see more of a marrige myself, I guess thats what I've been trying to do in my work.

Back in Fall 2004, three undergraduate Carnegie Mellon indie developers put together what was then a pretty blasphemous game along these same lines, Monk Kombat 3:

http://gamecreation.org/index.php?id=18

In responding to project lead Doug Fritz's pitch inquiry, at the time I was actually a little concerned that its edgy nature might negatively affect how the professors looked upon our then young freeware development club. Compared to these two games, it's quite tame.

It's also not as polished as either Bible Fight or Faith Fighter, but (A.) it seems to have been conceptually ahead of the pack (and B.) it was still popular enough at the time to nearly tank the Game Creation Society's web server with traffic, a feat that came back to actually help the organization's PR.

There's clearly some deep conceptual appeal to mixing religious figures and fisticuffs...