Cyber Play Christian Computer Games Avoid Bloodshed While Offering Plenty Of On-Screen Action

They are devoutly Christian teenagers with e-mail user names to match. One calls himself “soldier4truth.” Another uses the handle “saintA2J,” short for “addicted to Jesus.”

Like other high-tech teens, they have no patience for computer games that aren’t engrossing and challenging above all. That especially goes for Christian-themed titles; if those are plodding and preachy at the expense of good “gameplay,” they’re history.

This is an auspicious time for Christian gamers, then, because a groundbreaking crop of Bible-inspired action titles have appeared within the last year.

Perhaps the most ambitious effort to date, Catechumen, pits first-century Christians against Roman soldiers in first-person sequences that meld fast-paced combat with campy humor.

Catechumen joins games such as Saints of Virtue and The War and Heaven that also let Christian gamers take up swords in the Lord’s cause. War and Heaven, in a controversial twist, even lets players pick the side of Satan.

Christians appear to have an edge over other faiths in the action-game arena, although a wide range of PC-entertainment titles for Jews, Muslims and others are available via online storefronts and other Web sites.

None of the aforementioned games can match the visuals and features of best-selling PC titles such as Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament, but many Christians refuse to play those because of graphic gore and demonic themes.

“I choose not to play (Quake) because I don’t like the sickening violence,” says Chris Jeffrey, 15, of Archbold, Penn. “It’s not totally wrong for computer games to have violence, but it should be used in God’s way. God should be brought in.”

Jeffrey, who uses the “soldier4truth” handle, likes the bloodless swordplay and challenging puzzles in Shine Studios’ Saints of Virtue, which pits players - not against mutants or monsters - but inner demons such as pride, fear, vanity and self-righteousness.

Such floating foes are vanquished with an energy-zapping blade in settings such as the Caves of Loneliness and the Halls of Despair. Traps and mazes stump players at every turn, but Scrolls of Truth provide guidance.

This thrills Jerrod “saintA2J” Putman of Florence, Ala. The 18-year-old says Saints of Virtue isn’t “graphically up to par” with the likes of Quake, which he also plays. But “Saints has good action and a really interesting story line. It’s right up there in the fun factor.”

Rob Anderson of Cactus Games, which distributes Saints software, says the title is pitched mainly to Christian bookstores.

“We have to satisfy that market first,” he notes. “We’re not trying very hard to get into (stores such as) CompUSA” because kids would routinely pass it up for “the next Tomb Raider along with the code to make Lara Croft play in the nude.”

War in Heaven hasn’t sold well partly because of too-stringent computer-hardware requirements for a $20 “value” title, publisher ValuSoft now believes.

War in Heaven, a first-person combat game that pits angels against demons in an “epic battle between good and evil,” has another strike against it in Christian circles: It lets users play the part of a demon as well as an angel.

This, most agree, makes it poisonous for some devout shoppers.

“Playing a demon that fights angels? Too many Christians will have a problem with that,” according to Anderson, who says he raised this issue with the game’s Minnesotabased developer, Eternal Warriors. “I said don’t do it. They’re cutting their own throats.”

At least one Christian bookstore chain stopped selling the game after receiving complaints from customers about this issue, ValuSoft acknowledges.

Eternal Warriors co-founder Theodore Beale says he “knew this was a possible objection, but the concept of choice is (highly) significant in the Christian religion. Choosing between good and evil is not out of place in a game.

“It’s such a fundamental concept we weren’t about to take it out.”

War in Heaven has spawned a Pocket Books paperback titled, “Eternal Warriors: The War in Heaven,” which is loosely modeled on the PC game. Beale says his book is selling better than the software.

ValuSoft says it will keep plugging the War in Heaven game, lobbying the likes of Wal-Mart for mainstream distribution at a reduced price while working with the Christian-oriented FindEx software distributor to get it into more Christian outlets.

FindEx also will handle Catechumen, which is billed as the most technically advanced Christian PC title to date. The game, created by N’Lightning Software Development of Medford, Ore., gets its name from Christians-in-training who race to rescue their imprisoned leader by battling demon-possessed Roman soldiers, winged “low-level devils” and other foes inside a network of catacombs.

As in the other Christian titles, users wield a series of swords but never draw blood. Instead, in a humorous twist, the Sword of the Spirit shoots bursts of energy that send suddenly repentant Romans to their knees, bathed in heavenly light amid a chorus of hallelujahs.

Co-creator Ralph Bagley says he deliberately injected mirth into Catechumen so it wouldn’t seem overly solemn or sanctimonious despite its numerous Bible references.

For instance, users solve one of the game’s puzzles by zapping a cathedral organ in order to play the first few bars of “Amazing Grace.”

Above all, Bagley and his crew of 30 wanted to create a game with the “intensity, realism and immersiveness” of Quake and Unreal but without “satanic symbols” and “blood, guts and gore.”

To this end, they raised $1 million from private investors.