There are many great philosophical questions that come part and parcel with Christianity, chief among them being the problem of pain (how can an infinitely good God allow needless suffering?), and the problem of video games (how can an infinitely good God allow crappy Christian video games, which cause needless suffering?)

Very much in sync with my own thinking on the subject, he goes on to outline some of the common approaches taken so far, and where they fail (in a highly entertaining manner, I might add!) The only downside of it being so old is I'm yet to find the follow-up article explaining his solution!

For a while now I've wanted to develop a version of my Old Testament adventure game for the iPhone / iPod Touch using the Unity game engine. But it requires so much initial upfront investment that I've been endlessly putting off the decision, particularly since I had no idea exactly what an iPhone was really capable of - would it be able to handle a bunch of animated 3D characters without grinding to a halt? Well, in the end I took the plunge, and here are my findings!

The True Cost of Unity iPhone

Firstly, though, let's just sum up exactly what an upfront investment we're really talking about here. It turned out to be rather more expensive than I'd anticipated!

• Unity iPhone Basic License: $399 - this cost is pretty transparent, no surprises here.
• Mac Mini: $599 - in case it wasn't clear, Unity iPhone requires a Mac development environment, since you need to be able to run Xcode from the Apple SDK. If you've already got one you can obviously discount this cost. The cheapest piece of Apple kit is probably the Mac Mini starting at $599, I personally got a discount on a 13" Macbook coming out at about $800.
• iPod Touch: $199 - I'd hoped I could do all my development in the Unity development environment and then borrow my housemate's iPhone to do some occasional performance testing, but it turns out that a physical iPhone/iPod touch is essential for your ongoing development: all interaction takes place using an actual device which then sends signals back to your dev environment. For performance reasons you may be best off buying a second-hand 1st generation iTouch from eBay or something - mine set me back about $100.
• Apple iPhone Developer Program: $99 per year - again, because of the way you need a physical device for development purposes, you can't leave signing up for the Apple dev program until the end. You have to pay the annual fee before you can even get started using Unity in earnest.

The Software Itself

The first big surprise for me when firing up Unity iPhone was the extent to which it is an entirely separate product from the normal Unity. This may be a versioning thing - I've only ever seen the latest version of Unity - and the iPhone version may just be a version or two behind, perhaps. For now, at least, many of the interface elements are quite different if you're used to the standard Unity. For example, the widgets for rotating game objects work differently - not necessarily worse, just differently. The whole thing just looks a lot blockier and more old-fashioned, for some reason.

Secondly, as I've already hinted at in the costs section, the workflow isn't entirely what I'd expected. There's a great little summary of this on GameDev, but here's a brief outline:

1. Rather than running an iPhone emulator on your Mac, you actually run a Unity emulator on your iPhone!
2. All the code is then executed on your Mac during development, and Unity just streams low-quality images to your physical device. Touches / tilt readings are then fed from the device back to Unity. This means that (apart from GUI interaction) mouse clicks on your Mac are ignored - you really need a physical device if you're to test any kind of interaction with the user.
3. When you're happy with your code, Unity builds an Xcode project which can then be compiled like any other iPhone app and downloaded to your device for testing. This can be done in a single click from within Unity, but takes a few minutes to happen.

(Update: Unity 1.6 was released today that actually fixes all of that - you can now use .NET 2.1 functionality and System.dll)

Unity iPhone also has no support for programming in Boo, for reasons that I'm not sure of.

Hardware Capabilities

For me, at least, the million dollar question was regarding the hardware capabilities of the iPod Touch/iPhone - especially the first generation ones. The iPhone 3GS is a seriously powerful computer, but if you make your game so that it only runs on the latest hardware then you're ruling out a large proportion of your potential audience. I deliberately bought myself a first generation iPod Touch off eBay - apparently the first generation iPhone has very similar specs in terms of CPU speed.

I have to say, my expectations were not very high when I finally got to the point of being able to test. Since I'm developing an adventure game, I need to be able to have a good number of animated characters on screen at the same time, and I'd feared that the iTouch just wouldn't cope, particularly by the time you'd added in a few particle effects and background scenery.

But I was totally wrong - these devices are remarkably capable, and the guys from Unity have clearly done a great job of optimising their software to squeeze out every last drop of speed.

For testing purposes I used a character model with 738 vertices and 692 faces. The armature featured about 30 bones, and here you can see the frame rates I was getting as I added more and more of these characters on screen, all running the same animation but out of sync (just in case Unity tries to do any clever optimisations for characters at the same frame of the same animation):

Even with 15 characters, running just above 8 FPS, it didn't look so jerky as to be unplayable - at least not for an adventure game like mine. Exactly what framerate you need probably depends on how important fast responses are to your game.

The scene below with 5 characters, a relatively simple environment mesh and a particle simulation ran quite happily at about 22 FPS.

Conclusion

All told I'm immensely positive about what Unity iPhone is capable of, and have high hopes for what I'm going to be able to achieve with it. The engine is a real joy to work with, and the capabilities of the hardware far exceed what I'd expected from it. The Unity community is incredible, and help is always available when you need it.

If you're thinking about taking the plunge, I hope you've found this article helpful. Feel free to Twitter me if you want to ask any further questions, or check out the UnityAnswers website.

There are three main problems with this theory:

• There is strong counter evidence - which some dismiss as just being attempts to throw us off the scent - such as the fact that Elaine seems to continue to exist in some sense "outside" of Guybrush's fantasy. She suggests that LeChuck has put some kind of spell on Guybrush.
• It ignores many other clues about Guybrush's family history. At best, it can only be a partial explanation of the facts.
• Ultimately, many people find it deeply unsatisfying - it seems to take the essence out of this world that they have derived so much enjoyment from.

In response to the feedback that I received from my last video - The TRUE Secret of Monkey Island - I have put together a sequel which attempts to do justice to ALL the facts. Behold: The OTHER Secret of Monkey Island (direct YouTube link here).

One of the key writers on Ron Gilbert's Monkey Island games was Tim Schafer, who alongside Dave Grossman wrote a substantial portion of the dialogue for the games. Whilst it's not generally believed that he knows the full details of Ron's master plan, he must have been given a certain amount of information in order to be able to do his job. It provides a fascinating perspective on the world of Monkey Island to examine one of Schafer's own games: Psychonauts.

In Psychonauts, the player meets various disturbed individuals. The hero, Raz, is able to "enter" their subconscious minds, and each level of the game is then a physical manifestation of the various neuroses and traumas of those characters. Take, for example, the asylum warden haunted by his poor performance at war strategy games despite his descent from the line of Napoleon. His mind then takes the form of one giant strategy game that must be won in order to free him from the tyranny of his failure.

Although it's generally accepted that Psychonauts was inspired by a scrapped scene from Schafer's Full Throttle game, it's not impossible that there could also have been some cross pollination from Ron's games. At the very least, it provides a fascinating lens through which to view the world of Monkey Island.

Could it in fact be a representation of Guybrush's mental baggage? Might he be haunted by some past trauma that took place whist visiting a themepark?

LeChuck then truly does represent his mean older brother, Chuckie, with his "evil eyes" at the end of the second game indicating some kind of temporary triumph of this inner demon over Guybrush's sanity.

Could the Voodoo Lady's guiding presence represent some kind of psychiatrist helping Guybrush search out the suppressed secrets of his past and destroy his mental cobwebs?

Guybrush's Traumatic Past

In a notorious interview on IRC, Ron Gilbert made the following comment about Guybrush's relationship to LeChuck:

<Ron-G> In one sense, yes they are brothers, in another way, they are not. If you get what I mean.

Superficially, the evidence within the game backs up LeChuck's claim: how else would Guybrush be able to use his own father's bone to make the Voodoo doll that defeats LeChuck? Except that we only know he calls this man "Dad" - we have no proof that he is a blood relation of Guybrush. It's interesting that Guybrush always chooses his Dad's bone - is it possible that had he chosen his Mom's bone, the doll would not have worked?

I believe so: Guybrush and LeChuck are step brothers. When you purchase the (otherwise useless) feather pen from the antique shop on Booty Island, Guybrush exclaims that it is "just like the feather pen from Mom and Dad's wedding". In other words: his parents married within his lifetime. We know that LeChuck is "Dad"'s son, meaning that Guybrush's mother must have married LeChuck's father.

What's more, when hanging above the acid pit in his dungeon, LeChuck claims that Guybrush was an orphan, meaning he must have been adopted by his Mom at some point before she (re-?)married.

In my view, frequently overlooked is the fact that Guybrush's parents now appear to be dead. They turn into skeletons during his dream, and it's their skeletons that you find in the Lost and Found at the end. Guybrush lives with the belief that they abandoned him, a claim that they strenuously deny. I'm now far into the realm of speculation, but given their warnings at the end about the presence of "murderers and white slavers" at themeparks, could it be possible that they were in fact MURDERED? Their sudden disappearance might appear to Guybrush as though they had abandoned him. It is, after all, curious that they should be found in a "Lost Parents" area - more naturally they are for "Lost Children".

Such a traumatic event taking place whilst visiting a themepark would inevitably leave it's mark on a young boy growing up. Who could blame Guybrush for having to do battle with the demons of his past in the arena of the Big Whoop amusement park?

But Who Is Elaine?

I'll be honest that for me the big unresolved question is the identity of Elaine. Also in the IRC interview, Ron Gilbert says this about her:

<Ron-G> Elain never really liked GB and thought of him as more of a little brother.

Could she be some relation of Guybrush? Before you throw your arms up in the air in disgust at this idea, given her romantic involvement to Guybrush, just remember that Ron Gilbert was heavily influenced by the Star Wars movies - and who could forget that unfortunate kiss between Luke and Leia?

Guybrush does make a passing reference to having a sister in Wally's house - although he could just be blagging in order to cover up his having owned a dolls' house (he also says he has a lot of hairy cousins when you read a particular library book!)

In truth, we shall probably never know. But perhaps all this brings us one step closer to finally answering that great mystery: what IS the Secret of Monkey Island?

If you found this interesting, please watch my other video: Monkey Island meets the Old Testament.

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly,
Thou has brought me to the valley of vision,
where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights;
hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold
Thy glory.

Let me learn by paradox
that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision.

Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells,
deepest wells,
and the deeper the wells the brighter
Thy stars shine;

Let me find Thy light in my darkness,
Thy life in my death,
that every good work or thought found in me
Thy joy in my sorrow,
Thy grace in my sin,
Thy riches in my poverty
Thy glory in my valley.

Sometimes as Christians it's all too easy to fool ourselves and each other that all is fine, that we're all basically doing alright, until we all appear so "sorted" that we're each afraid to admit to the other just how desperately messy our lives are and how much life really gets us down. Well, this week God has really reminded me that that's not Christianity - far from it. True Christianity is a message about a saviour who came to a people who were far from sorted - why else would they need rescuing? God didn't send his son lightly - he sent him because there was no other way: we cannot fix ourselves or dig ourselves out of this hole we're in. Our sin is too severe for that - too all encompassing and destructive. Even if we were to build for ourselves a perfect world, our sin would keep us from enjoying it - why, even the good already in this world I can't seem to appreciate without screwing it up somehow or other. Yet Jesus came as the rescuer who reaches out with open arms to pull us from the miry bog and out of the clutches of the tangled weeds of sin. He DIED for my sin and PAID the price. In him I am made perfect even whilst I am yet such a messy work-in-progress. And at the very point where I am brought so low by awareness of my sin and my helplessness that I can barely dare to hope that Jesus would want me - in the valley, so to speak - that is where I find the vantage point I need to see things clearly, that is where I feel my need keenly enough to cry out, and so the broken heart becomes the healed heart.

In the words of Horatio Spafford:

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

Amen.

Whilst working on my Old Testament adventure game, Ebenezer, I've been struggling with this problem on and off. I've spent the last few months sketching out a very rough version of the game in Unity, but I keep being hindered by doubts that it's not up to scratch. Well, buddy, it's not supposed to be perfect! Having a bad version of a project together in working form is an important first step towards making it better. It doesn't matter that it sucks - that just helps me know what areas to focus on so that the finished product doesn't suck.

To that end, today has been an incredibly helpful day. I talked a friend through my prototype version, and it both helped me realise that it's not half as bad as I thought it was, and also showed me that with a few simple tweaks suggested by my friend, it instantly became a whole heap better. So consider that my tip of the day: doing things badly is the first step towards doing them well.

For years various theories have circulated on the Internet, and by far the most popular view is explained by an article by Jorrin Quest. I've put together the following video to explain (Warning - contains BIG spoilers to MI1+2):

I hope you enjoy it!

"For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." (Ephesians 2:10)

In the sovereignty of God, he planned where we would end up, and the circumstances in which we would find ourselves. Both the specific needs we will be confronted with, and the gifts and resources we will be equipped with to meet those needs are ordained by God. Instinctively, I think we recognise that fact when others help us out of a situation of dire need - at least for the Christian person, it feels natural to thank God for their support.

We see this illustrated for us in the Old Testament, where even the greatest victories of the people of God are not attributed to them and their strength, but to the Lord and his mighty power. Take, for example, one the best-known victories in the Bible: that of David over Goliath. The situation makes it clear that the credit doesn't belong to David - this young, scrawny shepherd boy armed only with five tiny pebbles and a sling clearly didn't stand a chance against the gigantic Philistine, the shaft of whose spear was as thick as a weaver's beam. But David never doubted what the result would be. His motto:

"All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD's, and he will give all of you into our hands." (1 Samuel 17:47)

For sure, David was the human agent God used to deliver his people from the Philistines. It was David who had to gather up his pebbles from the stream; it was David who had to make the effort to stand up to Goliath and confront him when nobody else would dare; it was David who had to take aim and sling his pebbles and slay the mighty tyrant. But David saw the truth throughout: the battle was the LORD's. Without the Lord governing and directing his every step, David would never have been so confident of a favourable outcome for the Israelites. If God could subdue the mighty Philistines by the hand of this single shepherd boy, then he could do it with anyone - David knew it wasn't his right to take the credit for himself.

We see the same story over and over again in the Old Testament. Gideon is another example, where God deliberately thins out the Israelites army again and again until only a few hundred men remain, "In order that Israel may not boast against me that her own strength has saved her" (Judges 7:2). The victory had nothing to do with Israel, and everything to do with God.

So next time you find yourself tempted to feel proud about something you're doing for God, ask yourself who put you in this position? Who gave you the gifts and abilities that made you able to do this? Who instilled in you the desire to serve in this way? And just see if the credit isn't really due to God, and not to you.

The aim is to raise awareness in the hope of finding some collaborators. It's pretty hard finding the right people, since the intersection of people who understand adventure games like Monkey Island, and people who share my convictions about the value of teaching the Old Testament forms a pretty small set! So do feel free to pass on this video to anybody you think might be interested.

Balsamiq comes with a great big palette of common UI elements, and then you just drag and drop them as you want. It all has a pleasing hand-draw feel to it, which helps remind everybody that this is just a mockup, not the real thing (you just know how managers love to assume you're nearly finished once they see an authentic-looking UI screenshot!)

Best of all, the team at Balsamiq are mad about customer service: they respond to support requests quick as a flash and are obscenely generous!

You can try it for free online, and if you haven't yet taken it for a spin then I highly recommend you do!

Jesus destroys such grounds for pride in one of his parables:

"Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, 'Come at once and recline at table'? Will he not rather say to him, 'Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink'? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.'" (Luke 17:7-10)

"So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty'". It's a staggering change of perspective, isn't it? Even if you succeed in doing all that you were commanded to do, what are you boasting about? That was merely your duty! It was the least you could do, to do what you were told.

The stakes are really raised when you realise just how much God has required of us: firstly to love him, the Lord our God, with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our strength, all of our mind, and secondly to love our neighbour as ourselves. That's a pretty comprehensive set of commandments with very little wiggle room. It leaves no scope for believing that our efforts to love and serve God and others are somehow exceptional, above and beyond the call of duty. So you battled your way through rush hour traffic in the pouring rain to go and do some shopping in a crowded supermarket on behalf of an elderly friend? Well done, but you haven't loved her any more than you love yourself, nor have you loved God with anything more than all of your strength. You have only done what was your duty. Or you resisted that constant temptation that is daily nagging at you to give in, and instead you spent the evening in prayer and joyful meditation of God's word? Terrific, but don't for a minute think that in that moment you were loving God with anything more than all of your heart and soul.

Our trouble is that we measure ourselves against the standard of other people. We look at others, and we're good at noticing how half-hearted they are in their love for God or their service of others. We see their reluctance to go out of their way, or their failure to notice somebody's moment of need. Then we look at ourselves, and we ignore or make excuses for all of the failures in our own life, and we see only the good. And compared to what we've seen in others, sometimes our assessment of ourselves comes out looking pretty great. But that is not the standard we're called to: God calls us to nothing short of perfection. We're to be measured against the awesome purity of his own holiness - spotless and without blemish. It's a standard that we can never attain - only one person who ever lived hit the mark, the Lord Jesus Christ - and even if we were to get near, what would we have done besides what was asked of us?

If you are trusting in your good works as grounds for pride - beware! We are but unworthy servants - even perfect obedience to God's will is merely doing our duty and merits nothing from God in return.

Just as last week we saw that the Apostle Paul counted all his righteous deeds as loss compared to the righteousness of Christ, so the prophet Isaiah spoke of our good works in these stark words:

"All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away." (Isaiah 64:6, NIV)

In the sight of God, even our best deeds are like filthy rags compared to the awesome purity of his holiness. His holiness is like a consuming fire that burns up all impurity in an instant. When Isaiah was confronted with a vision of God, he was so overcome with a sense of his guilt and unworthiness that his immediate reaction was to cry out, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" (Isaiah 6:5). Likewise the prophet Malachi describes the coming of God's presence in these terms:

"But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver" (Malachi 3:2-3)

Here and now we may be tempted to take pride in our good works, but when the Lord Jesus comes in judgement all of the secrets of mens' hearts will be laid bare, and all of our motives will be exposed. It won't be enough to show what we did: we will be required to explain why we did it as well. How many of our good deeds will really stand up to that level of scrutiny? How often did we really have mixed motives for our righteous acts, perhaps seeking to look good in the eyes of others or to avoid being thought of as selfish? Often when I fail to do the right thing in a given situation, my first thought is not of how I have wronged God and others, but rather fear that others will think less of me. That can be a powerful motivator to try harder next time. But if we think we can be made right in God's eyes by doing things purely for the sake of upholding our reputation, then we're sorely mistaken. That's not serving God - that's serving ourselves, and that is the essence of sin.

I remember finding that thought quite shocking as a young Christian: the idea that a seemingly good deed could be as sinful in God's sight as something obviously wrong like theft or adultery. But that's because I was defining sin in terms of external actions rather than as an attitude of the heart. It is striking that the first of the 10 Commandments is entirely an internal action: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength". And that explains why idolatry is such a serious offence to God: it is loving something created in place of loving the creator. If you do outwardly "good" things out of love for your favourite idol, be that the desire for reputation, for status, for money, for security, or just to impress someone special to you, no matter how seemingly good the act, if it's done for the wrong motives it's still deeply offensive to God and in fact is tantamount to adultery.

When I was a first year student at university, I did all manner of crazy things in order to try and impress a girl I was rather fond of. I even went as far as taking ballroom dancing lessons so that I could spend more time with her (I would say that it was an opportunity to demonstrate to her how suave I was, but that would require me to have had some skill on the dance floor!) My desire to please her overcame my natural desire to avoid dancing like the plague, and made me act in all sorts of out-of-character ways. It's exactly the same with all our idols: what we love will always show itself in how we act, and that will often manifest itself in very respectable looking acts of apparent righteousness. But in God's sight they are but filthy rags, symbols of our betrayal of him.

The prophet Jeremiah portrays it like so:

"Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord,
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water." (Jeremiah 2:12-13)

When we act to please our false gods, it's like sticking two fingers up at God and saying that he's not worth pleasing - at least, not as much as our idols are. Throughout the Bible, God frequently uses the image of a marriage covenant to describe his relationship with his people Israel. Their idolatry is then compared to the actions of an unfaithful bride - sometimes in quite brutal terms! Take the next chapter of Jeremiah, for instance:

"Have you seen what she did, that faithless one, Israel, how she went up on every high hill and under every green tree, and there played the whore?" (Jeremiah 3:6)

So be careful of resting on your good works as grounds for pride - they may not be quite as good as you think they are!

Last week I showed that if anybody has grounds for pride, it is surely the Lord Jesus Christ. But maybe the fact that Jesus is such a special case means that you find his example hard to relate to. Of course I don't have as much grounds for pride as Jesus - he's God! - you might say. But as far as ordinary people go, I'm pretty special. "God, I thank you that I am not like other men", as the Pharisee prayed in Luke 18:11. Other men are far worse than me: "extortioners, unjust, adulterers" But as for me, I'm so much more religious than them: "I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get." But if we want to play the religion card as our grounds for pride, there's another very strong contender in the race that we'll find ourselves competing against: the apostle Paul.

Before his conversion, Paul was an incredibly religious man. He was the absolute model Jew. "If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh," he writes in Philippians 3:4-11, "I have more." If you're feeling smug about your good works, I can assure you that they're not a patch on mine, says Paul. Then he goes on to list his religious qualifications: "circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews;" Paul's heritage and pedigree are absolutely top notch. He's a bona fide, full-blooded Jewish male, raised according to all the laws and customs passed down from God by Moses. But he went far beyond the call of duty: he continues, "as to the law, a Pharisee". The Pharisees get a pretty bad wrap these days, but at their core they were a group of people who were fanatical about holiness - they were absolutely devoted to obeying God's law in all of its minutiae, even down to the level of tithing the herbs and spices that grew in their window garden. That's how committed they were to keeping God's law, and they were great at it: "under the law, blameless" writes Paul. From what he goes on to say next, Paul clearly isn't suggesting here that he kept the law perfectly and could have earnt his way into God's good books, but he is saying that as far as the external, outward requirements of the law went, he was unrivalled. And it wasn't just a dry formalism, either; Paul's was a religion full of zeal and vigour in the service of God: "As to zeal, a persecutor of the church." He may have been mistaken about the right way to do God's will, but once he'd identified what had to be done there was not a shred of hesitation or holding back in how he went about it. Paul had Christians firmly in his sight and he wasn't going to lose track of the scent until he'd completely eradicated all hints of this terrible heresy.

Paul was exactly the kind of believer you'd want to have in your congregation. He'd never skive off synagogue on a Saturday morning because of an important football match; he'd never be distracted from what he was supposed to be doing by some pretty girl; he'd never be bribed into making compromises; he'd never shrink back from speaking the truth from fear that it might make him unpopular; he'd be the first one there at the monthly prayer meeting and the last one to leave; he'd be the most generous of your regular givers and would contribute hefty sums to that one off appeal to raise money for a new roof; he'd be on every committee, even the truly tedious ones; whatever religious works you find yourself tempted to take pride in, Paul would be there doing it better and more energetically, leaving you and your paltry efforts in the dust.

"But," says Paul, "whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." After his conversion, Paul now sees all of his religious works as a complete waste of time - indeed, as loss, because all they did was put up a smoke screen that prevented him from recognising his need of the Lord Jesus. "For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish (lit. dung) in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith". By trusting in his own efforts, all Paul was doing was digging himself deeper and deeper into a godless hole. His own righteousness seemed incomparably cheap and shabby next to the perfect, spotless righteousness of Christ, a level of righteousness that could be found only by forsaking his own efforts to make himself right with God and trusting wholeheartedly in Christ's finished work on the cross.

Even the mighty Paul, impeccable, immovable, incorruptible, even Paul recognised that his own religious works were but a pale shadow next to the righteousness of Christ. They were worthless, the sort of thing you'd take about as much pride in as a pile of horse manure. Boasting in your own works would be like taking a bunch of used nappies along to the Antiques Roadshow and trying to argue that they were worth as much as some centuries-old Ming vase: you'd be laughed off the show and told to never come back. "For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him... that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead." For all his religious works, even a zealous Pharisee like Paul would still one day die and rot, and without Christ there's not a thing his good works could do to save him.

We see this same attitude of Paul's played out in 2 Corinthians 11:21-33. Comparing himself to the false "super-apostles" who boasted in their works, Paul begins to mock them by adopting their own false logic:

"But whatever anyone else dares to boast of- I am speaking as a fool- I also dare to boast of that. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one - I am talking like a madman - with far great labours, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepness night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches."

Paul shows that whatever grounds for pride the super-apostles of Corinth thought they may have had, he had more. Nobody had gone to greater lengths for the sake of the gospel than him. And yet there is nothing arbitrary about the list of things Paul has chosen to mention here. As heroic as they may make him look, there's also something slightly pathetic about the list, don't you think? Earlier the Corinthians have described Paul as a man whose "bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account." (2 Corinthians 10:10) and here we read of him being beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, cold and exposed. This small little man seems to spend his whole life in constant shame, always one step away from disaster, whilst the cosy super-apostles get on with their comfortable lives in Corinth at the expense of the church there. The explanation comes in v30: "If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness." Paul chooses to boast not of the things that show how great he is, but of the things that show how small and weak and pathetic he is. He boasts of the things that show that all he has accomplished could not possibly have been accomplished in his own strength, but in the strength and power of the Lord his God. The God who says, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). When the human vessels that God works through are so obviously mere clay pots - cheap plastic cups that are used once and then thrown away - well it's then that God's infinite power is most clearly perceived. "Therefore," says Paul, "I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong."

If you think you have grounds for pride, surely they are nothing compared to the apostle Paul's? And yet he knew it was utterly vain to try and boast in his own righteousness - even as great as his was - and chose instead to boast in how utterly weak and pathetic and dependent on the God of grace he was.

All of us love to feel good about ourselves. Some of even have a few reasons: perhaps we have a great skill or talent, perhaps you're just a really stand-up chap. If there was one man in the history of the world who had grounds to be proud, surely it was the Lord Jesus Christ. There were many reasons why he might have been inclined to exalt himself:

Jesus could have been proud because of his earthly heritage. Firstly he was Jewish, a member of God's chosen people to whom were entrusted all the oracles of God (Romans 3:2). He was born into a devout family who brought him up according to all the laws that God had instituted, such as taking him to the temple as a baby to present him to the Lord (Luke 2:22). More than that, he was "descended from David according to the flesh" (Romans 1:3) - as if being part of the chosen people of God was not noble enough, specifically he was from the house and line of David, the great king of Israel to which all other kings were compared, the one after God's own heart, and whose reign marked the glory days of Israel's history as a nation. To David was given the promise that God would establish the throne of his kingdom for ever, and that one of his descendants would forever rule over God's people. You can imagine people clamouring to establish direct descent from David and the substantial prestige that would be associated with that. My family once got really excited at the discovery that there might be a link between my Grannie and Lord Kitchener (the guy with the amazing moustache in the original "Your country needs you!" posters). Given my complete inability to grow a moustache I suspect there wasn't much truth behind the claim, but we love the idea of being related to important people, and the more important the person the more pride we feel at being associated with them. As a descendant of Israel's greatest king, Jesus had great grounds for pride.

Jesus could have been proud because of his existence since times immemorial. Before the foundations of the world Jesus existed along with his Father: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God." (John 1:1-2) He existed before all others and so is greater than all others. Coming after King David was enough to receive the reflected glory of his ancestor, and yet how much more is coming before David? As Jesus points out in Mark 12:35, even David submits to the Christ as his Lord. That would have been a shocking idea to the people at the time, since in Jewish thought the order in which you were born establishes a hierarchy: children must always honour their parents, and the eldest child always received the largest share of the inheritance. Yet Jesus existed long before David, in fact he never had a beginning, and so David calls him his Lord. Or take the most revered figure in Jewish history: the patriarch Abraham, from whose line came the whole Jewish race. In Jesus' day, just as now, the Jewish people took great pride in their relationship to Abraham, and yet Jesus says to them, "Before Abraham was, I am". Jesus precedes all the greatest figures of Jewish history by virtue of the fact that he existed long before them. In a game of Bible hero Top Trumps, Jesus would win hands down against all the others. As the one who alone was with God since before the world began, Jesus had great grounds for pride.

Jesus could have been proud because of his eternal destiny. He is the anointed king to whom God promised: "Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool." (Psalm 110:1) His position as God's Christ makes him the ultimate king before whom none can stand: those who continue to oppose his rule he shall break with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel (Psalm 2:9). He is the one at whose name every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:10-11). He is the lamb upon the throne, before whom shall stand for all eternity a great multitude that none could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, forever praising him and giving him great glory. These are things which he knew full well throughout his earthly life, and indeed we are told that it was because of the joy set before him that he was able to endure the cross (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus' favourite way of referring to himself was as "the Son of Man", a phrase which brings to mind Daniel 7:13-14, and the one like a son of man presented before the Ancient of Days, to whom was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. Imagine how Barrack Obama must have felt the night after he was elected as the President of the United States of America - and yet that was only for four years, and as much as he might like to pretend, Obama doesn't really have control over America's enemies. Even Obama has a long way to go before being nominated as the President of the Whole World throughout all of time, and yet that's exactly what Jesus is, with supreme authority over everything and everyone. As God's supreme king, Jesus had great grounds for pride.

Jesus could have been proud because of his magnificent works. He was the author of all creation: "For by him, all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities- all things were created through him and for him." (Colossians 1:16) We're told that through him God created the world, and that even now he upholds the universe by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:2-3). Think of the most majestic thing you have ever seen in all of creation - maybe it's an incredible sunset, or a stormy day on the Cornish coast, or a geyser spewing out steam, or that amazing "pop" you get when opening a jar of marmalade for the first time, or a mighty blue whale, or an exotic bird of paradise, or maybe your husband or wife - Jesus created that in all of its glorious intricacy and beauty. As John 1:3 puts it: "All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." Whilst on the earth, Jesus demonstrated his lordship over creation again and again. He stood on a boat in the middle of the perfect storm: as the winds howled around him and the mighty waves threatened to sink them, Jesus merely had to speak and the storm immediately ceased, running away with its tail between its legs. He healed every kind of sickness and disease, such that those who moments before were at deaths' door were suddenly running around serving him dinner. He even raised the dead, calling the rotting corpse of his friend Lazarus out of the grave so that he might live again. Not surprisingly, Jesus attracted huge crowds who were constantly banging on his door and hoping to see what he might do next. As the mightiest miracle worker of all time, Jesus had great grounds for pride.

I hope you will agree that the Lord Jesus Christ had every reason to be proud. Yet the great surprise is that he was not, and indeed was the humblest man ever to walk the earth, and came to the human race as a servant. "Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men" (Philippians 2:6-7). If you think you have grounds to be proud then I can assure you that they are nothing compared to the reasons that Jesus had to be proud, and yet he felt no need whatsoever to boast or stand on his rights. Instead he emptied himself of all that he was, condescending even to come in to the world as a naked, screaming baby born into a smelly stable. "For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Mark 10:45) Even this mighty king, the eternal ruler, the one who was and is and is to come, greater than Moses, mightier than David, more majestic than the Grand Canyon - even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many by his gruesome execution on a Roman cross. It should make us ashamed for all our pathetic attention seeking, to think that we have more reason to boast than the Lord Jesus, to think that somehow we deserve recognition, when even the King of Kings lived and died in such obscurity and shame.

It was with some excitement that I came across the website for Iceberg Interactive's new game Adam's Venture Episode 1: The Search for the Lost Garden. As I've shared previously, the landscape of the Christian video game market is littered with less-than-stellar experiences, and though not explicitly Christian, Adam's Ventures' "biblical overtones" clearly signal the developers' intentions to make a fresh start in this difficult genre. It can't go without mention that the whole product comes across as thoroughly professional, from their website through to the packaging and the game itself - this is nothing like those hacked Nintendo cartridges of early Christian gaming efforts. There's clearly some proper financial backing behind the project which bodes well!

The game details the story of a character called Adam Venture on his hunt to track down the lost garden of Eden, helped by a couple of other characters who remain at base camp whilst you're out exploring, and forms the first episode in what is intended as a series of three (according to this interview with the developers).

Graphics

Playing the game, the first thing that strikes you is the graphics. They've made an excellent choice in basing the game upon the much-hyped Unreal 3 engine, and that's supported with high quality 3D content to really make the most of it. I had to knock down some of the detail levels to get a full framerate on my slightly aged desktop, but it still looked great and they make it very straightforward to tweak the settings accordingly. There are some really nice little graphical effects throughout the game, such as when you burn your way through some overgrown plantlife, and the game world's most mysterious inhabitant (which I won't spoil for you!) There are one or two moments where a slightly odd camera angle makes the gameplay quite difficult, but overall the whole thing is very well done and is a delight to the eyes.

Gameplay

Having set themselves a very high quality bar with the graphics, it was always going to be a challenge for the gameplay to live up to that. Overall it makes for a fun experience, with a lot of similarities to games like Tombraider, though thoroughly non-violent. Ten "secrets" hidden throughout the game also add a nice bit of replay value, each one adding a little something to the backstory or sharing some pertinent Bible verse. I found about four on my first play through the game, which gives me a little incentive to give it another go at some point if I were so inclined.

As well as the usual jumping and climbing and generally having to navigate your way through the game world, there are also various puzzles that you encounter on your journey. More accurately, it's really a single puzzle mechanic that is repeated numerous times with only the content varying: several times you come across a spindle featuring three identical discs, each containing three fragments of a Bible verse or a line from a well known Christian hymn. Either by knowing the verse already, or just by using your English grammar skills, the player has to rotate the discs until the verse reads in order. I have to confess that I didn't find it to be a particularly compelling experience: either you know the verse or you don't, and except in a few cases the verse isn't especially explained or integrated into the rest of the game. It does add a bit of interest though, and makes for a change of pace every once in a while.

The other thing that people are likely to call the developers out on is the brevity of the game, but this requires a bit of explanation. I managed to play the game through in a couple of hours - though I was not trying especially hard to find all of the secrets. Personally, I think that compares fairly favourably with other episodic games, such as the new Monkey Island series from Telltale Games, although perhaps still slightly on the short side. For me it was basically one evening's entertainment, with perhaps another couple at some point in the future if I went back for all of the secrets. Where it falls short, in my view, compared to Telltale's offering, is in not making it crystal clear what the timeline and pricing structure for the other episodes will be. Take a look at Telltale's website and you instantly know up front how much you'll be paying in total (indeed, I paid a single flat fee for the whole series) and what the schedule for future episodes will be (roughly I get one episode of Tales of Monkey Island every month for six months). I imagine that Iceberg Interactive where limited by financial constraints at this point - they may not even know if a second episode will ever happen until they see how Episode 1 performs - but £15 just felt a little pricey for one evening. Prior to purchase, their website also left me a little unsure of whether "Episode 1" meant I was only going to be playing a fraction of a story, or whether it would be a complete experience in itself. I'm happy to report that it was a self-contained story (though with clear room for future expansion) so I wasn't let down there. But I suspect that they'd be able to sell a lot more copies if they made that kind of detail clearer in their publicity material.

Christian Content

I'll just briefly close by commenting on the Christian content of this game. Adam's Venture is definitely not attempting to do anything like what I'm talking about in my Expository Coding series: they don't set out to explain anything about the meaning or relevance of any Bible texts, but rather they use the geography and events of the Bible as a setting for their own story, much like Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Various Bible verses appear throughout the game, which will appeal to Christian parents wondering if this game is suitable for their children, but they form a context rather than the focus of the gameplay.

Summary

All in all, I was very pleased with Adam's Venture Episode 1: The Search for the Lost Gardens. It didn't disappoint, and was a genuinely good game (unlike a few other Bible-based games I could mention!) I'd definitely recommend this to Christian parents wanting to buy their kids a Christmas present, and I think those who wouldn't call themselves Christians should enjoy this game too. There's definitely room for improvement in future episodes, but I suggest giving these guys a chance for a second outing by buying Adam's Venture now!